My Non- (Not Un-!) Professional Experience

If you’re interested in what I’ve done for my jobs, my formal résumé is a great place to check. My professional projects come with upsides and downsides for someone looking to evaluate my work: there’s a real company and a real person that knows how I did, but you can only access this information if you talk to them, which is onerous.

This page is for me to give you a better idea of my skills by shoing things that I have the right to release. If you just want to see my Github, the option is there, but if you want to see me demonstrate my breadth a bit, this page is your go-to.

Note: This page overrepresents projects that were already online or were easy to put online.

Website Work

I’ve got a personal website that I’ve enjoyed hacking on for a few years, but the only part of that site that I can in good conscience point you towards is my implementation of an RSS feed that is a valid HTML document with a stylesheet. I undertook this project to figure out how RSS feeds work and what exactly the deal is with XML, XHTML, XSLT, and the whole “XML pretending to be HTML” family.

If you aren’t me, that feed didn’t look very nice to you, but you’re in luck on the next web design project I’ve selected, because my wedding website was originally mocked up by my wife in LibreOffice Impress (Open Source Powerpoint).

In order to put my wedding website together, I learned a lot about weird CSS-hacks, Jekyll, and Github Pages. You can poke through the Github-hosted repository or the website until you’re convinced, but if you look at the site, please appreciate the effects on the menu and its buttons. I loved them so much that I later reused them on my résumé and portfolio website. If you’re interested in poking around the repository for that (this) website, it’s also publicly available.

Shadertoy Uploads

At some point, I found out how easy it is to use GLSL to make fun mathematical demos. As of writing, I have not gotten over how fun these are. These are probably of pretty limited utility to you in evaluating how capable I am, but I feel like they demonstrate what kind of self-motivated studier I am and they break up the page quite nicely.

I encourage you to check out my Shadertoy profile for a few more examples than what I display below.

Above is a simple ray-marcher I built after I was intruiged by a video online about how to make repeating patterns in GLSL. I had to see it for myself.

Above is another fragment shader, but one a bit dearer to my heart. This is an animation of a set of dots slurping up the entirety of their bounding box according to which is nearerst. If you follow the link to the fragment shader, you can edit the distance_ function to switch between the default Euclidean distance (real world distance, where a diagonal meter is 1 meter long) or Manhattan distance (also called “taxi-cab” distance, where a meter at a 45° angle is 2 meters long, one horizontal and one vertical).

I like this one because it’s the first shader I built just for fun.

Psyche Driller

Okay, this one was for school (it was my Computer Science B.Sc. capstone), but it was still really fun to make. We were allowed to pick groups for this project, so I joined a group with a friend of mine and some friends he had. We had to learn to get along while programming a game and receiving input from NASA (who nixed multiple names for our game in a row!), all while balancing full courseloads.

You can play the game online and also poke through the official repository.

Userstyles

I’m a fan of my computer displaying things exactly how I read them best (as any fan of tweaking their IDE’s typeface, font size, and light/dark mode will tell you, it’s definitely worth it and isn’t a procrastination method).

To this end, I’ve offered several userstyles, which I haven’t uploaded anywhere good for linking yet.

Here is a website that a friend wrote a short story on (a tutorial included in an unrelated story is pictured for privacy reasons) with its default style:

Default style

Here’s my favored style, which I won a few converts to when I shared it on the platform’s forums:

My style

And here’s my style-sheet only recreation of someone’s website (the author of the website was fine with this) which parses stories and writes new HTML for them:

My copycat style

As you can see, there’s no end to the amount of effort I’ll put to procrastinate reading fictional stories that I chose to read I really do make a hobby of CSS design.