As the first post for this website I thought it would be cool to reflect on some software projects I did in high school and college. None are particularly spectacular, but my philosophy is that the things you do in your free time don’t have to be spectacular. I had fun doing them, and I also enjoy the opportunity to write some thoughts down on them in retrospect.
Advent of Code 2020
In 2020 I participated in the Advent of Code. I didn’t complete it (I got to day 11 out of 24), but it was a fun exercise to do after work.
My solutions weren’t very clever. I often took the naive approach. However, it was nice to write code without worrying about shipping it to production and maintaining it. I learned a few things:
- how to use fold() in a functional programming paradigm and that it’s a lot of fun to use.
- Kotlin has some really nice quality-of-life features included in the language.
- that Advent of Code is a lot of fun and that I’d like to continue doing it
Nebula Mobile Game
At the end of our senior year in high school my friend Ray and I worked on a game we called Nebula. It never went anywhere and it was more of an opportunity to try out Unity than anything, but it was fun to work with him and figure out how games worked.
The game consists of a small spaceship slowly rotating around an asteroid, and when you tap on the screen the rocket shoots off in the direction it was pointed. The rocket either collides with a new asteroid and starts spinning around it (continuing the game), or flies off into space and you lose.
We used the Unity Game Engine to make the game for mobile and wrote our code in C#. I definitely didn’t do things quite right in Unity and relied on Ray to teach me the system, but it was fun to mess with game development and get a functioning game at the end.
It doesn’t do much, but we got our friend to do some art of asteroids and spaceships and that alone is cool enough to refer back to.
CropConnect
At the very beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, I was stuck in a tiny 100 square foot student apartment in Lausanne, Switzerland. I was mid-way through a study abroad program at the nearby University, ÉPFL. Even though I did eventually managed to return home to the US rather than wait it out in my tiny Swiss apartment (a pretty smart choice in retrospect), I was still in touch with some students at the university.
Some friends from ÉPFL asked if I was interested in participating in a hackathon with them. I let them know I had limited time but would be interested to use it as an opportunity to try out with web development.
I had never done any web development and wrote a very basic website over the weekend with Ruby on Rails. I never deployed it, but it was cool to experiment with building websites and learn some Ruby.