What was your favorite project?

augmented-ui is by far my favorite project I've made. It wasn't my first project, it wasn't my last project, but I really cannot get enough of it because I poured my excitement and determination into it.

My motivation came just from watching a full playthrough with developer commentary on YT of one of my favorite video games I previously played long ago. I had to bring their UI to the web and make it as easy as possible for others to create scalable sci-fi/cyberpunk ui elements too. The style is everywhere in the games, movies, and shows I love - but super rare on the web.

I hope you'll soon find some excitement from the things you enjoy too, annon. And thank you for the opportunity to talk about it! Will be refreshing this article for a couple days to check for new stories too; looking forward to it! :)
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My favourite project is a long long way back in history - I built the ZX Spectrum version of an arcade game called Shadow Warriors and I was bored, bored, bored of tiny sprites and no colour in Spectrum games, so I came up with a way of doing it differently. The resulting game was probably way more technically impressive than it was fun to play - but heh! It did get a score of 99% in reviews!

A bit of a counter to Shadow Warriors was Superman: Man of Steel of which Crash magazine said "Is it a bird, is it a plane, no it's a pile of crap". This game was built in 5 days (due to a late change of the source game we were translating) and included a bug that gave Superman a third leg when he flew right...

I've done one project that's followed me through the years... Also I presented the paper on it at a conference in Prague, which was pretty rad.

It's a three-dimensional modeling tool for creating nanostructures using DNA. The basic idea is, the nanoscale is mostly driven by shape, and DNA has well-defined structure. Adenine binds to thymine, cytosine to guanine, any of them can chain together, and everything bends at particular angles. Also, the technology exists to create synthetic strands of DNA with specified sequences (of A, T, C, and G), and you can also duplicate strands in large quantities with polymerase chain reaction (PCR)—an acronym that everyone knows now, because it's also one of the bases for COVID testing.

The software I wrote allows you to drag out a line in three-dimensional space, and it'll plop in a DNA helix. You can then modify the links between helices/strands to join them together, so that they can form meshes or tetrahedra or whatever else you want. Finally, it assigns types (A, T, C, or G) to all of the nucleotides, in a way that's likely to cause the DNA to assemble into your structure in the real world. This can then be verified by fabricating the sequence, amplifying it with PCR, and imaging it with atomic force microscopy. (Figure 8 of the paper shows an AFM scan of one of the generated structures.)

It's followed me through the years because it's still an active research area, so I did occasional contract work to add new features, but otherwise some researchers have asked for the source. It's a bit painful now, since it was written with Microsoft Foundation Classes and OpenGL 1.

As for the name, you know, I was in undergrad. It wasn't actually named for Final Fantasy or Dungeons and Dragons, but because in the Enuma Elish Tiamat was the mother of life. A bit extravagant, but we all did embarrassing things at that age.

I can't share it because I sorta lost it but, back in 2015 for my thesis I improved a mobile app I had been working on for my previous classes called Where's My Pet! mind you, this was done before android studio was what is it today, so I used eclipse to do everything and I believe there were only like two places where you could get actual useful information (I only remember android hive hahaha).

So, the idea was that you could pin point on a map the location of a dog or cat with your phone location. You could leave comments, pictures, loads of information and an organization type user could say that they had rescued the dog/cat or not. It had an admin panel (requirements for the thesis), list of vets/hospitals, adoption lists (pics included) and it was all done by me! UWU proud panda

It was the looongest deliberation for a thesis in my graduation class, and I ended up getting an honorable mention for it ⭐ There's quite a few apps in the market that do this already, but back then there wasn't any! so it was kinda innovative, which was a requirement for the thesis.

I learned a lot from that project and made me quickly realize that I love finding solutions to a problem. Which is why nowadays I think if I where to create an app to help non-profit animal rescue organizations, it would be to help them gain more money, not more cases! but for a thesis I think the app was fine c:

Always try to find a problem and think up a way software could help and wham, you've got yourself a project, good luck! ;3

My interactive portfolio is probably my favorite in terms of enjoyment but I'm also really proud of the work I did on an open source Python Instagram scraping library (no longer maintained) that is responsible for catapulting me from offhand side projects into an actual career

My favorite projects are still on going. They are Modal File Manager, EmailIt, EmailIt Server, and ScriptBar.

My favorite project in high school was on a Commodore 64 then moved to an Amiga in college (my home made system burned up my freshman year). It was simulating robots in a 2-D world with different types of intelligence. Alpha was pure reflective, Beta was reflexive with a memory of what worked, and Gamma that tried to generalize over the successful memories to project what would work in the unexplored space. Their source code I’ve long lost, but I had fun. The beta used up the memory in the Commodore 64.

After college, my favorite project was hardware and software. I help design, build, and program the Muse Mastering console in the late 90’s. It was a systolic array parallel processing system with 30+ DSP chips. I designed half of the circuit boards and all the low level programming. I also created a program for debugging the DSP chip code in the system (single stepping through the program while displaying all the registers). That was a very fun and exciting project. But, unfortunately isn’t around anymore.

I’ve always had different side projects. Whenever I’m idle, my mind keeps on programming.

For my programming introduction classes back in university, one of the projects was to do something similar to a pokedex. One of the requirements was to have a search by "name approximation". With "name approximation" the professor meant search for any pokemon that has the given string as a substring in the name, but what we interpreted by that was to search by similar texts as the one given.

So we ended up over engineering the search so if the search that you do have a typo in the name or it is phonetically similar to other pokemon it will show up. For example, if you searched for hivisor it will match with ivysaur.

This might not be the coolest thing I have worked on, but for sure is my favorite because we had a lot of fun trying to figure out how to do it and also testing the craziest searches to see how far it could go. Also even though this was not the professor requested he decided to accepted because he thought it was so cool.

As fun fact, one day I stumble with the project and decided to check the code. It turns out that search should not be working at all, the algorithm makes no sense for what it is supposed to do. But it does work xDDD

My favorite project - world-weather.info ⚡🌩️🌨️🌤️ is now actively working on it.

I don't have time to work on it, but fowdb.altervista.org/ was my favorite project for sure