My favorite was this project because it really shouldn't be possible, it requires some unusual problem solving (kinda like code golf), but the best part is seeing people's horrified expression when they realize

1. The monstrosity works
2. There's no real alternative

(I'm working on a video that explains it, but until then the readme and stack overflow post will have to do.)

I wrote a a masturbation tracker app to measure how frequently I fapped to my waifu

A decade ago I reverse engineered the Macventure game engine, allowing you to play Shadowgate and Deja Vu etc on modern oses. The current copyright holder then paid me to iron out the rough edges and create the official ports currently on steam.

I wrote a DNS server that did global software load balancing. Essentially it just has a health checking component and a sort and uses that to determine the closest healthy endpoint to return.

Mostly used for cluster failover or in cloud terms it can keep traffic within a zone if possible, otherwise within a region, otherwise closest region.

The reason it was my favorite project is because I was unqualified, but nobody else on my team was a DNS expert. So I got to drink from the firehose and learn. I had a really good testing feedback pipeline where basically visitors to our website did a couple extra background requests on their first page load and we used the web performance timing API to track DNS lookup times and TCP/HTTP times. So I every time I made a change I had millions of performance reports. I could see the impact of my changes in about 60 seconds in grafana.

Between learning something totally new and tying it to a short feedback loop with beautiful graphs I had a great time. Plus that product literally allowed my company to start using the cloud and build multi cloud systems.

I built a ruobo workbench for hand tool and other general woodworking tasks. Was made with all mortise and tenon joints and no fasteners, so I got to learn and practice lots of techniques (hand saw and chisel cuts, router flattening, lamination, etc).

I bought an old Speak and Spell a few summers ago as a circuit-bending project, and I want to build custom vocabulary ROMS. To this end, I have been working on a bitstream generator for the TMS5220, with the goal of being cross-platform, as the existing tools only run on Windows 3.0 and OSX...

My first mistake was doing it in C++, although I love the language, since I've had the royal displeasure of trying to compile it for Windows. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to throw in the towel and re-write the damned thing in Java. That being said, if you've got a Mac or Linux machine, you can check it out here. And if you've got a clue how to compile a Qt app for Windows, please submit a PR :')

Wrote a basic primality checker library, it's not by far my most interesting or complex project but I like that I accomplished all my initial goals in a timely fashion.

I made an app for track my paints for mini painting. Making the ui was really fun.

6 years ago during university I participated in a Coding Challenge for Vehicle Routing Problems. I really like TSP and VRP related problems. I tinkered on my algorithm in the evenings to make it faster, consider more edge cases, produce better solutions etc. It was a really rewarding work because every time you change something you can run it and can see if your thinking was right and improved the result. The goal was to find the shortest time to serve all customers, so the result was basically a number indicating total time. Number goes down = win.

Unfortunately I haven't found anything in my professional career so far that I really liked :(

Turning my web app for Burmese song lyrics with guitar chords into an open source PWA songbook app. I'll try to turn it into some kind of offline available song book that you can host on github pages.