My side projects
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Although the page title indicates that this is a list of side projects,
it in fact is a list of all of my notable projects, including the picks
presented on the home page. I attempted to hint towards this by making
the term "side" less dominant in the title but given that I am terrible
at designing intuitive visual clues, you probably missed that.
2017 • Segelbrand.ch
wip
Official, small informative website for the Segelbrand e.V.
Deployed to GitHub pages.
2017 • Multuino
finished
Arduino Sketch for creating an all-in-one IR and computer remote.
Because handling remotes
for multiple devices is laborious and retail all-in-one remotes are ugly bricks, this aims
to solve the problem in a more creative way. An Arduino with IR sender- and receiver is used
to translate signals from one, small remote into IR signals expected by various devices.
Additionally, since the device used is a 32U4 based device, its keyboard emulation capabilities
are used to implement general remote control functionality for the connected computer.
2017 • Wroomba
finished
A convenience project for scheduling on cheap Roombas.
A side-project born from researching WiFi and Bluetooth capable development boards. The ESP32
running FreeRTOS has proven to be one of the best devices out there for tinkering low-level network
connected applications. Wroomba uses Roomba's Open Interface (ROI) for interfacing with Roomba cleaning
robots and exposing a simple HTTP API for starting cleaning. The software is considered finished as is,
since it does its only job - automatic cleaning - very well. However, there's still a broken Roomba
around that could need some additional tinkering.
2017 • Cloud Cloud API
finished
A cloud based server for a literal cloud showing clouds.
Inspired by this SparkFun project
it became clear that our office needed a cloud connected cloud as well. While mainly started as a fun project,
this proved to be a good opportunity for playing with multi-connection socket handling and message passing in
Elixir. The cloud server will either fetch the current weather information or be manually controlled by a simple
webinterface.
2017 • Elixir INWX Domrobot
finished
An Elixir wrapper for using the INWX "domrobot".
This was my first attempt of writing a package for the hex package manager and generally one of
my very first actual Elixir projects. The current implementation, while completely untested, has
few enough moving parts to probably not break instantly. However, it does stay a learning experience
and is far from being a stable software.
2016 • ramworldrecord.com
finished
Anchor CMS based website for organizing 2016's RAM world record.
Breaking a world record is an exciting task, even if one's contribution consists only of handling the
technical details. Either way, the site succeeded in helping the team with organizing sign-up and fan-out
for newsletter and registrations to all participants and led to a successful world record.
2016 • 0 Zythum Mod
defunct
Factorio mod to clean up the mess created by custom modpacks.
Using pretty solid shell- and ingame hook based tooling, this mod collected item and building information
from all mods in order to create templates for sorting them in proper categories. Ultimately, while the
mod did find some success, the effort of sorting the ever-growing modbase and the comparably low adaption
led to it not being developed any further. Last time I checked, the mess without it is still horrible.
If nothing else, this sure was a huge LUA and Bash learning experience!
2015 • Giftfox
defunct
A bot for winning Steamgifts.com gifts without effort.
Let's face it, botting on giveaway sites is not exactly the most holy move in the book. While other sites
had harsh restrictions on it, though, Steamgifts was rather liberal in handling botting. Giving away games
to rank up and then botting higher-level rewards seemed like a pretty fair trade. The project got eventually
defunct because everyone using it - myself included - lost interest in winning random games.
2015 • SlothPHP
defunct
A very pragmatic MVC-ish PHP framework.
Not being satisfied with the state of PHP MVC frameworks at the time, I decided to write my own, very pragmatic
framework for solving exactly the problems I faced. While this obviously was no great success and was written
way to specific, it still was exciting creating a web framework from the ground up. I have since moved on to
better frameworks and miles away from PHP.
2014 • Hummingbird / Kitsu
finished
A modern anime discovery and tracking platform.
Arguably the most important project in kickstarting software development for me. After building some convenient
tools for the community, I joined the team as the second dev ever "hired". I do take pride in knowing that I
pulled the project and the team through some tough times until we got more developers on board and I eventually
burned out on working on it.
I went into this mess of Ruby on Rails and hacky JS tooling, not knowing a single bit of either and left from
a textbook dockerized Ember/Rails application. While I can only take credit for a small portion of all of that,
it is safe to say that this was one of the most amazing projects I ever had the chance to work on. Still riding
at the front of technological development, I wish the company that has grown out of this humble hobby project
nothing but the best.
2014 • GCode Renderer "Liquid"
finished
THREE.js based GCode renderer.
Assembling and fine tuning our company's first 3D - Printer, the need for visualizing models already sliced into
GCode files arose. Sure, there's out-of-the box solutions but GCode is a simple protocol, so why not build a
renderer myself... While this was only an internal experiment at first, the unpolished code was published on
GitHub. Years after actual development, this project's license has been changed to the classical MIT license
in order to allow tinkerers to use it.
2014 • CrunchDB
finished
JSON - file based database system written in PHP.
While CrunchDB probably does a lot of things right in terms of conveniently querying and updating information,
it does just about everything wrong in being an actual production-ready database. - For a very good reason, though.
Back in the day, I was building lots of PHP tools, mostly for myself or internal purposes which required an easy
to set-up and easy to handle database without all the complexity of an actual database system. Thus, CrunchDB was born.
A terribly inefficient, file-based database without locks or syncs but just right for single-person applications.
2013 • Hummingboard
defunct
A collection of useful tools for Hummingbird members.
As one of the fewer community members with a software development background in the early days, Hummingboard was my
way of extending Hummingbird's functionality with everything I missed. Generating quite a lot of positive responses
in the community, this was what eventually led to me joining the site team, building Hummingbird for over a year and
eventually helping out in them starting Kitsu Media, Inc.
2011 • IsNitradoDown
defunct
An online status site for nitrado.net
Originally started as a convenience tool for users to monitor the status of their Minecraft servers, with me becoming
part of the Nitrado team, the site was extended to cover most of the services active at the time. The site has not
been updated since I left the team due to a lack of new endpoint information and the hoster has since moved on to
providing their own status site on a third-party service.
2009 • Hello World!
Everyone's gotta start somewhere, eh?