Forgotten Projects
For the first 3-4 years of programming, all my projects were stored locally and then backed up to a google drive. This was before I understood the importance of version control, even in solo projects. However, even though they are old, it is funny how much I would over complicate easy tasks just to see if I could. Always challenging yourself is a key part of growth-- working just outside your limits and struggling. Below I list some of the projects that I DO have on GitHub and am excited to show you.
Vofog Engine
This engine took me nearly a year of long hour days to develop. This engine supports scripting in Lua, a photoshop esque drag and drop system, entity component system for faster processing with cache friendliness & data oriented design, realtime Bullet Physics support, and a whole host of other features. The entire rendering pipeline is written in OpenGL and the design is not only aimed at efficiency, but also ease of use. There is realtime shader compilation to see how your code changes the engine and a customizable UI with ImGUI. There are a ton of features and it really taught me so many things about architecting a massive system.
NLParallel
NLParallel was a project that taught me a ton about scraping the web and the technologies, challenges, and power of data mining. I did this project initially under Dr. Kai Wang for computing the novelty of an idea. To do this, we needed data and the data was my first job. One thing that caught me by surprise was how to validate that I am even creating a graph when there are millions of nodes-- I might've accidently created n sub graphs or a big tree, so I also needed a way to visualize data(Image is a picture of that data) and other ways to validate my findings such as predictable results from a Kruskal pass over my graph. I didn't know it at the time, but this project helped immensely with the work I do today.
Ray Marching
Ray tracing techniques is something that has always been very interesting to me. It mixes real life optical physics with the deceptive techniques of computer rendering. Ray marching was one of those easy introductions to understanding how everything works and can be optimized. The image shows a frame from the simulation but the techniques involved are really clever and amazing. I aim to use these techniques to accelerate another engine one day.
Present Day Projects
Currently, I am working with WebRTC to try and stream data into a webclient that will render a depth map from a robot. I build the WebRTC p2p connections myself and added redundancy with TURN servers and other related WebRTC helpers. The end goal is to see if we can't effectively and efficiently control a robot over the web with realtime accuracy.