Projects

For a summary of what I do, my resume is the best bet. What follows is a dump of all the interesting projects I’ve undertaken so far. You could think of it as the world’s most disastrously long and self-deprecating resume.

Current Projects

Since we started Steam Clock, I’ve usually worked on a new type of project every couple months. We love working on our own apps, but client work is more interesting than it sounds.

• Prism: A photo browser for iPad that excels at showing photos of kittens.
• WeddingDJ: The best darn iPhone app for running music at events.
• Consulting work: Some of my more interesting client projects at Steam Clock have been:
  • an HTML5 eBook
  • a Rails site for commercial real estate
  • an iPhone app for finding fresh food
  • an interactive retail console for iPad
  • strategic consulting for a consumer video startup
  • an app store for a Fortune 500 company
  • a JavaScript app for the Fortune 500 itself
  • an iPhone app for ordering wonderful custom suits.
• VanJS: I created the Vancouver Javascript Developers group, and it’s turned out pretty well.
• Unladen Follow: What started as a project to learn Rails ended up as an unfollow helper that I still use regularly. Basically it tells you who is really annoying, before or after you follow them.
• Prototypes: Lots of interesting prototypes haven’t made it out of the Steam Clock labs – for example an antisocial Facebook app, a Git client for Mac, and a turn-based strategy game.

Apple Era Projects (2008-2010)

I worked at Apple in the iWork group, which was extremely educational. I never thought I’d make a detour into working for a large company, but it was a fun ride.

• iWork for iPad: I worked on the highly successful iPad apps, primarily writing Objective-C to support iWork.com. Having a prototype iPad locked in my desk was possibly the coolest thing ever.
• iWork.com: I wrote thick-client JavaScript, CSS, and Objective-C for rich web app that helped proof iWork documents. Of course, web technology is a low priority for Apple, so after a few years it was discontinued along with everything else that was on the old iCloud infrastructure.
• Prototypes: Working on product prototypes that don’t ship is as fun and frustrating as it sounds.
• Websites for Fun: I’m often making websites for fun, for example for a local theatre company, a WoW guild, and my wedding. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this, it’s to use a static site generator and not have to worry about updating WordPress for the rest of your life.

• Altering Time: What started as a forum turned into a  long-running community site. It included multiplayer strategy games and user-generated content – before it was cool.
• Political Asylum: My first multiplayer game, a rat’s nest of PHP and MySQL supported some wicked political machinations.
• Engineering Faith: Excited by the success of Asylum, I built a second game about creating your own religion. After spending months making sure it was well architected, I forgot to make it, uh, fun.
• SFU CSSS: I spent time as the VP Operations, Acting President, and Secretary of the Computing Science Student Society. I have since retired from politics.
• The Cascade: During my year at UCFV, I wrote articles for the university newspaper. This was the peak of my stint in journalism.
• Gender Quiz: I built this somewhat better than random-guessing AI project almost entirely out of SQL. If that’s not a case of seeing a nail because you have a hammer, I don’t know what is.
• Modeling Plants with L-Systems: This project on generating 3D plants for SFU’s CMPT 461/761 class gets me both a crazy amount of traffic from Google and occasional emails from scientific journals. If you’re looking for a research topic in graphics, I suggest plants!
• Other Project Courses: I took all the project classes I could in school. Besides the plants and bizarro gender quiz, I built a small distributed system, a pinball game, a raytracer, a student society website, a Java compiler, an STV voting system, and 3D fireworks simulation in C#. All of these were bad.
• Freelance web development: For the better part of a year I did solo web contracting, and learned many lessons on the way. I built sites for my mom’s work (a credit union), a construction company, a venture investor, a project management startup, and my stepmom’s doggy daycare. It was world-class.

• Uniserve Intranet: Besides being a Customer Service guy, I built the intranet at the local ISP where I worked. I do not know why they let me do this.
• ACSS Theatre Company Video: This ancient nostalgic video has a horror story attached to it that should have scared me off of taking on large projects in the future. It did not.
• FantasyTech 3: I wrote a text-based RPG in QBASIC. How is this not on my resume?
• WarTech: I was likely the only person ever to make a turn-based strategy in C++Builder. My friends lauded it as “kind of fun”.
• So many games: I’m not sure what my most catastrophic failure to make a game was during childhood. It may have been the time where I tried to write an entire RPG in a 10,000 line C++ if statement.
• The Essence: For some reason I designed my own (bad) trading card game, creating a couple hundred cards, many featuring (bad) art.
• Spellbook: I ran a low-budget games magazine with my friends for a couple years. When I say low-budget, I mean photocopying at the 7-11. The first issue was taped with masking tape. I was like 12, okay?!
• Street Vending: In elementary school I enjoyed putting a table on the street and failing to sell lemonade and hockey cards to passers-by. I even kept a ledger of the lemonade I failed to sell. This was all of the lemonade.