Ok, this is dumb and shows my age, but my proudest moment was creating a Frogger “clone” on the Apple 2 in BASIC, using ASCII text. It even had music! I taught myself how to program doing that!

Now about 4 decades later, I’m a professional developer, go figure.

I’ve been working on my own game engine for years, and there’s all sorts of cool stuff it can do, but recently I’ve been expanding the scripting to be capable of streaming images to the GPU.

Today I got Doom running inside my engine as a hot-reloadable plugin script:
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-12-13_00-25-14.mp4

The engine has real-time bounce lighting using a highly modified voxel cone tracing algorithm I developed (doesn’t require ray tracing hardware), which I’ve been able to get running even on my Steam Deck! Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-03-21 23-50-29.mp4

The whole thing is open source here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons

A long time ago I wrote a little web app that takes a search string and finds all the words in the dictionary that have overlap with its spelling. Sort of a portmanteau generator. It was just a fun project at the time, but I have used it on countless occasions to brainstorm unique names for projects, websites, etc.

You can try it from the link below. Just type any word or name and it will populate the results.

https://dev.djdupriest.org/name-combinator/index.html

https://github.com/KiranWells/corgi

Like a lot of graphics programmers, I fell into the rabbit hole of rendering fractals. However, I never stopped - over the past couple of years I have slowly been building one of the most sophisticated Mandelbrot/Julia rendering programs that I am aware of. It has a mostly intuitive user interface, and does all of the calculations on the GPU. It has to use a bunch of mathematical tricks to get around the limits of single-point precision available in shaders. Because of the GPU rendering algorithm, I’ve managed to view fractal locations at around 10^250 times magnification with near real-time performance.

I also built a really in-depth compositing/coloring system, allowing you to make some really crazy images and get a lot of variation even for the same location:

Although it has only been me working on it, I think it is in a pretty mature state so far, and I would gladly take PRs/issues if anyone happens to be interested. It should support any OS if you compile it from source, but I don’t have binary releases set up yet.

Archery app. Basically zero users, and got purged from the play store earlier this year because I refused to jump through their hoops.

It was was meant for use with scopes, you would put in some distance and scope settings pairs into it, and it would fit a line allowing you to estimate intermediate scope settings.

It also had an AR mode, where you could save a targets GPS position, and get the distance and angle to the target, and the pin setting.

Sadly, never got any users. So its just for me now. And I deleted the AR stuff.

I made an FPS on NES.

It doesn’t use any mappers or added chips. There’s quicksaves, a level editor. jump-in two-player co-op, and SNES mouse support.

I have not been arsed to add music.

I wrote my own email service: https://port87.com/

I’ve made a lot of things for it, and most of them are open source:

• https://sveltematerialui.com/
• https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
• https://nymph.io/
• https://github.com/sciactive/tokenizer

Also, I made one of those neat sorting algorithm visualizers:

https://sciactive.github.io/libsortjs/demo/

I’m still proud of my rendering of the logistic map. It was mostly just to learn more Rust, but it rendered this beatuiful picture with relatively little code. And mostly by accident, I didn’t know I would get those cool shadows!

In high school, we used to play a game colloquially called Spoons/Assassins/Spoon Assassin/Marker tag. Long story short, everyone playing gets assigned another player as a target. You tag your target on the back of the neck with a spoon or marker to “kill” them + take over their assignment. Rinse and repeat until only the winner is standing.

Major catch here is that for the game to work properly, the targets have to be chained in a loop, so there usually has to be a trusted individual running the game who can validate the assignment list.

So I scraped the online school directory to pull names, emails, and school photos of everyone. Then I built a Java Swing app to track a list of who was playing, and the app would shuffle a random list and email everyone their assignments blindly, photos included. Flash forward a few months, and eventually we had a full roster of ~80 people playing across grades, which was ~10% of the student body.

Unfortunately, a group of freshmen started their own take on the game, which devolved into mauling one another with Crayola markers and Sharpies. The principal catches word that I’ve been running a ring, and brings me into his office to tell me to shut it down.

Uncharacteristically for my teenage years, I went all-in on diplomacy. I plead my case, tell him I’m not involved with the freshmen, hear out his concerns, volunteer to modify the game rules, and point out that our group been playing for months without issues. No dice; the dude was a jackass with a chip on his shoulder. So we come to an impasse, staring at one another in silence.

Eventually, to break the silence, he asks about a stray bandage I have sticking out the top of my shirt. I’d had a small melanoma removed from my collarbone that week, which was caught as early as possible and removed without issue. Seizing the opportunity, I tell the principal “I have cancer”, and immediately walk out before he could formulate a response. Poor dude went white as a sheet. Good times.

Bit of a lame ending for the app, but building it taught me the skills I used to jump-start my career, and drove home the point that software isn’t an end unto itself — it’s the way people use it to come together that makes things great.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, Hello World.

Okay, so you know the trope in spy movies where the launch codes or the diamonds or whatever are at the end of a hallway full of lasers, and the protagonist has to do some cool flip moves (if male) or some slinky contortions (if female) to get around the lasers?

I made that as an arcade game with an Arduino. Some red laser pointer diodes, some photosensors, a few lights, bells and whistles, a fog machine, a few big ol buttons, and you’ve got spy laser hallway. It had a separate “break as many lasers as you can” mode as well, played like a combination of DDR and whack-a-mole.

The second coolest thing I ever programmed was probably the GPS MP3 player. A farmer wanted to add an automatic soundtrack to his Halloween hayride, like when the drove through the spooky graveyard it played ghost noises, it would play music for longer stretches on the road. I used a Raspberry Pi with a GPS HAT and wrote up a script in Python that would compare the actual position with a set of coordinates stored in a text file, and if one matched, it would play an associated mp3 file. The effect was kind of lost because the audio was coming from the vehicle itself, but it’s a hay ride, it’s supposed to be kind of lame. The bedsheet ghosts said woo as you drove past, I’m in the special effects industry, dad.

Not QUITE a program, but I’d have to say my own little GBA ROM hacks for the original Fire Emblem. On account of the following story…

IIRC, it was 2007, and I was a senior in high school, reorganizing some of the stuff for the robotics team, in the cabinets in the big science classroom where we met. There were some freshmen interested in the team (season wouldn’t start for a while yet) who’d taken to hanging out there, after school.

They all had laptops and I recognized the menu theme when one of them pulled up Fire Emblem in an emulator, from across the room, and immediately called out “Who’s playing Fire Emblem?”. When I went over and saw he was using Virtual Boy Advance, it occurred to me what I had in my pocket. Or rather what happened to be ON the flash drive in my pocket.

At the time, I didn’t have my own laptop, so my flash drive had years worth of random crap on it. And over the years, I spent a LOT of time tinkering with ROMs and VBA over the years. In addition to a few copies of different hacked ROMs and save files, I had a portable hex editor, and a LOT of text files with hex tables and memory maps and other research I’d collected over the years.

So, yeah, I pulled out the flash drive, said “Wanna see something cool?” and proceeded to apply many crazy hacks as I could think of, in the most obtuse manner possible, just editing hex values directly in memory as the game was running. Free XP, free items, end game equipment, sprite swaps, etc. At one point, one of them says something like “What kind of wizard ARE you?!”

It’s what comes to mind for me when you say “cool” because I like to think I inspired those kids to get into software and programming themselves, or at least consider it as an option. They certainly stuck around with the team for the rest of the year. Also, it inspired ME to really realize how much I’d grown just by tinkering and being curious, and how much you can accomplish through incremental effort.

When Google Reader was alive, I wanted to improve its UI, so I wrote a userscript which completely replaced everything in the browser but still spoke to the Reader’s backend for data. When Reader was turned off, I only had to provide my own backend.

My first project in Rust was replicating this paper because i wanted to learn rust but needed a project to work on because i hate learning from tutorials.

Of course, I had intended to go the OOP route because that’s what I was used to and this was my first time using rust… that was a bit of a headache. But I did eventually get it working and could watch the weights change in real time. (It was super slow of course but still cool)

Anyway I’ve started making a much much faster version by using a queue to hold neurons and synapses that need updating instead of running through all of them every loop.

It’s like lightning fast compared to the old version; I’m very proud of that. However, my code is an absolute mess and is now filled with

Vec<Arc<Mutex<>>>

And I can’t implement the inhibition in a lazy way like I did the first time, so that’s not fun…

Back in late 1982 (i think it was), i was 16, I’d just convinced my folks to buy me a Commodore 64. It had a tape drive for storage, long before broard Internet access etc. I had magazines about programming in Assembler and programmed a couple games to play becase i didnt have access to, well, anything.

I still remember my bottom porky pig balloon shooter :)

SYS 64738 my dudes.

My next computer was an Amiga 1000, floppy and pirating in my local user group were a thing by then :)