Personal Projects

I do a lot of personal software development, both for fun and to extend my skills. Here are some of the ones I'm most proud of:

• Loom, a Smalltalk-like programming language.
  (This blog post gives a pretty good overview of the language and my thoughts behind it.)

• Sic, yet another mediocre small Lisp dialect that emerged out of the realization that C++ variadic arguments were a lot like S-expressions. I gave a talk on it for the Ottawa C++ users group. I don't have a recording or slides online, but the the blog post it's based on is here.

• Backpack Ruby and monolith, a toolchain for creating standalone binaries in mruby. This takes advantage of a) MRuby's ability to create self-contained executables and b) the fact that modern operating systems will safely ignore anything that's been appended to an executable.

• Bitart Bot is a Mastodon bot that generates procedural integer art.

• Several experimental Ruby gems:

  • simple-future provides a process-based implementation of the future construct in Ruby.
  • DBMLite is a DBM-style persistant key-value table using using SQLite as its back end. (Why? Because sometimes you need a dead simple key/value store and not a SQL database and SQLite is robust and portable.)

• ReLarn a cleaned-up fork of the classic Roguelike game ULarn.