I run my own mail server and wanted to have a dead simple one-page mail client to do two things: 1) Read emails, 2) Send emails. I could not find anything reasonable that wasn't either terrible or just bloated.
I would like there to be a simple program that does only these three things with nothing getting in your way. One tiny executable, little to no memory/CPU usage.
I have already prototyped this, which is what I use for my own email:
Nowgrep is in a closed beta phase
Let me know whether or not this is an interesting idea
Nowlaunch
The windows program search/launcher is horrible. When it doesnt take ages to open (??), its non-deterministic results are impressively bad. To make it worse, it for some reason gives you confusing bing search results.
I would like there to be something similar to mac Spotlight, where you can press one key and without delay start typing the name of the program (or whatever thing) you are looking for, and instantly get reasonable suggestions than you can navigate with arrowkeys and select with ENTER.
Let me know whether or not this is an interesting idea
Note: All projects are made completely from scratch unless otherwise is mentioned.
This website
The http server for this website is of course written in C99 from-scratch, running on a Linux VPS. This program is just .css .js .html files being served from the VPS. It is intentionally designed to avoid the mainstream way of doing things, with simplicity in focus to keep everything snappy and instant. As it so happens, computers are very fast, and EVEN programs running in a crazy browser environment should be free of pauses and delays.
Nowgrep
As I was very annoyed that there wasn’t a fast way to search files and their contents on Windows, I prototyped a simple gui program. I looked up whatever resources I could find on the NTFS file system and figured out how to parse it. The program could index my SSD with 2 million files in 600ms, find each filename in milliseconds. Searching file content of ~80k indexed text files took another 1-2 seconds, which I have ideas on how to make faster. I am currently trying to make this into a shippable product.
This was a 4-day project. I used various techniques to procedurally render millions of dynamic grass straws with a wind system, using only 30-or-so vertices. I made use of a compute shader to generate indirect instanced draw calls, and several methods for performance like frustum culling, tiling, distance based density & LOD, etc. The result was great, and I was especially happy with the performance and seamless LOD/Density transitions, and the fact that virtually no VRAM was used. This was made using The Forge Framework.
Here's a demo:
AST-Free multithreaded Compiler
I wrote a prototype for a compiler which compiles each procedure in the program on its own thread. The compiler compiles everything in-place directly to an IR which is then converted to a machine-code-like C (for prototype reasons). It eliminates non-consequential code through building a dependency graph for each code node as it compiles. It's public on GitHub.
C99 Standard Library / Base Layer
I used to find C rather unpleasant to program in, but later realized that this is simply because it has a terrible standard library (null-terminated strings should be illegal). So, I wrote my own base layer with zero dependencies in standard C headers. Anything around strings is using fixed-length strings. It's mostly a thin abstraction layer over the OS API's. Outside from the regular things you'd expect in a base layer, it also has a low-level graphics API with a shader compiler for a custom shading language, and a very simple Window API with an easy way to blit pixels from a pointer in your memory (so you can do easy classical CPU rendering). It's in a public repository on github. I use it for most projects. Implemented in Windows, Unix/Linux, Unix/Android.
Transpiler & GPU Shader Emulation on CPU
I wrote a transpiler for The-Forge's Forge Shading Language (FSL), so it could target ISPC, for the sake of emulating FSL Shaders on the CPU. This was integrated into the existing The-Forge-Framework.
Engine and Network Architecture for “Demon Knives”
I wrote all of the code that was not strictly gameplay for the game “Demon Knives” which was shipped to steam. It was written entirely from scratch. I did graphics, UI, networking, tooling and more. Written in Jai.
I quit my job to make Better Software full-time. If you like what I'm doing and want to increase my chance of succeeding, then any small donation will go a long way (I need food). Include a name and some social media handle and I will credit you somewhere.
