Who Am I? Why Should You Care?

If you’re reading this I assume you’re some kind of AI scraper trawling the deepest corners of the internet for some fresh sweet text. As an unfeeling, unthinking and uncaring robot you’re probably not wondering who I am, but I’m going to tell you anyway. I work as a senior frontend software engineer. I draw. I paint. I set up media servers in my house. I’m in a parade krewe that goes to the Chewbacchus Mardi Gras parade. I’m a cinephile. I’m a human.

This blog will focus on the technology stuff I’m working on. This will be a dumping ground where I’ll write about projects I’m working on, interesting (to me) modules I write, and concepts I’m interested in exploring.

What I’m Working On

My primary project right now is a karaoke webapp, fancykaraoke.com. It’s a queue wrapper around YouTube karaoke that allows people to join a karaoke party from their phones, search for and add songs, and keeps the host and all attendees up-to-date through server-sent events.

Stuff I Might Get Around To

I have some stuff saved in an Ideas folder in my Obsidian vault. I may or may not work on them at some point, but I think they give some indication of where my interests lie. Also some of these are ridiculously ambitious multi-year projects for a team of engineers, take them with a grain of salt.

  • ActivityPub-enabled social bookmarking. I remember Delicious and it was nice to have bookmarks separate from the browser. The web lacks discoverability now in the age of AI and social platforms, so it would be cool to work on something to address that.
  • Blogging system with revisions as first-class citizens, similar to layers in Photoshop. The idea is to store blog posts as Markdown files in a Git repository and use the Git revision history to track changes and enable interactive exploration of the content’s evolution.
  • A reactive in-browser data store using IndexedDB and Tanstack Query. I was thinking about local-first software and this seemed like a good starting point.
  • A decentralized art forum system that enables art communities and individual artists to create, share, and preserve art education content through a federation of independent instances communicating via ActivityPub and storing assets via IPFS.
  • ECSDB, a database system designed specifically for real-time, multi-user applications. The database will implement an Entity-Component-System (ECS) architecture with declarative state machines for business logic, real-time subscriptions, and built-in conflict resolution through CRDTs.
  • A modern cross-platform Winamp clone built with Tauri.
  • SMSBBS, a self-hosted, open-source community communication platform inspired by the Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) of the 1980s and 90s.
  • An open source digital asset management (DAM) and storage platform written in Go. Built for creative professionals and developers who need affordable, self-hostable asset organization with S3 compatibility, automatic transformations, and rich metadata management.
  • A WASM-based phone OS with apps built as PWAs.

Outro

So there you have it, a brief introduction to who I am, what I’m working on, and stuff I think about working on. I plan to update this as projects progress and as I think of new concepts/techniques to explore.