I recently built a small game engine which takes image files and metadata in TOML format and turns it into a point and click adventure.

Its not perfect, but I had fun making it.

i read a book about how a cpu+ram work together and decided to simulate it in excel.

wish I kept the file but I was so proud to make a loop or a Fibonacci sequence in excel by simulating a Von Neumann architecture in excel

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Mines nothing amazing, really, but i find it handy.

I 🏴‍☠️ movies. The downloads often come with excess files, images, text, sample videos, etc. The only files I want beside the movie file are subtitle files if they came with the download. And the video files often have obnoxiously long file names with coding info in it, the uploader’s name, etc. And sometimes they get nested weirdly.

Most of the time, the file name and nesting is not really a big deal since I use plex and does good at ignoring nesting and it typically matches the title to imdb entries even if the file name is full of garbage. But sometimes it doesn’t match correctly and has to be manually fixed. And I just want my files to be clean, readable, and get rid of the bloat.

So I made a script that walks through my movie libraries, deletes all unneeded files, generates a directory structure dependent on whether or not there are subtitles, and renames the files (and directories) by removing all of the junk words and coding and leaving only the title and release year. Like I said, it’s nothing amazing, but it’s the only utility I ever wrote in it’s entirety for myself that I actually use on the regular.

Back in the day, I got the weird idea that it’d be handy to grab information from the XMMS music player as it was running. So I made an extension that basically dumped the information about the player state as text to a named pipe. A few people wrote scripts for their IRC clients and whatnot to tell others what they were listening.

(Back then, none of the GUI music players really had any kind of RPC capability. Nowadays, you can probably do this stuff easily with D-Bus or whatever.)

One time, late at night, I was just listening to music in bed with headphones, controlling XMMS via infrared remote controller (LIRC). A random cool track came up. I had no idea what it was actually called. I went “wouldn’t it be cool if I could hit a remote button and it’d say what song is currently playing?” …so I got up, got back to the computer, and wrote a script that reads the pipe, takes the artist and song title, and feeds it to Festival TTS, then added that to LIRC configuration.

I made a D&D character creator for 3.5e/Forgotten Realms. Not just PCs but NPCs and encounters based on CR, too.

Implementing a probabilistic skiplists.

Because standard linked lists use traversal methods instead of quick memory access like arrays it’s computationally straining to traverse through 1000000 elements. A skiplist skips nodes by adding an additional dimension to the linked and its probabilistic for adding and removing nodes where as the idealized version requires reconstructing the entire list.

Idk I haven’t written many but recently I made an integration for my sister’s startup that automated enrolling prospects from companies in an email campaign by sourcing different prospects name fields and LinkedIn accounts and finding their emails. It was good fun, and the user would get a prospecting email with all the details on the company and the role the person worked in at the company along with how long they worked at their company. I was calling it LeadFetch until my sister closed shop and told me my program was her IP. That still pisses me off cause I was gonna merge it to one of the sources we used after she called it quits and left me with no opportunities. She designed none of the back end but had the gall to say it was her app.

I made a ttrpg character sheet template generator. It used PHP to parse a markdown language to build the sheet, and Javascript on the front end to control the fields and save the current sheet as a JSON cookie.

It’s half-working but:

A library for making a Discord bot in C with the only dependencies being OpenSSL and cJSON. That means I also wrote code for handling the HTTP requests and also WebSockets.

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.

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.

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.

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

Coolest thing is hard… I’m a bit of a nerd, but let’s go from a few angles.

As a kid I had made and recreated a number of games on my TI-83+ and did some fun optimization challenges to get as much in the pure BASIC code as possible. I was working in an ARG into it. But all that code is lost because I didn’t know how to back up that stuff back then. (And I was a bit lazy even when I knew I should.)

I’m proud of how fun my Football mod for Binding of Isaac is. It’s just an item that give Isaac randomly bouncing projectiles, like how a football kind of sporadically bounces in real life. I meant to release a challenge where you get ipecac and football to start, and all explosion immunities are removed from the pool. With a short goal since I think that’s enough chaos.

But probably from a different angle PySpeedup and DriveLink are libraries I designed to improve code as invisibly to the end user as possible because I got tired of taking PhD coders’ code and making it actually work because they don’t understand swap space or scheduling. (I’ve worked with brilliant algorithms at times, but had to correct critical misunderstandings of the computer at times.) I haven’t touched the libraries in years, but a lot of time and research went into it, and there was a full test suite and documentation. I don’t think the idea is fully without merit yet as the multiprocessing in Python is better but still has oddities, and I don’t think there’s an RAM aware abstraction in the base language yet? I forget what state I left things in. I know the CI I was using doesn’t exist (for free users) anymore though.