Aaron Goin

In February, I completed a small ReactJS coding challenge as part of a job application. Their challenge was rather simple: Create a blinking light component that accepted it's color and lit state as props. They encouraged a little creativity, so naturally I went all out. Because, why not? I could have met the bare requirements in a minute, but I took an hour or so instead to craft something unique. It's been a few months now, so I feel safe in sharing this publicly.

Weave is a web application for writing novels, that started out as a Vue.js project in late March 2017. Before I worked on this, I had never used Vue.js before, and indeed this app was partly an effort to teach myself just what Vue could do. And for a while that was really great. Vue is a nicely polished framework, and it's easy to use. But I felt hampered by it half-way through as I kept trying to make html templates and directives work like React's JSX. And about that time I discovered Preact, which is a tiny open-source React clone. Preact touts itself as a drop-in replacement for React, but (at that time) came without Facebook's license (which has since been fixed), and is less than 1/14th the size. So naturally, I decided to rewrite the entire project!

This past semester has been a whirlwind of classes and responsibilities. But one of my more enjoyable classes was Game Design, which focused heavily on core subjects like SAT collision detection, isometric projection, pathfinding, and surprisingly: git. While the projects themselves were not strictly germane to my career, the opportunity to architect and implement applications—combined with the freely creative nature of these projects—was both rewarding and enlightening.

I took a Web Data class this past semester, and teamed up with another classmate to produce Sweetnums as an assignment for that class. Sweetnums is a searchable database of Candies, Fruits, and Baked Confections scraped from Wikipedia. Scroll endlessly through pictures of results, and click on any result to see a larger image, with text detail, and Nutritional Facts pulled from the USDA nutritional facts database.

I've long been a fan of roguelike games. While often graphically simple (or archaic to some) they can suprise you with their depth. They’re unforgiving. You can’t rewind. You can’t reload after death. It’s the finality of our choices that gives them weight, and this shines through in roguelikes. Ogremage is an old off-and-on side project that I started back in 2014.

rogueColorConsole isn’t really a console at all, at least not in the classical sense, as it doesn’t detect user input. It uses HTML5 Canvas to draw 2-toned sprites into a 2d user-defined or fullscreen canvas. I made this in my efforts to make an in-browser roguelike game engine. My own uses for this have changed, and the source inside the ogremage engine does not reflect this one. But I thought this was a useful thing to spin out as it’s own repository.