Things I’ve built to understand how they work, from GPU and CPU renderers to firmware and boot code. All source code is on GitHub.
A C++20 Vulkan renderer with a quaternion 6-DOF camera, an 8-texture sampler array with anisotropic filtering, Blinn-Phong lighting with 16 animated point lights, a fixed 512 Hz simulation loop and an ImGui debug overlay, built on swap-chain recreation (MAILBOX with FIFO fallback), two frames in flight synchronized with fences and semaphores, staging-buffer uploads, depth buffering, descriptor sets and push constants.
A CPU rasterizer with no graphics API: its own matrix math, near-plane and screen-edge triangle clipping, back-face culling, perspective-correct texture mapping and a depth buffer, rendering OBJ models.
A real-time 3D renderer for an ESP32-S3 with no GPU: hand-written vector and matrix math, back-face culling, flat lighting and depth sorting, with triangles pushed over SPI to TFT displays and OBJ meshes loaded from an on-flash LittleFS filesystem.
A wearable ESP32 badge with an E Ink display. The firmware speaks a custom Bluetooth Low Energy protocol that streams images in MTU-sized chunks into two 1-bit framebuffers and deep-sleeps when idle, waking on a GPIO pin; a Flutter app converts and dithers images on the phone. Published in Paged Out! #6.
Write-up: PixelPin — Bluetooth e-paper badgeSource: PixelPin — Bluetooth e-paper badgeApp: PixelPin — Bluetooth e-paper badge
A two-stage x86 boot chain: a 512-byte NASM boot sector walks a FAT12 filesystem to load a 16-bit C second stage with its own small libc and FAT12 driver, using BIOS disk services with retries. Debugged in QEMU and Bochs.
Plays video, GIFs and images as 24-bit color ASCII art in the terminal. A producer–consumer pipeline runs decoding, rendering and the UI on separate threads; builds on Linux and Windows.
A small simulation compiled to WebAssembly that runs directly in the browser.
Falling-sand physics built on cellular automata, compiled to WebAssembly. Runs in the browser; best on a desktop with a mouse.
Intel Cryptography Primitives Library
Fixed a multithreaded cache-thrashing bug in SHA-1/SHA-2 hash dispatch, where a shared function pointer was rewritten on every call, and measured it with perf: −48% instructions, −32% cache references and −10% CPU time in a 12-thread SHA-256 benchmark. Intel shipped a fix for the issue in v1.4.0.
Added slider change callbacks (SliderOption::on_change) to this 10k-star C++ terminal UI library, shipped in v6.0. My terminal_animation app is listed in the project’s showcase.