I am a developer (Rust & TypeScript), music artist, and multimedia enthusiast. I have been progremming in TypeScript for $xp years and switched to loving Rust about 2 years ago (it happens). Most of my projects start from what I call "dumb ideas" that are usually ambitious in the beginning, but can end up working spectacularly.
Projects
Airwave
Source: GitHub
Airwave is an ATC (Air Traffic Control) simulator based on real-world units and commands.
Frustrated by the current landscape of ATC games, I sought out to build one powered by AI. But wait, not just because AI is a buzzword, but because it allowed me to parse tasks from speech-to-text requests made by the user without a hard-coded syntax for the user to follow.
Utilizing Rust, I was able to build a comprehensive simulation that matched the real-world operations of aircraft and ATC. As the game grew, the scope started to change. Focusing more on the gamification aspect of Airwave, I rebuilt it to feature airport-management strategies rather than the OG idea of building an ATC MMO-style simulator.
Stack
Source: GitHub
Website: https://vandesm14.github.io/stack (Website and Documentation)
Stack is a dynamic, stack-based, concatenative programming language.
I like to call myself the idea man. I'll have a random idea, such as "How hard is it to make an OS?" or "What if there was a language that implemented the bare-bones and allowed you to build it up from there?". Can you guess which one stuck? Fast forward from mid-December of 2023, I, and my good friend Leon, started on the daunting task to create our own programming language.
Surprisingly, parsing and executing the code was easy. The part I found most challenging is sketching the behavior of the language. Because Stack is incredibly dynamic, the evaluation engine couldn't make almost any inferences about the code, which means I had to find creative ways to get features like scopes (took me many tries to perfect).
Another fun feature was building a debugger with Egui, which allowed us to see inside the language and keep track of every operation (and even go back in time!).
Stack isn't finished and neither am I. I'm still working hard to make it a fully-fledged and usable language.
Node Shell
Source: GitHub
A CLI to bring scripts, binaries, and packager commands to your fingertips (inspired by nix-shell).
Inspired by the ease-of-use of nix-shell, I wanted to create a way to easily call commands and binaries in a NodeJS project. So, instead of running pnpm dev, you could run dev. Or instead of pnpm prisma format, you could just run prisma format. It was surprisingly simple to implement, though I did have to learn how to instantiate the BASH shell and give it a proper config.
Conetto
Source: GitHub
I have always been fascineted by number stations and one day, I decided to build a Rust library based on it. Conetto provides a set of primitives that allow Text-To-Speech clips to be generated and spliced together in different ways.
Classaware
Website: http://classaware.org
A class countdown system I built for my High School. It is still operational and still recieves updates. Classaware was the first widespread project I had created in my coding career.
Jason
Source: GitHub
Website: https://jason.thedevbird.com
Jason is a dynamic JSON viewer that I built to tabulate and visualize JSON data. It is built with React and TypeScript, and is hosted on GitHub Pages.
CC-Twigs
Source: GitHub
A joint effort of a friend and I to build a collection of packages for ComputerCraft (a Minecraft mod). The packages are written completely in Lua, though the hosting server utilizes Deno (TypeScript). Our biggest challenge was and is building an in-game networking system to emulate IP and above.
Replit Testimony
How did I get here?
My journey started on Replit, an online IDE, building tiny web apps, writing games and my own cryptography system. At the time, I barely knew anything.
However, as I learned the limits of my knowledge, I continued to push forward, learning more and more. Instead of taking a coding class at school or getting a certificate online, I spent my time absorbing everything.
As I progressed, my use of Replit was not only developing apps, but also interacting with the community. I climbed my way from being an early adopter, to a moderator of Repl Talk, the forum of the platform.
After graduating high school, I couldn’t find a job anywhere. But, after a Replit event in Discord, I saw that Amjad, the CEO, was still online. Knowing that this was my only chance to DM him (he was seldom online), I quickly wrote up a message on what I was good at and if I could get a job there.
That message marked the beginning of my professional career.
Life at Replit?
After a swift reply from Amjad, I was sent through a set of interviews. Then, one morning, I had received an email from HR that had sealed my career as a customer support engineer.
That was 3 years ago. Since then, I have learned so much from my fellow engineers and from the job itself. Starting out as a simple “Reply to these emails”, I found my way around a full-time job. As things quickly accelerated, I had to keep a fast-paced mindset in order to keep up.
I was involved in hiring the new manager and the other support engineers. Though my title stayed the same, I provided a valuable role in not only communicating with troubled users, but developing tools and software for our team.
Less than a year later, we had a new manager. With that, came more hires and changes to the team. We migrated from software to software, decreasing our footprint as much as we could. Through all of this, I was heavily involved in refactoring our integrations and workflows ensuring a smooth transition.
Where am I now?
I was laid off from Replit late February of 2024, along with a few other members of the support team. It wasn't due to performance or anything on my end.