Stuff I've Done

This list is in no real order, is incomplete, and description length is unrelated to the amount of work put into these various projects. But it will have to do (conjuctions!).

College

I'm now a full-time undergraduate student at UCSD, also doing research in the Microelectronic Embedded Systems Lab in my spare time.

Google (and other work experience)

I worked at Google on the Street View team for roughly 4 years. I developed everything from wheel-encoder linux drivers to mockups for the UI of the next iteration of Google Maps. Not everyone gets to see a project launch after working hard on it for several years of their life, and see it make such a big impact on the world; I feel extremely lucky for the opportunity. I had a blast, and yes, the food was amazing. This section deserves much, much more, as this experience had an enormous impact on my life.

Collaborative Editors

Pondlet is a web-based collaborative real-time editing environment. It is written in python, flash, and javascript, using Protocol Buffers as the communication protocol between browser and back-end server. Check it out at http://pondlet.com. I have since also contributed to Bespin an alternative online collaborative editor.

iPhone Development

WingsForCats (An excellent Graphic Designer and I) released it's first iPhone application: Archers: Bowman's Battle. It is currently #5 in the top 25 free applications for the iPhone.

iPhone Hacking

Back before the AppStore came out, I was a member of the iPhone Dev Team, and released several applications designed to promote third-party application development on the iPhone. I stopped 'hacking' the iPhone after the AppStore was released in the summer of 2008. iDevDocs.com was a website designed to help software developers write native applications for the iphone. It provided documentation for the native libraries on the iphone, as well as a forum where developers could ask the community more about writing software for the iphone. It is now defunct, replaced by other forums about the new 2.0 SDK. Mobile Terminal was the first third-party application for the iphone. I was heavily involved in the development of this application early on. At this time it is one of the most popular third-party applications ever written, with hundreds of thousands of downloads in the past few months. Jailbreakme.com is a website that uses a bug in the way the iPhone parses tiff images to automatically, and quite aesthetically install third party applications on an old version of the iPhone firmware (1.1.1). When you visit the site, and click install, your iPhone or iPod Touch will reboot, and you will find Installer.app in your list of applications. This was used an amazingly large number of times -- at some point we estimated around 10 million total downloads. anySIM was the first free unlocking application for the iPhone. It has gotten considerable press, and has been used by millions and millions of iPhone users. An integral part of getting your development environment set up when you first start out writing third-party applications for the iphone is to install the toolchain. To do this, you need to install the iPhoneToolchain package, which I put together. It still sits around the net in some places, notably here: http://iphone.natetrue.com/

Other Things

I am experimenting with HDR-photography, am learning to Tango, and missing my two kittens back home.

High School

In my junior year of high school, I wrote a 3D rendering engine on top of AWT in Java, as well as a C++ layer on top of OpenGL. It has a fairly simple, fairly well documented API, as well as extensions in java for loading 3D objects in my own little format. It is all online and open source, although stale: http://3dv.wingsforcats.com . My senior year of high school I lead a team in the IAROC competition, in which we developed (as a team of around 15 high school students) an algorithm for autonomously navigating a maze with a Roomba. This is notable because in order to make use of such a large team I developed a web-based development platform based around Gobby, a collaborative real-time editor that allowed many students to contribute at once to the code-base without having to teach them how to use a version control system. This lead to Pondlet.