I’ve been programming for 7 years. I started with making silly games with my friends in Scratch, then I moved onto making 2D and 3D games in the Unity game engine.
I worked with Unity for about 4 years. Through that time, I learned about concepts like vectors, vector math, rigidbody physics, and object-oriented programming (OOP). The Unity engine was a great help in getting me much more into programming in C#.
Towards the end of my time with Unity, I began experimenting with fusing data from the game with data from real-world hardware such as accelerometers and gyroscopes. At one time, I even made my own VR game!
I also created a custom node-based proof-of-concept app called NodeFlow. Doing this project taught me a lot about bezier curves and rendering them within the game engine.
This was the ultimate test in what I learned about object-oriented programming; every single node is its own object, meaning that they all link with one another.
Somehow, the code was still quite performant despite the large amount of nodes!
Recently, i've started doing more hardware projects.
In the early summer of 2023, I created my very own self-driving model car. It’s an old remote-controlled Hummer, and it didn’t have a remote or a working battery pack (proprietary tech, the bane of my existence). So I took a Raspberry Pi 4, a motor driver, and an old webcam, and I slapped this thing together. It used OpenCV (a system for easily creating computer vision systems) to detect faces and a custom algorithm to turn to face them. This car would drive towards people and follow them.
However, there were many flaws. You can read more here.
In March of 2024, I learned about Hack Club from a hackathon that was being organized by them. I ended up not being able to attend due to the distance that I was from the venue, but the concept of the organization was really interesting to me.