My family makes fun of me. I spend 8 hours a day coding. Then I come home and code.
I do spend a good portion of my personal time on development. I do so for two reasons: 1) I enjoy it, and 2) it's really necessary in this career field if we developers want to stay viable. Here's a list of some of my home-projects:
Quid
- Windows 10
- C#/WPF
- MS Sql Server
Quid is my money-management application I started several years ago (the name was picked because it's a short nickname for money). I wrote this partly as a coding exercise, but mostly because I was frustrated at none of the money management apps at the time were designed to budget via the envelope money management system.
This is a fully feature-rich application with the ability to create a budget, enter recurring payments, reconcile with the bank, and create reports. I use it daily.
Quidroid
- Windows 10 & Android
- Back-end: C#/WebAPI
- Phone app: C#/Zamarin
Quidroid is a phone-app version of Quid written for Android (via Zamarin). It uses a WebAPI back-end. I've included location service so that when I record an entry in a store, I record the location, name, and which envelope I used. That way the next time I'm in AutoZone and bring up the app, AutoZone appears in the selection, and the Car Maintenance is automatically selected.
SIBROIDS
SIBROIDS started out as a bit of a joke. It's short for Sibling Asteroids. When I kids wanted to ditch their Playstation and move to XBox, I quickly threw together a game with a space ship, and all the siblings as asteroids. They were amused...for about 30 seconds.
Over time I kept adding to it. My favorite additions were 1) a physics simulation for modeling a lunar launch including orbital paths around the earth and moon (this was a student project for my son), and 2) guided missiles. 3) a complex wall collision detection system which accounts for bouncing, sliding, or simple stop-collision.
Unfortunately at some point I had to stop messing around with it and get on to other projects (like robotics, see below). I still wish I had time for: further collision detection, neural networks, AI, more physics modelling, retro-style games (ATARI!). etc...
My favorite aspect of game coding (other than it's fun to write video games) is that it lets me really delve into true object-oriented design, and fully use several design patterns. Stuff that simple web-apps really don't require, but are rewarding to code.
