Please enjoy this universally accessible, radically lightweight, mobile-first, user friendly document.
See it live at https://vcolavin.com/tree. It might not look very impressive yet!
See the code at https://github.com/vcolavin/tree, and check out the rambling development log.
Technologies: TypeScript, vanilla JS
2022 to present
A sort of clone of Dwarf Fortress, the fantasy world simulator and story generator that inspired Minecraft. I've been exploring ideas around computer-assisted storytelling for a bit, and watching a lot of Kruggsmash's videos on YouTube. I want to make a world simulation which can support sufficient complexity that it starts supporting interesting stories.
I'm learning a lot of game development principles from just running headlong into problems and coming up with naive solutions, which I can refine over time.
See it live at https://vcolavin.com/nature-of-the-beast.
See the code at https://github.com/vcolavin/nature-of-the-beast.
Technologies: TypeScript, React, Redux, Scss, Webpack
2018 to 2020
An an interactive horror fiction inspired by '80s text-based adventure games, literary fiction, and the terminal console. It is nerdy, queer, verbose, and deeply personal.
See it live at periscopic.com.
This project is close-source.
Technologies: React, Redux, GraphQL, Strapi
2018
The main marketing website for Periscopic, where I worked as a front-end developer. I had my fingers in a lot of pies in this project, but one of the pieces I'm most proud of is the the opening animation and impact selector, which we called the "Impact Wall". It had its features pared back over the years but it still looks cool.
I also designed the data loading scheme, which is a naive GraphQL client implementation. I learned a lot while building it. The biggest lesson I learned was to just use Apollo instead. We used Strapi as the CMS for its GraphQL support.
See it live at http://salmonexplorer.ca.
This project is close-source.
Technologies: TypeScript, React, Redux, Mapbox, Scss, Python, Jupyter Notebooks
2018 to 2019
An app to look at huge amounts of data about fish in the Pacific Northwest! I worked on features all across this app, including data ingestion, map rendering, massive performance improvements, and squashing memory leaks. I was entirely responsible for the on-demand PDF generation . Warning, some PDFs are very data heavy and may take a long while to load.
See it live at https://luminafoundation.org/stronger-nation/report/#/predictive.
This project is close-source.
Technologies: React, Redux, TypeScript, SVG, Nivo (a D3 charting library)
2018, 2019
The goal-exploration tool is the first project on which I was the lead developer. I made virtually all of the technical decisions on the front-end, contributed to the design process, and wrote all of the code.
This project is no longer available
This project is close-source.
Technologies: React, Redux, TypeScript, WordPress.
2018
This project was intended to be a report card for politician's friendliness to animal welfare issues. In addition to the accountability tool, I used Wordpress as a headless CMS to construct a blog and marketing site. The theme and marketing site I created is no longer online.