I began learning FPGA development in pursuit of gaining a better understanding of how computers work beneath the abstraction layer provided by software. Knowing how computers use transistors and electricity to make the magic happen has long been something I’ve wanted to really understand. My goal is to understand more about how to assemble parts of computers out of these fundamental components, and doing this with FPGAs is helping me learn faster.

I’m using a DE10-Nano as my development board, along with Intel Quartus as the development environment to build and run my projects. These tools aren’t great, but they’re getting the job done, and they let me build and deploy code I’ve written with Verilog, the HDL I’m starting with. I have a bunch of project ideas to try learning on it, but for now it is not a means to an end, but a platform to learn on.

Here I plan on cataloguing this journey as much as I can.

This website is itself one of my projects, one that has been evolving for over 15 years. It started off as static HTML files written by hand, before eventually moving over to a WordPress site in the mid-2000s. Seeing the rise of Tumblr and wanting the ability to have my own posts that were image or link posts, I switched the site over to Chyrp, which was a really nice lightweight blogging platform but one that hasn’t been well maintained in the last few years, unfortunately.

After years of neglect and posting to my now-dead side blog called Informal Protocol and posting to Medium, I decided to get my blog back into a good place that would be easy for me to hack on, maintain, and deploy. I originally thought to switch back to WordPress, and prototyped with that for awhile, before settling on Gatsby, a static site generator built around React that aims to be incredibly fast to get pages to load. Since it’s built in React, which I’m very comfortable with, getting the site together was quite easy. This means that for the first time in the history of my site, the entire theme was built completely from scratch.

I’ve built a few PCs in the past, but I really wanted one that would be a ridiculous, over the top, gorgeous showpiece. I’ve loved the aesthetic of D.Va from Overwatch, with her baby blue and hot pink color palette. So I decided to build a PC themed after her, and documented the process in video.

Ohai is a location-based journal app to keep track of where you’ve been. Other apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Path are focused on sharing your location all the time, for the benefit of other people. Ohai is designed to make a journal out of your locations and photos you take while there, benefitting you first.

Ohai was designed and built around the App.net APIs for points of interest and stores all data within a private channel for your profile. This means that the data is accessible only to you, but other apps can also publish into your journal.

Along with all App.net-powered apps, Ohai was retired with the closure of App.net and the shutdown of its APIs. I’d love to revisit the concept some day, though.

Pony Cons is a convention tracker for My Little Pony conventions. Developed in conjuction with my friend Foalpapers who handles data, Pony Cons takes the data of all the (surprisingly many) conventions and condenses it into an usable and accessible presentation.

The first version of Pony Cons was developed as an iPhone application, but was rejected from the App Store for almost a year due to Apple’s incorrect belief that the project used copyrighted and trademark names and images from Hasbro. After months of rejections, the application was eventually approved in June 2014.

The Pony Cons iPhone app showed a list of conventions and guests which could be favorited, and favorites would trigger push notifications when a convention announced a new guest, or a guest of honor was announced for a new convention. It also showed all the conventions on a map, to help you find conventions to attend.

After several updates, Apple rejected the app again for using the Today widget API. The app did nothing wrong and used the widget APIs exactly in the manner they were meant to be used. Despite this, App Review wrongly rejected the app several times, and it took lots of terribly frustrated emails with Apple developer relations before the app was finally approved. It would be the last update to the app, and the last time I subjected my work to Apple’s App Review process. The app was removed when my developer program expired in 2017, though it still functions for people who have it.

The project lives on, however, in the form of a web application that is currently in development.