Years ago I was asked to make a website to educate the public and promote a campaign to bring back a formerly-declared-extinct species.

There were scientists, zoologists, researchers and volunteers in the field who did the REAL work. I had the easy part.

But when the website was launched, I received 'thank you' emails from all over the world. Reading all of those letters was one of the most rewarding feelings.

And the best part . . . Though it's still a threatened species (I'm told recovery potential is strong), today there are more than 500 of these animals living in the wild.

Back in the 90s, we bought an 87 year old house that had been neglected for decades, but the neglect was what we liked. That meant that nobody had "upgraded" or modernized it.

We spent the next 7 years renovating it, fixing every wall, repairing plumbing, installing a cast-iron woodburning stove, etc.

When we were done, we had turned the ugliest house on the street into a museum piece, and sold it for far more than any house on the street had ever sold for.

Last year I built this cupboard and hutch, along with a matching buffet.

It's no longer online in order to minimize data exposure, but during some major wildfires a decade ago, a small city was evacuated with my city being the nearest safe place to be (~4 hours away), so I built a site within a couple of hours to let people with spare rooms offer space to evacuees. For nearly a week I became the place to find vetted information about resources for everything an evacuee needed to know. It took the province and Red Cross 4-5 days to get their systems up and running so I was an important stop gap. I've since devised a system for evacuee information that I can deploy in less than an hour (it's always running, but I confirm data for each deployment to make sure links and phone numbers are still valid).

My name is on a plaque (along with dozens of others) attached to the Nancy Grace Roman telescope that just launched. I don’t think I’ll ever top that. I also had a hand in building the primary mirrors for JWST, seeing images come back from it has been incredibly rewarding! Working in aerospace definitely has its awesome moments, despite being “just a job” most of the time.

I make music. It’s not amazing music but it’s mine and doing it brings me great joy. I have a recording studio in my house, and use much of my down time for writing and recording music. I’ve slowly been teaching myself audio engineering and production, try to drop a song or two each year, and am working on a full-length album.

Unfortunately I can’t really share that here without doxxing myself. I do still maintain a Reddit account solely for the purposes of promotion and networking with other amateur recording artists, only because the music making communities on Lemmy are not very active.

I make video games on occasion. My portfolio is mostly jams and unfinished prototypes, and while I am working on something special, at this rate it will be a million years before it's ready for release.

I catch my wife playing this one sometimes and it makes my heart happy

Sometimes I paint minis. These were a couple of characters I played where I made a custom figure

Kurt is technically a kitbash. I took a figure that was originally a bard holding a harp, cut out the harp and gave him some books. He was a gifted kid turned wizard-college-dropout, really pulling from life experience there.

For Robin I made a couple of additions with clay. I'm really bad at that, but it makes me happy

I sculpted this tiki mask using blender and then milled it out of aluminium using a 3 axis mill.

You can make your own, if you have a 3D printer or a milling machine: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4636877

I made a t-shirt from pieces of other t-shirts. It's messy as fuck but I wear it with pride. I want to make more and improve.

Something I’m still proud of was a diorama I made in 5th grade for Halloween. It was called the “Peanut House of Horror” and featured dried peanuts with little googly eyes being disassembled in every conceivable way on cardboard torture devices — think a stretcher rack pulling one in half, a “pit and the pendulum” device slicing into one, etc. with peanut shells all over the floor. My parents supported the creativity and humor. Other parents, not so much. But to paraphrase John Waters, you need to possess good taste to appreciate poor taste.

I made a printable pattern that allows you to origami fold two d6 dice from a sheet of letter paper. It means I can give my acute psych patients board games if they ask and even if they're sick enough to insert them into their orifices there's very minimal harm possible.

spoiler

I have other games that also utilize pieces made very similar to the pieces used by this chess set and have even made checkers to accompany that set.

https://newdawnowl.itch.io/microtonal-grid

I made a pure code, microtonal step sequencer that makes it really easy to try out what microtonal music is like.

I'm also very proud of how quickly and easily I implemented the conway's game of life into it, only took me about an hour or so.

I'm not proud of how long it took me to get rid of the "clicky" bug.

Keyboards (home and work)

Macro-pad (for me and the Mrs)

Hitbox controllers (for playing Street Fighter 6)

My last two PCs

Turned a broken laptop into an emulation console

A bunch of "Ikea hack" furniture pieces around the house that I don't have pictures of currently.

Well, if we're tootling anyway. Am rather fond of my latest.

Its owner will be taking delivery later this week. Hopefully they're fond of it, too.

I don't have anything specific to show. But I am an aspiring author who took an old English Creative Writing assignment and turned it into a 16 book epic decades later. I should be ready for publication by the end of this year.

I built a maze game in Godot. It uses depth first search to make a maze then you have a little wizard dude that runs through it. Each time you complete theaze the next one get bigger.

I spent most of this year building https://github.com/zedd00/PantryButler a pantry and recipe organizing app.

I'm about 95% on a firmware update and Linux gui interface for my cloudnine keyboard so I can move the fucking led back light change button away from the ctrl key.

Something out of myself. Raised poor, lived in a renovated chicken coop for a while. Almost homeless a few times. My wife and I now have two nice paid off cars, a nice home, good jobs, our kids are all doing well and we spoil the shit out of our granddaughter.

We just had this delivered to her! Something I always wanted as a kid and wanted to be able to afford for our kids but couldn't.

A free mobile game "Wandering Alchemist" I've released on both Android and iOS. Free as in offline, no ads, no in-app purchases (Besides a fully optional "support the developer"). It's a GPS walking game where you gather ingredients, brew potions, sell them to merchants and decorate your neighborhood.

On some days it's awesome, on other days I ask myself why I do this to myself. But overall it's fun :)

I'm currently working on a big update that reworks all the visuals, a lot of them are still from early on and look really shoddy. For example before and after:

Google Play Store

Apple App Store

It gpt too hot too early in the season to complete it, but this greenhouse will be completed soon!

Speed the read write speeds of every server and workstation at work by introducing on the fly compression. I hypothised it would work because we had a surprising amount of idle cpu and even where we didn't a lot of the clock cycles were waiting for IO. Had to design some benchmarks, run on test systems, do a blue field deployment on a few prod servers, etc, but it was really rewarding to go from idea to implementation. It's was actually noticble to users for start up time too! It lead to a more aggressive compression on some backups that ended up delaying the need for hardware purchases too.

There are two big ones at the moment. The first is that I made my own cyberdeck, and I even have an assembly animation for it:

https://dalek.zone/w/oSAxetbgfQBrYHTgz4AXLB

It took me several months and two iterations. But I'm very happy with the end result. It could use some more tweaks, but it's been working well so far.

The second is that I've more or less completed a multi-player video game called Sunken Barrels:

https://codeberg.org/Sir_Thominick_IV/Sunken_Barrels

Just like my cyberdeck it could use some polish, but again I'm very proud with the result. It is fully playable, it's fun, and it fills the nostalgia from the original Garry's Mod game its based on.

I made this halloween costume out of scrap from a hospital demo I've been doing and I'm pretty happy about it.