“Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the painter who dares and who has broken the spell of 'you can't' once and for all”
― Vincent Van Gogh

Projects

Comsos, GuPM, and other projects

Beyond the classic projects I worked on as a web developer (It would be pointless to screenshot the Checkout App, or the Debenhams website here!), I had a few of my own personal projects scattered here and there. Most of those projects are dear to me as they are the horses I rode to bring me to where I am today. As part of my job, I worked on both small and gigantic codebases such as the one of the DailyMail. I also worked on a lot of different projects not directly related to web, such as security gates for enterprise grade SSO, and finally, my own collection of various packages that can be found on Github.

Mobiles apps

Most people will agree that Mobile applications define the future of how users will interact with content on the internet. Over the past 10 years the volume of data transmitted to mobile phones has exploded, even if you only consider the audience shift from desktop user. For this reason, I have always cultivated a fascination for mobile technology, with experience from very low level Android development (In Tokyo I had to use the Java Native Interface to compile C code AI algorithms for maximum performance) to high-level React-Native and Phonegap-like technologies.

Game projects

Game development has always been a hobby of mine. What I find most interesting about it is the far higher complexity you find there than in pretty much anywhere else. The thrill of spending a whole day optimizing mathematics and small chunks of code simply to save a few milliseconds is the kind of puzzles that really stimulate the "developer creativity" that tends to be lacking especially among web and mobile developers.
One of my favourite project to work on is Crystal Venture (see here), a voxel based game with sandbox mechanism. The non-traditional structure of the game, and the way you can empower the user to use their own creativity to create a unique set of challenge. I wrote multiple versions of this game, the first one in C++ using only DirectX (pure system development) then I re-created in Unity (C#), to finally move to Unreal-Engine (C++).
While I was working in Japan I had to work on a 3D demo for vision recognition technologies. That's how I designed and developed Tori no Mori. A game whose base mechanism is to control the main character using your hand (a bit like a Kinect would do). You fly around moving your hand, and shoot by forming a fist with your hand. The game has been made from scratch using Ogre and C++. I had to develop my own scripting engine (parsing XML files) to create cinematics and levels.
Another one that I really enjoyed working on. this is a small game I had to develop using only the base canvas element in JS. It has been a very interesting project to explore the base mechanism of JS and the browser.

Other projects

Over time I did a lot of different things, here are some other relevant code projects I would like to talk about (Click on them to read about them!) as well as some completely unrelated projects, like my book, that I love talking about!