Share your cool programs!
I have a program called “country guess” that I made a year ago where it’s like the Sporcle quiz but with a) the proper UN recognized countries (with options for some of the partially recognized ones), b) completely offline since it’s made with half-baked Python and c) it’s text-based (ASCII art maps and all). It times how long you took to complete it, but there is no time limit. It also accepts alternative names, just like the Sporcle quiz (e.g. “uk” or “usa”)
The way I did it was incredibly time consuming though, as it relied on a whole load of string formatting to show the ASCII map with countries highlighted (each country is a list of either whitespace or hashes #), meaning I had to manually copy and past the white space of the ASCII maps I found for each and every country. No wonder why I never finished it. It also had the flaw of not showing the country names in the big countries, with all of them shoved to the bottom of the map, meaning when you are close to finishing, you can’t see both the map and the countries you got right.
As of right now, I think it has the continents of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, as well as Oceania. Not Asia though (there are simply too many countries there!) and the world, since I never bothered to finish it. If I recall correctly, the partially recognized territories I included that actually worked were Western Sahara, Somaliland, and Kosovo. I also had the optional UN observer states of the Vatican and Palestine.
Do note that the python program requires the modules “colorama” for colourful text and “art” for ASCII text headings I think.
Archery app. Basically zero users, and got purged from the play store earlier this year because I refused to jump through their hoops.
It was was meant for use with scopes, you would put in some distance and scope settings pairs into it, and it would fit a line allowing you to estimate intermediate scope settings.
It also had an AR mode, where you could save a targets GPS position, and get the distance and angle to the target, and the pin setting.
Sadly, never got any users. So its just for me now. And I deleted the AR stuff.
Woah! So you give it a distance and it estimates where to place the reticle? What sort of math formula do you use to estimate?
It fits up to a 4th order polynomial (going beyond 4th gets a bit silly), depending on the number of known pins.
Uses an apache math library to solve the best fit line.
Probably not “coolest” as in ‘best code ever’ or most complex code ever - but that got most coverage. So I think it’s pretty cool
Based on popularity: Back in the day I wrote Stick Fighters Brawl 2: Vector Warriors.
I’ve been wanting to re-compile it for modern machines for ages but guestures broadly life has been in the way. Should that happen, it will be hosted at Nuclear Playground.
The code I wrote that I use most often is music playback in the Jellyfin Roku client.
I use it almost every day and think it’s pretty cool 🤘
It’s either printf and stack unwinding in assembly or something to test all possible execution path for very simple multi threaded programms.
Coolest thing is hard… I’m a bit of a nerd, but let’s go from a few angles.
As a kid I had made and recreated a number of games on my TI-83+ and did don’t fun optimization challenges to get as much in the pure BASIC code as possible. I was working in an ARG into it. But all that code is lost because I didn’t know how to back up that stuff back then. (And I was a bit lazy even when I knew I should.)
I’m proud of how fun my Football mod for Binding of Isaac is. It’s just an item that give Isaac randomly bouncing projectiles, like how a football kind of sporadically bounces in real life. I meant to release a challenge where you get ipecac and football to start, and all explosion immunities are removed from the pool. With a short goal since I think that’s enough chaos.
But probably from a different angle PySpeedup and DriveLink are libraries I designed to improve code as invisibly to the end user as possible because I got tired of taking PhD coders’ code and making it actually work because they don’t understand swap space or scheduling. (I’ve worked with brilliant algorithms at times, but had to correct critical misunderstandings of the computer at times.) I haven’t touched the libraries in years, but a lot of time and research went into it, and there was a full test suite and documentation. I don’t think the idea is fully without merit yet as the multiprocessing in Python is better but still has oddities, and I don’t think there’s an RAM aware abstraction in the base language yet? I forget what state I left things in. I know the CI I was using doesn’t exist (for free users) anymore though.
When Google Reader was alive, I wanted to improve its UI, so I wrote a userscript which completely replaced everything in the browser but still spoke to the Reader’s backend for data. When Reader was turned off, I only had to provide my own backend.
Not QUITE a program, but I’d have to say my own little GBA ROM hacks for the original Fire Emblem. On account of the following story…
IIRC, it was 2007, and I was a senior in high school, reorganizing some of the stuff for the robotics team, in the cabinets in the big science classroom where we met. There were some freshmen interested in the team (season wouldn’t start for a while yet) who’d taken to hanging out there, after school.
They all had laptops and I recognized the menu theme when one of them pulled up Fire Emblem in an emulator, from across the room, and immediately called out “Who’s playing Fire Emblem?”. When I went over and saw he was using Virtual Boy Advance, it occurred to me what I had in my pocket. Or rather what happened to be ON the flash drive in my pocket.
At the time, I didn’t have my own laptop, so my flash drive had years worth of random crap on it. And over the years, I spent a LOT of time tinkering with ROMs and VBA over the years. In addition to a few copies of different hacked ROMs and save files, I had a portable hex editor, and a LOT of text files with hex tables and memory maps and other research I’d collected over the years.
So, yeah, I pulled out the flash drive, said “Wanna see something cool?” and proceeded to apply many crazy hacks as I could think of, in the most obtuse manner possible, just editing hex values directly in memory as the game was running. Free XP, free items, end game equipment, sprite swaps, etc. At one point, one of them says something like “What kind of wizard ARE you?!”
It’s what comes to mind for me when you say “cool” because I like to think I inspired those kids to get into software and programming themselves, or at least consider it as an option. They certainly stuck around with the team for the rest of the year. Also, it inspired ME to really realize how much I’d grown just by tinkering and being curious, and how much you can accomplish through incremental effort.
https://github.com/KiranWells/corgi
Like a lot of graphics programmers, I fell into the rabbit hole of rendering fractals. However, I never stopped - over the past couple of years I have slowly been building one of the most sophisticated Mandelbrot/Julia rendering programs that I am aware of. It has a mostly intuitive user interface, and does all of the calculations on the GPU. It has to use a bunch of mathematical tricks to get around the limits of single-point precision available in shaders. Because of the GPU rendering algorithm, I’ve managed to view fractal locations at around 10^250 times magnification with near real-time performance.
I also built a really in-depth compositing/coloring system, allowing you to make some really crazy images and get a lot of variation even for the same location:
Although it has only been me working on it, I think it is in a pretty mature state so far, and I would gladly take PRs/issues if anyone happens to be interested. It should support any OS if you compile it from source, but I don’t have binary releases set up yet.
I worked on and created a lot of things, but when thinking ‘cool’, the fractal rendering I did a long time ago popped into my mind as well. It just looks cool, interesting, has variance and experimentation, and is very visual.
Probably the Hello World I wrote for the Pocket Sprite along with the programming tutorial for it. To my awareness, I was the only person who made a tutorial for it and it got decent amounts of use on the Discord. It’s too bad you can’t get them anymore.
It’s half-working but:
A library for making a Discord bot in C with the only dependencies being OpenSSL and cJSON. That means I also wrote code for handling the HTTP requests and also WebSockets.
Idk I haven’t written many but recently I made an integration for my sister’s startup that automated enrolling prospects from companies in an email campaign by sourcing different prospects name fields and LinkedIn accounts and finding their emails. It was good fun, and the user would get a prospecting email with all the details on the company and the role the person worked in at the company along with how long they worked at their company. I was calling it LeadFetch until my sister closed shop and told me my program was her IP. That still pisses me off cause I was gonna merge it to one of the sources we used after she called it quits and left me with no opportunities. She designed none of the back end but had the gall to say it was her app.
Curious but were you paid for it? I’m no lawyer but I can’t imagine that holding up unless she paid you for it. Even then, without an explicit contract, there’s probably a lot of gray area this falls into because you could have just been offering a service that’s utilizing something you made.
I was employed by her for a time for various duties for her startup and she asked me to make this application
Since she “closed shop” is she running around trying to sell the software you made or is it just rotting away because her ego won’t let you try to make something of it?
It has been rotting, I frequently used the APIs to remix into different apps, pulling posts and comments off LinkedIn for her to review and compile strategies based off of popular posts and users. She wanted some of that code so I forwarded my scripts to her to make use of. She isn’t selling my scripts but she then used them for herself. I tried to sell this idea of integrating LinkedIn Leads to one of our partners who is also a budding start up and set up a meeting. Then I told her because I was proud of my work and she bashed my idea and the direction I was taking claiming I stole LeadFetch from her.
Quite the family member you got. At the very least hopefully you’ve gotten your family to shun them or something regardless of their “legal rights”. Drives me nuts seeing “idea people” exploiting the actual effort and talent it takes to implement it.
I made a D&D character creator for 3.5e/Forgotten Realms. Not just PCs but NPCs and encounters based on CR, too.
I recently built a small game engine which takes image files and metadata in TOML format and turns it into a point and click adventure.
Its not perfect, but I had fun making it.
