I gravitated towards open source instead of internships for getting experience outside of college, as I found it personally fulfilling. Here, I will give a summary of past and current projects.
This project was my choice for my first big open source project, and aimed at bringing a collection of niche client-side Quality of Life features to minecraft, particularly minded towards player of the popular MMO "Hypixel Skyblock". This project was my early teacher for technologies such as Gradle, Mixin, and an introduction to internal game loop systems. As a former active player of the game, my unique insight towards the wants and needs of the player base were instrumental to the success of the project, and the collection of features chosen garnered the project > 200,000 downloads on GitHub. The project is now considered EOL (End of Life), as it is a conflict of interest with my current job.
When Hypixel indicated they were interested in porting much of their backend to support exclusively modern versions of the game (mostly to take advantage of new blocks/entities etc), my friend Nea and I expressed a mutual interest to get ahead of the game and do early rewrites of the extensive modding scene for the much newer versions of Minecraft. This was not a small task. While the game plays pretty similar across it's many versions, Minecraft has gone through massive changes under the hood over the years - including an entirely different game engine and many design philosophy differences. Over the course of the summer of 2023, we worked in parallel on our separate projects (see Firmament! Nea is an extremely talented developer, and their project is still active today). While we both got a lot done that summer, my part in the effort was cut short in August for similar reasons to the 1.8 counterpart, and is considered EOL - now only receiving updates to fix critical bugs or keep it up to date with the latest releases of Minecraft.
This project allowed me a unique chance to refine my previous implementations of features with scale in mind, and was instrumental to committing the lessons of the previous project to memory. While it definitely wasn't the perfect implementation for a lot of features, it was a step up in code quality, in my opinion, to it's predecessor.
There's not a ton to say about this project yet, as it's pretty early stages. However, this is intended to be a Java 21 compiler plugin to essentially bring Kotlin's optional chaining inside of Java. While developing previous open source projects in Kotlin primarily, there are some advantages towards staying inside Java for your projects. It is still far more popular, and libraries like Mixin don't work in Kotlin anyway, so there's some interfacing that will need to be done anyway. However, the boiler plate that I find the most obnoxious in Java tends to be in regards to null safety and lots of guardian clauses. This will attempt to alleviate that!
Not too much to say here, as a website built on such a framework is really nothing to write home about. However, I believe it's important for me to regularly brush up on this sort of material, So I will be maintaining this website and it's design periodically, just to maintain some familiarity with the tools of web development.
Business inquiries: inglettronald@gmail.com