Hi! This is my scratch space where I organize my thoughts and my work. The site should always be changing, like my techniques and ideas.

What I'm working on:

• [01]
  Splitskies — A web app that lets you split expenses for trips with your friends.

  Developing this has challenged how "easy" I thought it would be to keep track of who owes who money and for what. It quickly became a study of accounting techniques and lots of sketches of how to efficiently model debts.

• [02]
  runningman.network — An active AIM server

  This hosted service speaks OSCAR that vintage AIM clients (v1, v3.1) can connect to and chat on. I see this as a software revival, which opens the doors to expanding the original technology in ways it was not meant to be used.

  You can register for an account and begin chatting shortly after setup. Getting these old clients to work on macOS is a huge challenge, involving installing VirtualBox and using a provided image. I tried to make it as seamless as possible but it's a big ask for some users. Surprisingly Windows 10 will gladly install the old clients and run them as if nothing has changed in 20 years.

  I hope to fill out capability for all of the various features that AIM originally supported like groups and away messages. In the future I hope to implement federation so that users can chat across servers, something that the original service was never intended to do.

  You can read the code on Github.

• [03]
  FiveLetterWordGame — Cloning a popular word game

  I built this for my wife, who is addicted to the original game. It was an exercise in building a web app that felt as natural and easy to use as the original, while adding new features like unlimited games and game statistics.