My Portfolio

nick's brew

This project is the very website you’re looking at right now! I developed this website in 2024 using Astro, a static site generator (SSG) that allows me to write my website in a mix of HTML, CSS/SCSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript without having to complexify the workflow.

Working on frontend development is typically not my strong suit, but I wanted to challenge myself to develop a website from scratch. I just never enjoyed frontend technologies because it’s less about solving problems and more about making things look pretty.

However, I wanted to have a blog, so I needed to start somewhere. Astro is a great tool for me to start with because it allows me to write my website in a way that I’m comfortable with.

This website source code is available on GitHub.

hackhouse2024

Check out my blog post that features this project!

hackhouse2024 was a project that I worked on with a few classmates in 2024. The project was developed to educate the public on the dangers of typosquatting.

I was the project lead, and I was responsible for the overall direction of the project. I contributed a significant portion of the codebase, and I was responsible for the deployment of the live demonstration. The repository for the live demonstration and supplemental information can be found on GitHub.

All of us worked together to develop the ideas, design, and implementation of the project over the course of a few weeks. The project ended up being a success, and we were able to educate a lot of people on the dangers of typosquatting. We presented the project at a local event at our school that was open to students, industry partners, and the public.

infra.reversed.coffee

This domain covers my personal server infrastructure. I host various services on my own hardware. The network is segmented into multiple VLANs, and I use multiple enterprise-grade networking technologies such as MikroTik RouterOS and Juniper Junos OS to manage the network. These are solid technologies that you typically only see in enterprise environments, but I decided to take a shot at them to learn more.

I use Proxmox Virtual Environment as my hypervisor to host various virtual machines (VMs), including a Windows Server VM that acts as an Active Directory domain controller. I use this domain controller to centralize logins and to manage most of the Windows VMs on my network.

This infrastructure is sometimes used for hosting websites, but this website is offloaded to GitHub Pages for for simplicity. This project is an ongoing project that I tinker with in my free time.

clockwork-eclipse-engine

This was a project that I developed in 2023 to qualify my team for the “Software Engineering Team” competition at Business Professionals of America. This project got half of the members on the team into the National Leadership Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

The project was a solid base engine for a video game that could be built upon. The engine was developed in C++ and was designed to be cross-platform. The project is available as an archive on GitHub. Two notable dependencies of the project were SDL2 and oneTBB, which were used for rendering and threading, respectively.

We ended up moving to a different implementation that was built into the browser. This was because the team was more comfortable with web development than C++. Our team placed 10th in the nation, but lessons were learned. If we were to do this project again, we would have started with the web implementation from the start and would have managed our time better.

Starlight

Starlight was a project that I developed in 2022. The project essentially was an alternative launcher for a popular video game called Roblox. The project was developed in C# and was a great learning experience for me.

The main goal of this project was to offer a launcher that was faster and more efficient than the default Roblox launcher. It could handle bootstrapping the game, updating the game, and applying quirks such as FPS unlocking.

This project required me to analyze the Roblox binaries using Ghidra to understand how the engine functioned. This reverse engineering process enabled me to develop a game mod that allowed manipulation of the game’s behavior, including unlocking the FPS.

The project is now defunct and will require significant updates to work with the latest Roblox versions. I lost interest in the project shortly after Roblox made it difficult to modify the game, and I was busy with school and other projects. Nobody else seemed to want to take over maintaining the project, so it was left to be archived. You can view the project archive on GitHub.