Matt's Holiday Hackathons

Work can take up a lot of our time, but it is vital we make time to learn and do the things we are passionate about. For me, this means doing fun little hackathons on my holidays and weekends to either refresh existing skills or to learn new skills.

These projects aren't meant to be perfection. They are done fast and often forgo the shortcuts of professional libraries to add extra challenge or fortify my knowledge. First and foremost, these projects are a fun way to keep my mind engaged.

In more recent times, particularly as I split my time between programming and digital artwork, I have been doing smaller challenges and hackathons on specialised social platforms. They are a great way to get feedback and inspiration, so be sure to check out the profiles I have linked below.

Codepen IconCODEPEN Artstation IconARTSTATION
 

Midjourney Manifold Explorer

A tool to generate random (gibberish) prompts for Midjourney, allowing rapid ideation and exploration of how Midjourney works. Supports symbols from multiple languages, and weighted guideance to push prompts in a certain direction.

Explorable in most modern browsers. Tested in December 2022 versions of Chrome, Edge and Safari.

 

Darwinian Denoiser

A quick / fun experiment using basic evolutionary programming to generate a target image from noise. Just some fun exploring a segmented approach to evolutionary programming.

Explorable in most modern browsers. Tested in August 2022 versions of Chrome, Edge and Safari. Doesn't work in August 2022 version of Firefox (slow and stalls).

 

IsoColony Prototype

A proof-of-concept isometric game engine built using HTML5. Built to explore the key concepts needed to build a full game in this style.

Explorable in most desktop browsers. Tested in May 2021 versions of Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Requires a mouse and otherwise not optimised for mobile.

 

RayJS

A fun little implementation of old-school ray casting (think Wolfenstein 3D) using HTML5 and Javascript. Includes a ray visualiser.

Explorable in most desktop browsers. Tested in May 2021 versions of Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Requires a keyboard and otherwise not optimised for mobile.

 

CEDANNdriver

An evolution based machine learning script that learns to navigate an arcade style race track using RGB senors.

Explorable in most desktop browsers. Tested in May 2021 versions of Chrome, Edge and Firefox. Not optimised for mobile.

Will learn to drive from scratch each time you visit, so make a cup of coffee :)

 

Crawler

A simple random map generator and path finding implementation in HTML5 and Javascript.

Explorable in most desktop browsers. Tested in May 2021 versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on iOS.

 

IMGlotto

A fun little script that generates grids of lottery-style numbers from an image by comparing the colour properties of different areas.

Explorable in most desktop browsers. Tested in May 2021 versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on iOS.

 

SPC Model

Build your own programs using the basic but fun instruction set of this stored-program computer model/emulator built in Javascript :)

Explorable in most desktop browsers. Tested in May 2021 versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox. Requires a keyboard and otherwise not optimised for mobile.

 

XNA MD2

An MD2 (Quake Format) model loader for one of the earliest version of Microsoft XNA. Has been ported to newer versions of XNA by many people over the years and was even published in a book or two :)

Just the original code, preserved for posterity and spec-reference only.

Some kind person recorded a video of the demo I created and uploaded it to YouTube... 14 years ago. Check it out if you want to make me feel old :)