129 Hours: The Pabst Mine Disaster
129 Hours is a source-grounded centennial exhibit about the Pabst Mine disaster in Ironwood, Michigan. It follows the collapse, five days underground, and rescue through 1926 newspapers and local memory.
Sheet 01 · Work
The work
Software, research, games, and films I've worked on.
I've worked on full-stack and backend software in Java, C++, and JavaScript, using Spring Boot and Node.js. My personal projects have also included server administration with nginx, PM2, and GitLab CI.
Status legend
- Active
- I'm still working on it.
- Exploratory
- I'm trying an idea without a fixed finish line.
- Archived
- Finished, offline, or kept here as an older project.
Current work
Duel for Middle-earth
I'm building a fan-made web adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: Duel for Middle-earth. The same persisted game supports live two-browser play or asynchronous turns, with the base game and Allies expansion.
Liberty Letters: March to Victory
Liberty Letters is a Revolutionary War–themed letter-recognition game. It has a browser activity and a printable PDF for practicing letters away from the screen.
Learning at home
My wife and I take subjects our family is interested in and make games or projects we can work on together. We write about what we tried with our own family.
Previously built software
These are four applications I built before the current projects. The surviving TTT rules PDF is included; the apps are no longer available.
2018 — 2020
TTT
I built a server/client controller for our homemade live-action version of Trouble in Terrorist Town. It works best in a large place with lots of side rooms, such as a museum.
2017 — 2020
Steam Secret Santa
I built this for exchanging Steam games with friends. It supported custom dates, prices and information, email notifications, and non-overlapping assignments.
2015 — 2017
Swipe: The Game
I made a game where you swipe dots in the correct direction. It had several difficulty levels and worldwide leaderboards.
2011
Easy Algebra
I made this Android app to solve basic algebra through three-variable functions.
I built it because I had to make an app before I was allowed to get a smartphone.
Research papers and recorded talks
I wrote these papers at Northern Michigan University, UW–Madison, and Argonne National Laboratory. The links open the original PDFs.
2021
Foundation Model Features are Strong Baseline for Private Learning (PDF)
We used large pre-trained models to extract features, then trained a differentially private model on those features and compared its accuracy at low ε with earlier benchmarks.
2019
Profiling Resource Bottlenecks in Sentiment Analysis (PDF)
For our CS 740 group project, we profiled cloud resource use while scaling a Twitter sentiment-classification task.
2019
For our CS 760 group project, we made a GAN that tried to turn lizards into dinosaurs and dinosaurs into lizards.
2017
Non-linear Dynamics in the A* Plane (PDF)
For my senior project, I built a client for running simulations on the A* lattice, a plane of hexagons. I also recorded the presentation.
2015
Configurations: The Complexity of Card Games and Chess (PDF)
My final paper for MA 340 used equations to estimate the number of possible chessboard positions.
2015
Implementation of Augmented Teleoperation (PDF)
I worked on controlling robots with augmented reality during the SULI program at Argonne National Laboratory.
Recorded talks
2017
2017
Film archives
2007 — present
Sunset Films
As a hobby, I make movies with friends and family under the Sunset Films name. There are heists, dragons, and plenty in between.
2016 — 2020
Whetstone Productions
We made three science-fiction and fantasy films in the northwoods with friends from Northern Michigan University.
You can also visit the 2017 TrefSoftware page, along with the old Sunset and Whetstone pages.