Portfolio

Welcome to my Portfolio page! Here will you find the ongoing projects I’m currently working on and select samples of content that I’ve produced. Feel free to explore this showcase and ask me questions by emailing portfolio@cdahmedeh.net.

Ottawa Computing Group Social Club

Description

I've been hosting Hack and Talk Social that I’ve founded over 6 years ago, every single week on Friday night. What started as a write-in for computer hackers, has become a wild social club for bringing people from all sorts of backgrounds, not just IT, into passionate discussions. It has brought in some incredibly bright minds and really interesting people. And the best part, it’s in person where we crash a coffee shop, none of that virtual nonsense.

Showcase

Offer a freeform platform for discussing technology, current affairs, emerging technologies and computing projects.
Sharing of projects and provide a collaborative and demonstration environment.
Facilitate conversation and sharing of ideas through suggested subjects select by me and members.
Handle all reservations, invitations, RSVPs, virtual online meetings, selection of venues and other preparations.

PoetWrite

Status

PoetWrite is still in an incredibly early stage of development. The main focus right now is on a library for detecting rhymes and counting syllables. Which will be the very base features.

Description

PoetWrite is an in-progress application to augment and empower writers while writing poetry. At the centre of it all, is an advanced rhetorical and lexical analysis engine. Which will be provided as metadata to the user in the editor. Integrated is also dictionary lookups. To tie it all up, sentiment analysis and meter detection will really complete the PeotWrite experience.

I know artificial intelligence is the new hot trend. But I'm actually trying to make PoetWrite AI-free to provide blistering performance and consistency during the analysis. Even heuristic features will be based on predictable rules. And if needed be, a touch of pre-trained machine and deep learning SDKs.

Showcase and Planned Features

AI-free and completely offline advanced rhetorical analysis and lexical suggestion engine. Written completely from scratch with focus on accuracy and performance.
Assistive writing with full and partial rhymes handling, dictionary suggestions, meter and pattern detection, various grammatical and stylistic devices tools.
IDE-inspired syntax highlighting and inline visuals based on powerful parser generators.
Designed using software engineering principles, this isn't just focused on coding. Includes automated testing, strong architectural designed, intelligent use of external libraries, distribution via installers and auto-updaters with support for major operating systems.
Extensive documentation for the rhetorical and lexical tools, along with their inner-workings.
Designed as a desktop application using battle-tested frameworks. Lightweight and efficient despite being written in Java. No use of bloated web-based frameworks.
UX-first application design where user experiences comes before technical decisions.
Plain-text based file format with support for history and metadata. Interoperable with basic text editors.
No trade-secrets approach with code being available under a GPLv3 license. No pecuniary interests.

Case Studies

Description

Discussions of everyday technologies in various fields including technology, gaming and automotive. It’s a show and tell that’s accessible to everyone.

Showcase

Showcasing everyday technologies that may be unknown even to enthusiasts.
Explaining highly technical concepts in easily digestible ways.
Research-driven content with emphasis on obscure sources. Despite the technical nature of the topics, still written as a narrative story.
Inclusion of various aids such as video demonstrations, diagrams, audio samples and more.
First ever comprehensive discussion of automatic transmission simulations in games on the Internet. Top result in search engines and several thousands readers. Most popular blog post on this website. Popular LLMs have used this article as training data.
BeamNG.drive transmission simulation behaviour demo has over 100,000 views.

How-To and Guides

Description

Various guides mainly focused on computer-related subjects like gaming and operating systems.

Showcase

Detailed step-by-step guides that are easily to follow without hindering power users who understand these topics better.
Thoroughly researched and comprehensive.
Focus on narrative and linear style for engaging read while staying instructional.

TopRoms

Description

The TopRoms Collection is a curated collection of classic console games focusing on high-quality, notable and popular titles. Contrary to other sets, TopRoms does not aim to be an exhaustive package with every game ever released. Instead, games are hand-picked based on their gameplay quality, historical significance and popularity to find both notable releases and obscure gems.

Showcase

Heavily research-driven with proprietary curation process.
Professional documentation on main page with navigable sections. Includes release notes, download links with hashes and set descriptions.
Combination of manual processes augmented with automated scripts for curation.
Conversion of file types for ease of use in modern emulators.
Fan translations for foreign games already patched and ready to use.

Essays and Commentaries

Description

Most tech blogs focused only on technology. Talking about some more human topics adds a bit of humanity to my blog. These were written despite my fear of losing some opportunities.

Showcase

Why I Hate The Weekends has gone viral on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19180339) several years ago leading to very intense and controversial discussions about cultural and socio-economic issues.
Use of more colourful vocabulary to add soul to the discourse and essays.
Unlike the more technical topics, these deals with the more intimate issues of everyday life.

Humour

Description

Sometimes we can become too serious in the world of corporate culture. People love things that make them laugh and it’s even funnier to write, sometimes tasteless, jokes.

Showcase

Combination of sarcasm to accentuate humour to bring pretentious levity.
A variety of themes to demonstrate the different forms of comical discourse.
Showing how to drift a bus using accurate physical modeling from BeamNG.drive

Music Analysis

Description

Music is a big part of my life, and while I’m technically pitch-perfect, I have no background in music theory at all. So there are my poor attempts at trying to decipher some of the odder music I’ve listened to.

Showcase

Lyrics meaning deciphering and story-telling. Reading in between the lines approach.
Basic analysis of music including keys and other metrics and transcription.
Introspection into music videos to highlight meanings beyond the lyrics.

Minor Programming Experiments

Links

MuraleWinCommand — https://github.com/cdahmedeh/MuraleWinCommand
A Small Script written in C# for changing wallpapers for a defunct wallpaper changer software. Helped me learned how to do advanced interop with Windows libraries.
SMLabTestingSimulation — https://github.com/cdahmedeh/SMLabTestingSimulation/tree/master/SMLabTestingSimulation
Simulation of a medical lab based on a very old university assignment. Focus on architecture and maintainability. Learned a lot about how to run simulations. Written in Java.
TP2Joy — https://github.com/cdahmedeh/TP2Joy
A little program that would convert inputs from a ThinkPad TrackPoint pointer stick into joystick commands. Synaptics doesn’t provide any API to read the track readings from the TrackPoint, so a clever way to detect changes was to use the mouse movements as a heuristic instead. Written in Visual Basic because I was a bit lazy.

Description

These are so older experiments with coding that I’ve done near the beginning of my software development career. I can’t call these little gadgets applications, they’re rather little snippets of code that a script kiddie would write.

Whitepapers and Brochures

Description

I’ve had to the task of writing some brochures and white papers which are technically out of my field of expertise. However, some communications do have to go public and they required a completely different tone and appearance.

Showcase

Product brochures for product description for sale and documentation purposes.
Advanced Whitepapers for studies on company goals presentation.
Heavy focus on visual aspects with creative use of layouts for magazine-style material.

Song Lyrics

Description

I always had a soft spot for poetry but I always wondered what it would sound like as sung music. Well, the wonderful people at Suno had created a generative AI that lets you create pretty impressive music with a prompt. Of course, I had to get a go at it, and use my favourite feature, which is writing the lyrics myself and bend it to get the genre I had intended in my mind.

Showcase

Exploring some of my more creative sides, not that I’m that creative.
Some songs need more deciphering than others.

Personal Website

Description

Where all the action started, where the domain was registered in 2013. After several failed attempts, the blog finally picked up page in 2017 where it’s been seasonably alive since. It’s a portal to my world and my passions. Sometimes I’m tempted to go too far, but recruiters and potential employers will look at me like a madman and think ‘this guy is really messed up, next’.

On a more serious note, when I registered the domain, I was trying to create the website from scratch. Of course, pretty much every video back then had a sponsorship for Squarespace. So that’s what I signed up for, and been using it since. If I was a proper web developer using a CMS would be a major sin. But frankly speaking, I just want to be able to focus on my content and not wrestle myself with some web framework that will be outdated within days and be replaced by a new one.

I like to keep my statistics secret, but there’s enough people visiting to keep this project worthwhile. Especially with all the friendly emails I’ve gotten from many of my readers. I see this as a passion project, and I don’t want to litter my page with ads and other nonsense. The whole idea of advertisement doesn’t bode well with me so I’ll have to admit that I use an ad-blocker when browsing the web.

The template has been the same since the website was first hosted on Squarespace. While my house is overly decorate with too many colours, I thought that a more simple look would make the site timeless. Squarespace doesn’t provide that many templates in the first place, and needed quite a bit of CSS tweaking to make it look just slightly more polished.

For those wondering what the story behind my username, and therefore, the site’s name, I wrote about it here.

Showcase

Nicheless blog and content covering swath of topics ranging from technology to pop culture.
Posts frequently go viral on various social platforms including Reddit and Hacker News.
Mastery of SEO and content optimization techniques for high visibility in search engines.
Extensive research driven content and case studies on everyday technologies.