Most of my time recently has been spent upskilling in deep learning/machine learning and maths!

Previous projects

Book Project - Present

The main open-source I worked on was a book tracker system called Book Project (catchier name needed).

What is it?

It was a web app that lets you record books that you want to read, are currently reading, have read or did not finish.

If you're familiar with Goodreads, this might sound familiar. The Book Project goes further than Goodreads; it was created as a result of wanting to make a better web app than Goodreads.

It’s been done before, and Goodreads does a fair job at it. Why reinvent the wheel?

I've written an answer to this in the FAQ page.

You said 'we' and 'our' – are there others working on this?

Yes! To date, 100+ other people have contributed to the project (excluding the few who are not showing up as contributors and our UI/UX team).

I don't know any of those contributors outside of GitHub, so it's great that it's had so many contributors so far.

What’s the stack?

The backend (which I led) was written in Java using Spring Boot the frontend in React TypeScript. We used PostgreSQL for the database with Flyway to bring it under version control and handle migrations (we used a small H2 in-memory database for testing). We dockerised the backend, frontend and database to make it easy to launch for contributors on their own machines.

COVID-19 Dashboard

Alongside the Book Project, I’m also developed a COVID-19 dashboard. This showed at-a-glance global information on the number of deaths, confirmed cases, total recovered and much more. You can also look at how the number of cases and deaths for a particular country has changed over time, and compare one country’s deaths or confirmed cases with others with area charts.

This is made using Spring Boot and Vaadin 14. I didn't use much of Spring in this project, it was mostly Vaadin. Vaadin is an incredible framework, and the charts API works well.

If you’re interested, you can read my COVID-19 dashboard article that I wrote about it.

The code is a bit of a mess right now, but I've parked it for now.

Others

I’ve worked on lots of other small projects, too, but the ones here are my main ones. For more information, see my GitHub profile.

Non-programming projects

I designed my own Harry Potter monopoly game (based on the book canon) because our family loves monopoly and I love the Harry Potter books, so I wanted to combine the two (and there wasn’t already a Harry Potter monopoly on the market). I had a lot of fun making it!

If you’re interested, you can read the Harry Potter monopoly blog post I wrote.