I've done some pretty fancy stuff with #CSS in the past, but nothing quite on the level of DOOM Scroll: https://codepen.io/cobra_winfrey/pen/oNOMRav
In early 2020, I found myself inspired to try and collect my thoughts in a collection of linked notes. I was mostly inspired by Andy Matuschak and the way his notes website opened linked notes in columns, so you could see where you'd been.
I did attempt to create my own similar thing for a bit, but then I discovered Obsidian. It was pretty new at the time, but seemed to do what I wanted in terms of linking notes together.
However, it didn't have the cool horizontal stacked notes thing that Andy Matuschak's website had. However, based on my experiments with building a similar thing myself, I thought I could modify the internal CSS of Obsidian to present notes in a similar format. And it worked! Not only that, it was pretty popular with others!
Later in the year, the Obsidian team opened up their plugin API (which I helped discuss with the devs) and I migrated my fun CSS tweak into a full-blown JavaScript plugin. Doing so won me the inaugural Best Plugin of the year in 2020.
The functionality has been since incorporated into the core of Obsidian. By using the "stack tabs" option, you get vertically stacked notes that slide over each other, just like I'd envisioned from Andy Matuschak's website.
This was a big project.
It started small enough. A system to print shelf tickets for a group of pharmacies. Of course, that had its own technical challenges. Not least of which was printing from a browser in such a way that it would be consistent with pre-printed and/or pre-perforated paper. We ended up developing an unobtrusive background application for windows that would handle communication with the printer, and a separate web system for creating the print jobs.
This expanded a lot. We built an entire visual editor for printible tickets with multiple dynamic labels and layouts of those labels. We also expanded the management side of the system to handle promotional periods and other forms of marketing. The idea became for marketing departments to create and upload assets and product pricing details, and the stores just had to log on and print what was relevant to them.
With nearly a thousand stores using the system, there was a lot of iteration around the UI/UX of the system, especially about making life easier for the store users. We also started handling support tickets and calls (myself included) in order to better assist the stores. This helped me put an emphesis on the UX design, as I got to know the kinds of people that were using the system (and designing things so I had less support tickets to attend do :P ).
Before I left, I was part of the management of the product as a whole, and was working on a big redesign and re-branding. Partially in an attempt to simplify the entire system, and to reach out to more non-pharmacy retail chains and outlets.
This was a javascript-based online game, built for the Gene Technology Access Centre (GTAC). I was mainly involved in the design phase, as opposed to the development, but what a design phase it was!
The goal of this game was to help teach VCE level students about the human immune system through an interactive game. Of course, this meant that the first step was to learn all about the human immune system. Over a period of many weeks, there were many discussions with the GTAC educators, alongside actual immunology experts, to get a handle on which cells play a role in the immune system and their function.
There was a lot of back and forth, gaining knowledge, assembling it and then confirming it with the experts. In the process, I think even the educators learned new things.
Afterwards, we had to translate the cells and their processes into game mechanics — attacking invading pathogens, recognising pathogens and utilizing the lymphatic nodes to produce appropriate T-Cells, sending out different forms of Dendritic Cells and acrophages... In the end it became an interesting (and hopefully entertaining) real-time strategy game. And I learned a lot about the immune system in the process.
This was one of my favourite projects to work on, despite the frustrations. A cloud-based application for the Victorian Space Science Education Center (VSSEC), which would allow a class of secondary school children log in, be assigned various mission roles and run a simulated Mars Rover mission.
The kicker: students actually ended up controlling a physical rover robot that would drive around VSSEC's on-site Mars simulation area.
It was a technical challenge to run 12+ users concurrently viewing the same set of data, and issuing requests and instructions to each other. Data was partially plotted in advance, and partially randomised. There were also random events like dust storms or electromagnetic interference, which the students would have to cooperate and coordinate to overcome.
Plus the added technical challenge of interfacing with VSSEC's rover, as well as computer vision data to track its physical location on the ground. It would've been so much easier to simulate that data along with the rest, but you can't beat the coolness factor of driving a real robot and seeing the live feed from its camera.
Also, once development was almost complete, we recieved graphic designs from a design agency, which required a lot of re-working to the front-end to make it fit the final design. It ended up looking great, though.