Bună ziua! 👋
My name is Culi (kuh-lee). I use they/them or he/him pronouns. I play with code a lot (currently mainly JS, TS, Ruby, and Python), but if you're here for that you probably meant to check out my portfolio site! Although I really enjoy coding, code tends to mainly act as the glue that allows me to tie together my varied interests including, but not limited to:
- botany
- citizen science
- editing Wikipedia (another hobby that tends to be a "glue")
- building community
- cooking
- oh shit this has a scroll wheel
- linguistics
- soil ecology
- generative programming
- conlanging, especially auxlangs (but not Esperanto lol)
- keeping up with Annual Reviews in order to occasionally reference an article or major development within a field and make people think I know more than I do
- maths; particularly social choice, game theory, and cellular automata
- slowness
- starting projects
- sharing projects & collabing
- making long syllabi and learning plans to learn about topics I never got a chance to study (but not actually following those plans)
- antilibraries
- participating in niche online communities/forums
- the indie web
- reading just enough of a book to quote the one part of the book that stuck out to me (again, making me seem a lot more well-read than I am)
- composting
- gardening
- traditions
- web standards and the a11y space
- open-source
- sourdough starters (and sometimes making bread with them)
- appropriate technologies
- data visualization
- traditional architecure techniques
- bikes
- electoral politics and modelling
- dumpster diving
- sharing
- libraries of things
What's there to do here?
I do this thing where I make some main repo for my million of quick project ideas. Usually it serves as a nest for projects and if I'm really into it I'll spin it up into a separate project. A good example is my project VoteVote which is a little toy I'm working on to allow you to compare dozens of different voting systems in one go using color as a metaphor. Voters and candidates are both represented by color and how much a voter prefers a candidate is determined by their RGB distance to that candidate. It actually started here and then I learned D3 to make this which soon turned into an exploration of a few more. Then it finally got it's own domain at votevote.page!
The first attempt to collect my miniprojects happened at /toys and was made with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. Then I decided to try a create-react-app for my second attempt at it. I made some architectural mistakes I eventually got fed up with enough to make a third attempt at dontplay.netlify.app. Still a create-react-app and I haven't even finished setting it up. But since then I've tried out Svelte, Elm, Next.js, Preact, and a few other alternatives to the one big SPA approach CRA lends itself for. So I'm researching micro-frontends to see if I can still do it all in one for my next big iteration of this.
Other places you may find remnants of my projects are CodePen (a few experiments), Are.na (not yet), ReplIt (a few slightly larger experiments), FreeCodeCamp (I actually never really learned much here but I like the community), Dribble (not yet), OpenProcessing (not much there yet)
Functioning projects
Here's some stuff you can actually play with.
Things I somewhat actively maintain
Projects with other people
Unfinished projects
Steal these ideas! Or collab with me!
- Here's some graphs showing how each US State's Partisan Lean Index has changed over the years since 1968. The PLI is a measure of how a state votes relative to the nation as a whole. My plan was to add timestamps of when major voting access related laws were passed in different states and see if that tended to affect the partisan leans over time.
- One thing that's really captivated me recently is ASCII-based charting libraries like ervy and asciichart. Besides enabling console-based data visualization, they just look really cool. I've been cataloguing all the different libraries I've come across in a big yaml file with the languages they' for and which visualizations they support. My plan is to make an accessible dataviz catalog in the vein of DVP by ferdio. I even managed to snag the dataviz.gallery domain! (HMU if you want to help with this).
- I had big plans for this highly-specific portfolios project aiming to aggregate and highlight the portfolio websites of other developers. Kinda started with me trying to collect inspo, but I got really excited about implementing this tag-based voting system that I never actually implemented. I originally started on this because I was looking for inspo for my own personal portfolio site. But since then I've also began collecting niche programming language websites, political campaign websites, one-off conference/events websites, and small business websites. So part of me is wondering about a more generalized system for crowdsourcing these types of collections.
- This one didn't even get passed the "market research" phase to see what similar projects already exist out there, but it was a very interesting investigation so I wanna share anyways. I've always wanted to build a learning resource aggregator mean to be extensible for learning pretty much anything. This is a natural evolution from my hobby of creating syllabi for myself to some day follow and study a particular subject. However, as usual, I discovered I'm far from the first to have this idea.
- This one's more straightforward. I was trying to play with some new styles I hadn't tried much of before and I ended up using a compost guide as my excuse to do so. Has some cute easter eggs which I spent a good amount of time on and is probably the reason I didn't finish, haha. I'll probably submit it to whimsical.club if I do finish it.
- My attempt at organizing my million bookmarks and playing with some cool generalized UI is readlater. The short-term goal was to implement a tag-based system for all of my bookmarks. I have widespanning interests but like to stay focused on specific topics at certain points in my life. I'd like to use this to group together similar articles/books/podcasts/documentaries so I can watch them together and make it feel more like a "deep dive" than me bouncing from interest to interest. Long-term goal is to open it up to anyone so that you can also prioritize what you're reading based on your friends or community's interests
- I made this cute seasonal fruit chart. Don't have big plans or anything. Just wanna expand the functionality to let people add more fruit and export as a png or something.
- I'm making an open source game clone of Sean O' Conner's Slay. Mostly because I think it's what I need to finally stop playing this silly game but also as an excuse to learn Elm and playing with hex grids.
- There's this fun party game me and some friends played a lot called Loaded Questions. You get a question, everyone anonymously answers and then you go around trying to guess who wrote which answer. Simple idea but loads of fun. I wanted to make an open-sourced online version of this during the pandemic. I called it "Only You'd and made a non-functioning website for it, but then I got a job haha. I still have a collection of 248 questions that I hand typed (most of which are totally original) which you can still access here.
Other corners of the internet I crawl
Other places I maintain an internet presence but won't link here include BookWyrm, Mastodon, Wikipedia, iNaturalist, and various forums (e.g. votingtheory.org and talkelections.org).
Accounts I'm ashamed to hold include LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter. I also like coding challenge sites like CodeWars, Exercism.org, and even LeetCode.