the work
Things I built
Some of these solve a real problem. Some exist because I wanted to know how something worked and reading about it wasn't enough. Stars and languages come straight from GitHub every time the site rebuilds, so nothing here is inflated.
Reads the mood of your social feed. A browser extension captures the posts you scroll past, a fine-tuned xlm-roberta-base scores each one — it handles Bengali-English code-mixed text, which is most of my timeline — and a dashboard turns months of scrolling into positivity-over-time charts, busiest-hour breakdowns and keyword clouds. One account and one JWT across the extension and the web app.
A chess board that watches itself. An overhead camera on a Raspberry Pi 5 tracks a physical game and streams live algebraic notation to a built-in web UI. The trick: it never identifies piece *type*. A 3-class per-square classifier only reports empty/white/black, gated by a cheap motion detector and cross-checked against every legal move — so the software keeps piece identity and vision does the easy half.
A full-stack digital library. Read EPUB and PDF books straight in the browser, join collaborative reading rooms, get AI recommendations, and moderate the whole thing from a Filament admin panel. React 19 on Laravel 13.
A 2D light-and-shadow simulation in C with SDL2. A glowing circle casts 500 rays in every direction; a second circle drifts up and down and blocks the ones that hit it, carving out a moving shadow you can drag around with the mouse. No renderer, no GPU — every pixel is written straight into the window surface, and the circle test compares squared distances so it never calls sqrt.
Working through Karpathy's backprop video by hand — typing every line, re-deriving the math in the margins, and refusing to move on until a cell actually made sense. Learning in public, mess included.
Built purely to understand service architecture: splitting a Laravel monolith apart and making the pieces talk to each other.
The rest of the mess lives on github.com/TheRealNightmare.