Software_Engineer on Tres Sims

Managing Home Lab DNS and Ad-Blocking with Technitium dns-server

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve use Pi-hole for a long time to manage dns blacklists. It’s an absolutely briliany project, and I highly recommend it. But as my homelab grew, I realized I wanted to have more control over DNS resolution in my home network. I have a handful of domains that I use to point to various services in my lab. Originally, I followed this wonderful article by a dear friend of mine which got me started, but I hated writing DNS records by hand and wanted an all in one solution to manage my DNS black-hole and my local DNS zones. Enter Technitium dns-server .

Writing a custom login form for SPAs with Django

Wed, 29 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the world of modern computing, there are many great out of the box tools for handling authentication and authorization, NextAuth for example. However, to make sure I understood my fundamentals, I wanted to make a login form for my portfolio project LnkShrt

The Goal

As a way to keep up with the changes in modern web infrastructure, earlier this year I decided to put together a link shortening application using the NextJS, Django, and Postgres as my tech stack. It’s been a fun project, and I’ve caught up on the tools that makes building modern web applications fun and expedient, like the awesome new app router in NextJS. But one thing I’ve never actually taken the time to do by hand is make a login page.

Compatibility Plugins for Cutting-Edge Mesh and Volume File Formats with Python

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

During my time developing software for DASH, I occasionally found the need to write my own file interpreters. We used several file formats that were super cutting edge, that our engineering tools and web application packages didn’t have support for yet. In these cases I would need to write custom software to import the files into the software or environment.

3mf and NRRD Readers for Houdini

One of the engineering tools that we used frequently was Houdini, a procedural DCC tool designed for the film and VFX industry. Since it was designed for film and VFX it didn’t always have the built-in capability to import certain volume and 3D printing formats.

"Meh": A Standalone mesh inspector, and 3MF exporter

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As a software engineer at an additive manufacturing company, I’ve had the opportunity to work on some interesting challenges. One that I think was particularly successful was running to ground was the need to have a way to communicate build properties of multiple 3D printer parts that would be manufactured as an assembly in a reusable and simply way.

The slicing software that managed our polyjet printer did not, at the time, have great support for mixing files with multiple properties, or more importantly, support for combining files of different types that were made in different parts of our production process.

John's Wizard Dungeon

Sun, 19 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am a published game developer! Wow, it feels good to be able to say that. In my final semester at UCF, I led a team of four to design, develop, and publish a VR escape game on Steam. We wanted to tell the story of a plucky thief who wanted to steal the Elixir of Life from the Wizard, John, who had locked in his dungeon. Check out our trailer, then I’ll go over more detail on my role in the project.

AR Board Game Demo

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As a part of my senior project at UCF, I craeted a demo using AR to augment the board game Betrayal At House On the Hill . I’ve always enjoyed gaming of both the digital and phyiscal variety, and was excited about the opportunity to bring a digital twist to one of my favorite board games.

As a part of this project, I created digital recreations of several of the room tiles, created an AR tracking on the game parts in Unity 3D, using Vuforia to handle the minutia of the AR, and created a tool to allow me to snap the digital tiles together, to help optimize the AR tracking elements of the project.