Fleet Command
How a drawer full of mismatched PCs learned to behave like one AI service, and what broke on the way.
Engineering notes · start here
Things I built to find out how they work
Some of these started as "how hard can it be?" and turned into months. Each write-up is the honest version: what I built, how it is put together, what went wrong, and what I would tell myself at the start. Pick one, or go and play something first. I won't tell.
6write-ups
7things to play
68projects shown
4,226,065lines of code, measured
The write-ups
Long reads with diagrams and a dashboard each. Every number comes from the project's own records, not from memory.
CodeAtlas
A tool that reads every project I have and tells me what is actually true about them, including the parts I would rather not hear.
NBLidar
A province's airborne laser survey, turned into a block world you can walk around in a browser.
Voxel Racers
Moving a Python kart racer into the browser without letting a single tick drift, and proving it.
VoxelBlox
The voxel engine underneath the racers, with the trailer and the film.
VoxelStrike
A game engine written from scratch in Python, and the vehicles it grew.
Play and explore
Things that run in your browser right now. No install, no sign-up.
Voxel Racers
Kart racing in the browser. Bring a keyboard, a pad or a thumb.
VoxelBlox
NBLidar map
Orbit, fly or walk through a province built from laser survey data.
NBLidar
Ports of Call
A trading voyage across old sea lanes. Buy low, sail far, try not to sink.
Ports of Call (Ship Voyage)
Ironvale
A small strategy game whose rules were written by hand.
Ironvale
Quest of the Number Dragon
Arithmetic, dressed up as a dragon hunt.
Quest of the Number Dragon
Voxel Racers trailer
The short version, with engine noise.
VoxelBlox
The VoxelBlox film
Seven minutes of the engine showing off.
VoxelBlox
The portfolio
Everything else, in one place
68 projects I've built on my own time, with what each one does, how it is made and where it lives. The deep dives open with the hard problem each project solved.
Open the portfolio4,226,065lines of code, measured
1,811tests
16deep dives
How the pieces fit
They were not planned as a set, but they ended up leaning on each other.
The fleet does the heavy liftingSpare PCs share the jobs too big for one desk: NBLidar's map is built one tile per fleet job, and every Voxel Racers course is built and checked on the fleet before it ships.
The engine underneathVoxelBlox is the voxel engine; Voxel Racers is the game built on it, and the browser version is that game, proven tick by tick.
The auditor keeps everyone honestCodeAtlas reads all of it and reports what is true: how big things really are, what is tested, what is out of date. Most figures in these pages come from it.
The common threadMeasure first, write down what went wrong, and do not trust a check you have never seen fail.