In response to Seth Godin’s recent post I thought I’d provide my own list of projects I’ve done with varying degrees of success. All of these are *personal* projects, not the unexciting professional projects that someone else wanted done (those are secret).

1995 – Space Invaders clone as a CS project in grade 12. After killing everything the boss had to be shot multiple times before he died.

1996 – Mario brothers clone. Another student had a side-scroller with way better graphics, but mine was more of a “game”. He just focused on the graphics “engine” and all you could do was move around.

1997 – Joined a extracurricular CS team at uWaterloo that was to control a traffic light. First meeting was the last. No leadership. No result.

1998 to 2002 – University of Waterloo (dead years)

2002 – took the Canadian Securities Course because I was interested. Got a job on a Trading floor as a result.

2004 – Outside of work created FIX parser/engine. I forget why I did it. Or how.

2009 – Wrote a 50k word novel as part of the nanowrimo.org

2013 – Started a Securities Matching Engine. Added a web front end. Then a custody system. Then created securities and a data interface with multiple online weather providers.

2014 – Got a job integrating FIX for a Capital Markets firm and automated their manual ticketing for Options. Compiled a FIX parser/engine using Quickfix. To be added to Massive Rainfall. Drank my first Red Bull.

Peace.