Hollow Souls — a solo development studio

An Unreal Engine asset package for building a lighting system out of the thing that actually controls it: the switch on the wall. Switch plates carry up to four switches, each one operates independently, and each can be wired to as many light actors as a room needs — across different light and component types, the way a real fixture rarely matches its neighbour.

Lights are made by subclassing one parent Blueprint, which tags them automatically; anything a light should do when it changes state hangs off a single event. That is the whole integration. The interaction side ships as an example first-person character with a post-process outline, so aiming at a switch highlights it before you press anything.

Version 2.0, for Unreal Engine 5.8, makes it multiplayer. The server owns every light's state and replicates it to every client, late joiners included; a client's input goes through a reliable server RPC, and switch levers animate locally from the replicated state, so every machine lands on the same picture. Lights sit dormant until they change, so an idle room costs no bandwidth. It runs under a listen server, a dedicated server or standalone, and it is still Blueprint only.

Engine versions before 5.8 receive version 1.0, which is single-player only. Originally sold on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, and now on Fab following its closure.

An editor plugin that gives Unreal Engine 5.7 and 5.8 a prefab workflow. Select actors, make a prefab, place it as many times as the level needs, then change one instance or all of them. Prefabs nest inside prefabs, with cycles detected and refused, and edit in place: Edit, Commit and Discard, where a commit updates every loaded instance in one undoable transaction.

Any property on a single instance can be overridden, and the Details panel puts Revert to Prefab and Apply to Prefab on the overridden rows — applying to the prefab itself, to a variant parent or to a nested prefab. A variant is a prefab based on another that stores only its differences, and variants of variants are allowed. Pack turns identical static meshes into ISM or HISM components and estimates the draw calls before it changes anything: a thousand identical cubes go from a thousand draw calls to one, and Unpack puts every node back.

Built for World Partition rather than despite it. An instance is one actor, so one instance is one external actor file; instances in unloaded cells are found through actor descriptors without loading them, and a commandlet re-syncs them in bulk with dry-run, verify and check-out modes for CI. A Python API covers the same ground, and the plugin ships its own regression suite and a packaged-build smoke test.

Nothing here locks a project in. Bake exports an instance to plain actors, a Level Instance or a Packed Level Actor, and baking is permanently free. Workflow inspired by Unity prefabs and prefab variants; not affiliated with or endorsed by Unity Technologies.

A ground-up rewrite of ShareX for macOS, built entirely in Swift on ScreenCaptureKit, SwiftUI and AppKit. Not a wrapper: it keeps the parts of ShareX's workflow that make it worth using and adopts the platform's own APIs and conventions instead of emulating a Windows app.

It captures fullscreen, window, monitor, region or a scrolling page; records to H.264, HEVC, WebM, GIF, animated WebP or APNG; annotates, blurs and pixelates; runs 51 image adjustments with importable presets and a beautifier; and uploads through a custom engine that speaks multipart, JSON and XML, with OAuth2, S3, Backblaze B2 and Azure behind it. History is a searchable SQLite database that opens a Windows ShareX history unchanged, and a Windows ShareX backup imports in one step — custom uploaders, hotkeys and history together.

Split into eleven modules in one Swift package — capture, upload, editor, effects, history, tools and updates each standing alone — with a native messaging host for browsers and a Share Extension so it appears in the system share sheet. GPL-3.0, signed and notarised, installable from Homebrew, and it keeps itself current: updates are checked against the release's published SHA-256 and Developer ID team before the app is replaced in place. The interface ships in seven languages.

Files ported from the original C# codebase keep the ShareX Team copyright alongside their own. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the ShareX team.

Japan publishes its immigration figures faithfully and in a form almost nobody can read: government spreadsheets, hundreds of thousands of rows, no way to ask them a question. This turns them into something you can actually look at — two datasets, thirteen charts, one address.

The first dataset is application processing across the Regional Immigration Bureaus: volume, completion rates, and how long an office is actually taking. The second is the resident population — roughly 202 nationalities across 43 residence statuses, in half-yearly snapshots back to December 2012. Both filter by office, category and period, and every filter is in the URL, so a view you have set up is a link you can send someone.

The hard part is upstream of the charts. Official exports arrive with regional totals that already contain their own branch offices, a residence-status hierarchy with the parent relationships wrong or missing, and rollup rows that double-count anything that sums them. A build-time transform deaggregates the branches, repairs the hierarchy, and drops the rollups and the zero rows, taking the resident table from roughly 191,000 rows to about 42,000 — then re-adds what it kept against the official totals and fails the build on any mismatch, so a chart can never look fine and be quietly wrong. A scheduled job probes the e-Stat API daily and only pulls and redeploys when the published survey date actually moves.

It runs in twelve languages, exports what it draws as CSV, and ships a plain data table alongside the charts so the content does not depend on being able to see an SVG.

The Cloud Resume Challenge sets objectives rather than steps — it tells you what the thing must do and leaves the architecture entirely to you. Taken seriously, that is the point: there is no tutorial to follow and no correct answer to check against, so every decision is one you have to be able to defend.

What came out of it is a single-page app with an API behind it, standing on twenty AWS services and fully serverless, with no idle compute — identity and keys, DNS, CDN and WAF at the edge, API Gateway and Lambda, S3 and DynamoDB, events and queues and mail, and tracing and audit underneath all of it. None of it is clicked together in a console. The whole estate is declared in Terraform, which means it can be read, reviewed and rebuilt, and the architecture diagram is generated by a script in the same repository rather than drawn, so it is kept in step with the Terraform.

The CV is compiled to PDF from the same JSON the site renders, so the two can never disagree; a Lambda caches it in S3 by a digest of its content and only renders a new one when that content changes. The download goes through a signed CloudFront URL minted per click, so a download is an event that can be counted rather than a file that vanishes, and the address on the CV is a forwarding alias that SES rotates monthly, so every message shows how old the sender's copy is.

GitHub Actions gates every pull request on unit tests, type checking, format validation, an end-to-end run, a Terraform plan and Lambda linting; merging applies the reviewed plan, deploys, and smoke-tests what landed — without repeating work the pull request already proved.