Hey! I'm an enthusiastic programmer, who spends most of his free time integrating Rust crates together to build really cool things! I work casually at a local programming company MFDC and contract for Salt, as well as on many side projects that have collectively taught me most of what I know today about programming.

During high school (grade 10) I built a small chrome extension to change the colours of SchoolBox, an LMS our school used. It quickly grew in popularity, now it has over a hundred users spread across various schools in Ausrtalia and New Zealand. Such a simple solution, but I designed it to be transparent and automatic, so once you've installed it, it will silently sync between devices and just keep working. I wanted to mention this because it was the first time a project I had built directly impacted the lives of people I had never met before, and because it used a very-hacky method of integrating Flutter with the JS chrome extension API that I still get Github issue emails from to this day ;)

Around the same time, me and a couple other friends entered a competition called the Mathematics and Statistics Research Competition (MSRC). We won the Queensland Prize, and are now published, but my favourite part is the app I built which can be viewed in website form here: https://caleb-msrc-q11.netlify.app/. It is 100% Rust, uses a 3D game engine library called Bevy, and was an invaluable tool that has not been made before (to my knowledge). I needed to know the maths behind what I was building, but the success of that paper taught me the potential benefits of combining that domain-specific knowledge with good programming skills, which is more than just the best of both worlds.

And finally, this is a rather grandious idea of mine that I've started to build a few times now but have kept hitting walls in my programming understanding and time.

• The first motivating aspect is a notetaking app cloning MS OneNote, with the ability to own your own data. This means ideally you could self-host on a VPS for personal notetaking without needing to sign in to an organisation, or pay Microsoft for the rest of your life. Critically, I want to use my Apple Pen for drawing and double tap functionality, which isn't easy with winit.
• Beyond that, I wanted to build my own VCS (Version Control System) to replace git and github. The primary improvements are a requirement for cryptographic signing, and I believe in the decentralized web that Ethereum's implementation of cryptography is the best alternative to gpg. This means developers are primarily identified by their Ethereum wallet address. I'll call this hypothetical VCS yit for now
• But even remaking git can't solve hard branch merges, so I propose a new language called The. The key characteristics of The are:
  • It is a compiled language which deeply understands the computer it is targetting
  • All aspects of the languages assumptions are documented programmatically, and can be conveniently looked up by programmers
  • Programming in The stores only IR. There is no stable textual storage format. Therefore, a new text IDE editor must be built that deeply supports The, and users must customize their programming experience to make assumptions that they understand fluently
  • VCS is applied within the language, so that dichotamous branches turn into The-understood conditionals. Like having a runtime feature-flag for every branch, except at compile time. In Rust parlance, the closes equivalent to this would be an automatic cargo feature enabled for the current branch, which you could #[cfg] code based on.