personal-site/src/projects.filler.html

<div>
  <h1 style="margin-bottom: 0px;">Projects</h1>

  <div>
    <h2>Project Warminster: yayacemu, yacemu, yagbemu</h2>
    <p><i>C, C++, and SystemVerilog</i></p>
    <p>
    <a href="https://git.nickorlow.com/nickorlow/yacemu">[ Git Repo: yacemu ]</a>
    <a href="https://git.nickorlow.com/nickorlow/yayacemu">[ Git Repo: yayacemu ]</a>
    </p>
    <p>
    <a href="https://files.nickorlow.com/videos/warminster/yayacemu_tetris.mp4">[ Tetris Demo: yayacemu ]</a>
    <a href="https://files.nickorlow.com/videos/warminster/yayacemu_bowling.mp4">[ Bowling Demo: yayacemu ]</a>
    </p>
    <p>
      Project Warminster is a collection of 3 subprojects: 
      <ul>
          <li><b>yacemu (Yet Another Chip Eight Emulator):</b> A CHIP-8 emulator written in C</li>  
          <li><b>yayacemu (Yet Another Yet Another Chip Eight Emulator):</b> A CHIP-8 hardware implementation in SystemVerilog (that works on real hardware)</li>  
          <li><b>yagbemu (Yet Another Gameboy Emulator):</b> A Gameboy hardware implementation in SystemVerilog (WIP, not public yet)</li>  
      </ul>
      This project taught me a lot of practical hands-on things about Computer Architecture. Designing the hardware driver for the ST7920 LED display was 
      the most challenging part. Debugging hardware adds a lot of complications, you don't get breakpoints or a nice debugger like gdb. Additionally, 
      interference, faulty wires, timing, and debouncing all throw wrenches into the mix. 
    </p>

  </div>

  <div>
    <h2>Nick Web Services (NWS)</h2>
    <p><i>C#, Kubernetes, Rancher, and HAProxy</i></p>
    <a href="https://nws.nickorlow.com">[ Project Website ]</a>
    <p>
      Nick Web Services is a cloud infrastructure provider service that I created and run.
      It allows people to deploy containerized versions of their web apps across our multiple
      points of presence. It provides geo-distributed high availability by default with no extra configuration
      needed from users hosting their webapp with us.
    </p>
    <p>
      Hardware-wise we use old Dell PowerEdge servers running Proxmox. We then have VMs running
      in Proxmox that run Kubernetes clusters. At the peak I had 4 points of presence: Austin, Hill Country,
      Schuylkill, and Philadelphia. The deployments are managed through GitOps with Rancher Fleet. Unfortunately, 
      we only have one point of presence at the moment due to a number of factors, however that should 
      change this fall.
    </p>
    <p>
      NWS maintained 100% uptime for the period from 11/8/2023 to 11/28/2024 (over a year!).
    </p>
    <p>
      The website you're reading this on right now is hosted on NWS!
    </p>
  </div>
  
  <div>
    <h2>Anthracite Web Server</h2>
    <p><i>C++, CMake, and Python</i></p>
    <a href="https://git.nickorlow.com/nickorlow/anthracite">[ Git Repo ]</a>
    <p>
      Anthracite is a web server written for Linux in C++. It currently supports both HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 and TLS.
      It heavily uses a dependency injection design pattern to allow for a high degree of customization. 
      It currently uses an event-loop threading model and uses the epoll() system call to efficiently detect
      events. Previously, it used a connection per thread model. 
    </p>
    <p>
      Anthracite's HTTP request parser is able to parse roughly 27 million requests per second on my laptop, compared 
      to Boost's HTTP parser which parsed roughly 1 million per second. I'd imagine a lot of this is due to missing 
      functionality in Anthracite's HTTP parser, but it's enough to get by! While I haven't run extensive end-to-end 
      tests on the newest version of Anthracite, in the limited tests I've done during development, it's been able to 
      handle ~300k RPS on my laptop, a comparable number to NGINX.
    </p>
    <p>
      The website you're reading this on right now is hosted with Anthracite!
    </p>
  </div>

  <div>
    <h2>RAZZLE</h2>
    <p><i>C, ASM, and CMake</i></p>
    <a href="https://git.nickorlow.com/nickorlow/razzle">[ Git Repo ]</a>
    <p>
        RAZZLE is a monolithic kernel. Currently, it's very limited and I haven't made a lot of progress on it.
        It's currently single-core but supports preemptive timesharing. It has basic I/O interfaces for ps2, 
        serial, and vga. It currently has a very limited in-ram filesystem using a proprietary filesystem. 
        I'm currently working on adding an ATA driver so I can have programs run on RAZZLE without including 
        them at build-time.
    </p>
  </div>

  
  <div>
    <h2>Open Source Contributions</h2>
    <p>
        I've made various (minor) open source contributions. I'd say the only one worth anything was the cgroups2 support in 
        nginx-ingress.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a href="https://github.com/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/pull/9816">[ kubernetes nginx-ingress: cgroups2 configuration support ]</a>
    </p>
    <p>
      <a href="https://github.com/argoproj/argo-cd/pull/13060">[ argo cd: fix styling issue on dashboard ]</a>
    </p>
    <p>
      <a href="https://github.com/endeavouros-team/endeavouros-i3wm-setup/pull/90">[ endeavouros: update default i3 config to work with numpad keys ]</a>
    </p>
    <p>
      <a href="https://github.com/trivago/hamara/pull/15">[ trivago hamara: documentation update ]</a>
    </p>
  </div>

  <div>
    <h2>SQUIRREL</h2>
    <p><i>Rust</i></p>
    <a href="https://git.nickorlow.com/nickorlow/squirrel">[ Git Repo ]</a>
    <p>
      SQUIRREL stands for SQL Query Util-Izing Rust's Reliable and Efficient Logic. It is a SQL database 
      that I am writing in Rust. Currently, it can create tables, insert data into tables, and select all 
      data from a given table. The biggest challenge so far has been writing the parser. My next steps are 
      to add WHERE clauses to SELECT statements, allow column filtering in SELECT statements, and add DELETE
      statements. 
    </p>
  </div>
  
  <div>
    <h2>CavCash</h2>
    <p><i>C#, Kubernetes, SQL Server, and MongoDB</i></p>
    <!--<a href="https://cavcash.com">[ Project Website ]</a>-->
    <p>
      CavCash was a company that I founded which built a debit-based payment system similar to 
      PayPal and Venmo. I assembled a 5 person team and took on a technical role in the company,
      writing most of our backend codebase. Our backend used C#, ASP.NET, Microsoft SQL Server,
      and MongoDB. Our infrastructure changed throughout the lifetime of the company, initially
      it was on Microsoft Azure using Azure App Service. We then pivoted to AWS using Elastic
      Beanstalk. We also ran on Google Cloud Platform using Compute Engine. Finally, we setup our
      own servers in-house and managed our deployments with Kubernetes.
    </p>
    <p>
      We launched in 2021, with the ability to send money between real banks using the ACH network.
      We ended up processing a few hundred dollars in transaction volume before ultimately shutting
      down due to a lack of funding. <!--The website is now back up and everything works as it did in 
      2021, except adding funds from a bank account is not supported.-->
    </p>
  </div>

  <div style="width: 100%; display: flex; justify-content: center; padding: 5px;">
    <a style="margin: 5px" href="https://github.com/nickorlow">[ See more projects on GitHub ]</a>
    <a style="margin: 5px" href="https://git.nickorlow.com/nickorlow">[ See more projects on Forgejo ]</a>
  </div>
</div>