Alex Dytrych

An open-source game that teaches children aged 8+ to code. Players have to solve puzzles and rescue kitten GIFs by hacking into the source code of the game.

I started this project in my bedroom. By the time, I left the startup that we had set up to develop it, it had introduced over 100,000 children to code.

A short talk on how we used of GraphQL at Music Glue.

I looked at how we had made error-handling an explicit part of our data schema for extra resilience if a back-end service went down.

A prototype exploring a way to visualize and explain computational thinking as transformations of streams of data. I decided not to take this prototype any further, but plan to integrate some of the ideas into a future project. Check out the code: https://github.com/somehats/programarble.

Using Redux—with its focus on immutability—with a physics engine that relied on mutating objects (Matter.js) was an interesting challenge. In the end, I kept all the important data in Redux, synchronizing it with the physics engine when the store updated.

Oulipo is a programming language and IDE that I hacked together while working on my startup, Drum Roll. The aim was to let my non-technical collaborators write interactive branching dialogue trees for our game without me having to manually translate them into JavaScript.

Although it was implemented hastily, Oulipo did its job well. The screenplay-inspired syntax was easy for my collaborators to use, and they wrote some great dialogue for our game.