Matei Copot

I wrote a book and lectured about getting started with industry JavaScript practices from scratch. This was in collaboration with Packt Publishing and three other engineers.

We covered topics ranging from functional programming to garbage collection to code formatting.

I liked the community so much that I decided to make it my own. So I moved in for six months.

My daily life consisted of waking up in the morning to clean up various circuits and making the space more enjoyable to visitors, hanging out with humans from every tech field available, and setting up events with topics ranging from (early) cryptocurrencies to 3D printing to machine learning.

While doing this, I was holding part-time positions elsewhere.

Throughout the years, I built a portfolio of over 400 open-source demos, ranging from minigames (https://codepen.io/towc/details/gwgyZr) to embeddable visualizations (https://codepen.io/towc/details/zBLRbR) to simply pretty animations (https://codepen.io/towc/details/mJzOWJ).

These were made purely for fun, and the majority involves no third-party code, leaving me to enjoy creating 3D rendering engines, messing with raw WebGL, and learning new techniques.

These are so popular, there used to be successful businesses built entirely on reselling them before I tracked them down and asked them to be more transparent.

I rarely ever change the code, so these also serve as a log of my programming style/skills over time.

In my spare time, I was helping a friend hook up local shops and residents with food waste (and there is a lot) to local homeless/dog shelters and other green residents.

My friend wanted to do an app that would connect wasters to consumers, along with the crucial transport. I decided to have some fun with it and make a node/bookshelf back end with a full testing environment with as few external dependencies as reasonable and as painless a development experience as possible.

I took my time with different approaches and came up with an accumulator/contract-based declarative back-end architecture. I extracted some of those parts into a library I haven't had the time to refine (Github.com/towc/conac, see Example.js), but I keep using these patterns whenever I'm not locked into another framework.

Eventually, I had to abandon this project to make more time for work.

For three years, I competed in js13kGames which gives you a month to build a JavaScript game in under 13KB, external dependencies included.

In recent years, I've fared very well, doing everything in under 48 hours.

• 2017—12th Mobile, 26th Desktop
https://js13kgames.com/entries/loud-maze

• 2016—13th Mobile, 36th Desktop
https://js13kgames.com/entries/glitch-maze

• 2015—2nd Twitter, 2nd Google+, 5th Facebook, 16th Community, 18th Mobile, 44th Desktop
https://js13kgames.com/entries/flappy-box

• 2014 - 26th Mobile, 84th Desktop
https://js13kgames.com/entries/elements-out

After 2018, I no longer submitted my own entries, but helped others with theirs.