Share your cool programs!
The code I wrote that I use most often is music playback in the Jellyfin Roku client.
I use it almost every day and think it’s pretty cool 🤘
I’ve been working on my own game engine for years, and there’s all sorts of cool stuff it can do, but recently I’ve been expanding the scripting to be capable of streaming images to the GPU.
Today I got Doom running inside my engine as a hot-reloadable plugin script:
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-12-13_00-25-14.mp4The engine has real-time bounce lighting using a highly modified voxel cone tracing algorithm I developed (doesn’t require ray tracing hardware), which I’ve been able to get running even on my Steam Deck!
Video: https://wednesdayos.sw0.com/share/2025-03-21 23-50-29.mp4The whole thing is open source here: https://github.com/frustra/strayphotons
Software path-tracing has been on my bucket list, mostly to test a concept: physically based instant radiosity. If an eye-ray goes camera, A, B, C, then the light C->B forms an anisotropic point source. The material at B scatters light from C directly into onscreen geometry. This allows cheating akin to photon mapping, where you assume nearby pixels are also visible to B. Low-frequency lighting should look decent at much less than one sample per pixel.
Total cool 🤩
It’s either printf and stack unwinding in assembly or something to test all possible execution path for very simple multi threaded programms.
Okay, so you know the trope in spy movies where the launch codes or the diamonds or whatever are at the end of a hallway full of lasers, and the protagonist has to do some cool flip moves (if male) or some slinky contortions (if female) to get around the lasers?
I made that as an arcade game with an Arduino. Some red laser pointer diodes, some photosensors, a few lights, bells and whistles, a fog machine, a few big ol buttons, and you’ve got spy laser hallway. It had a separate “break as many lasers as you can” mode as well, played like a combination of DDR and whack-a-mole.
The second coolest thing I ever programmed was probably the GPS MP3 player. A farmer wanted to add an automatic soundtrack to his Halloween hayride, like when the drove through the spooky graveyard it played ghost noises, it would play music for longer stretches on the road. I used a Raspberry Pi with a GPS HAT and wrote up a script in Python that would compare the actual position with a set of coordinates stored in a text file, and if one matched, it would play an associated mp3 file. The effect was kind of lost because the audio was coming from the vehicle itself, but it’s a hay ride, it’s supposed to be kind of lame. The bedsheet ghosts said woo as you drove past, I’m in the special effects industry, dad.
In the 2010s I had a Windows Phone which I thought was amazing. I bought the original Surface Pro too, because at the time I thought it was incredible. A full operating system in a tablet form factor that was incredibly fast and touch screen.
In the IT office I worked in, we had a dartboard. It was great for just stepping away from your desk if a problem had stumped you, throwing a few darts to take a break, and inevitably the answer would come to you. It was our rubber duck.
Trouble was, all of us were terrible at the basic maths involved with darts matches. So I thought, what if we mounted the Surface to the wall, and could just tap where the dart had hit, and get scores instantly.
So I wrote this darts score-keeping app that worked on everything from Windows Phones to tablets, and even an Xbox at one point, thanks to the way Microsoft had implemented their cross-device app deployment.
We used it every day in the office. I think in 10 years it’s sold about 3 copies.
I’m still proud of my rendering of the logistic map. It was mostly just to learn more Rust, but it rendered this beatuiful picture with relatively little code. And mostly by accident, I didn’t know I would get those cool shadows!

Probably not “coolest” as in ‘best code ever’ or most complex code ever - but that got most coverage. So I think it’s pretty cool
I implemented a self made or at least adapted ant based algorithm to solve a mathematical problem. Each ant walks a route which represents a possible solution. The shortest path is the best solution. It takes advantage of swarm intelligence.
Similar to BFS?
A long time ago I wrote a little web app that takes a search string and finds all the words in the dictionary that have overlap with its spelling. Sort of a portmanteau generator. It was just a fun project at the time, but I have used it on countless occasions to brainstorm unique names for projects, websites, etc.
You can try it from the link below. Just type any word or name and it will populate the results.
That’s really cool.
Bookmarked! I love that this exists
a bot that shorts any coin mentioned by elon musk.
Chhoto URL - It’s a simple URL shortener written in Rust.
I’ve written more programs, some of which are more useful in my daily life than this (e.g. movie-rename) but this is one that many seem to find interesting, and that’s kinda cool I guess. Also, I’m proud of some of my Lean code, but that stuff’s not published.
I have a program called “country guess” that I made a year ago where it’s like the Sporcle quiz but with a) the proper UN recognized countries (with options for some of the partially recognized ones), b) completely offline since it’s made with half-baked Python and c) it’s text-based (ASCII art maps and all). It times how long you took to complete it, but there is no time limit. It also accepts alternative names, just like the Sporcle quiz (e.g. “uk” or “usa”)
The way I did it was incredibly time consuming though, as it relied on a whole load of string formatting to show the ASCII map with countries highlighted (each country is a list of either whitespace or hashes #), meaning I had to manually copy and past the white space of the ASCII maps I found for each and every country. No wonder why I never finished it. It also had the flaw of not showing the country names in the big countries, with all of them shoved to the bottom of the map, meaning when you are close to finishing, you can’t see both the map and the countries you got right.
As of right now, I think it has the continents of Africa, Europe, and the Americas, as well as Oceania. Not Asia though (there are simply too many countries there!) and the world, since I never bothered to finish it. If I recall correctly, the partially recognized territories I included that actually worked were Western Sahara, Somaliland, and Kosovo. I also had the optional UN observer states of the Vatican and Palestine.
Do note that the python program requires the modules “colorama” for colourful text and “art” for ASCII text headings I think.
Archery app. Basically zero users, and got purged from the play store earlier this year because I refused to jump through their hoops.
It was was meant for use with scopes, you would put in some distance and scope settings pairs into it, and it would fit a line allowing you to estimate intermediate scope settings.
It also had an AR mode, where you could save a targets GPS position, and get the distance and angle to the target, and the pin setting.
Sadly, never got any users. So its just for me now. And I deleted the AR stuff.

Woah! So you give it a distance and it estimates where to place the reticle? What sort of math formula do you use to estimate?
It fits up to a 4th order polynomial (going beyond 4th gets a bit silly), depending on the number of known pins.
Uses an apache math library to solve the best fit line.
It doesn’t use any mappers or added chips. There’s quicksaves, a level editor. jump-in two-player co-op, and SNES mouse support.
I have not been arsed to add music.
This is insane holy moly!
I only played it for 15 seconds, but I could hear the music anyway!
I wrote my own email service: https://port87.com/
I’ve made a lot of things for it, and most of them are open source:
- https://sveltematerialui.com/
- https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
- https://nymph.io/
- https://github.com/sciactive/tokenizer
Also, I made one of those neat sorting algorithm visualizers:










