When I am kind of bored or need a break from my projects, I try to contribute to other projects. Check out my Github.
I got into web development because I wanted to create my own applications. At companies I worked at, there were always retrospectives, but they didn't work well - there was no improvement. I wanted to solve that problem for the other teams in a similar situation. I thought that Slackbot would be a good solution. Turns out that idea was solid because some teams are indeed using it :).
I built Slackbot with Elixir, Phoenix. I also had to craft a landing page and I decided to use Jekyll (Ruby) for that. The experience I gained was worth it! I learned a lot about time management, productivity and also noticed the huge amount of work that is needed to launch and to continue improving a tech product.
I built a mobile robot in 2017 for my dissertation. I used Python and Flask to develop software that was running on the main unit (Raspberry PI 3) of the robot. The software was responsible for collecting information from multiple different sensors, driving, controlling servos, and streaming video from a USB camera.
All data was sent to Operator Panel, which was SPA app written solely by me using Javascript and React. Both programs communicated over WebSockets. Operator Panel had driving and servos controllers, sensors switches, video stream preview, and charts with sensors data that was streamed real-time via WebSockets. There was also a very basic authentication implemented to gain control over the robot.
What about hardware? Well, I crafted a handmade PCB board to mount all the sensors and engines, servos to RP3. It was hard.
In 2014 I joined a small team that was working on a video game. It was my first real experience with programming and
working on a big codebase written in Java and PHP. I got to work with other software developers and it was a blast!
I learned so much, I discovered a new passion for coding. And honestly, I'm a developer because of that affair. There is also a video of me talking about the game in Polish: