guest@BipbopPC:~$ ls ~/writing
Longer write-ups on things I built, including the parts that didn't work the first time, which are honestly the parts worth writing about. Most of these started as project reports, and I'm adapting them here as I get to them.
A* Pathfinding with OpenMP
May 2025One OpenMP directive runs 1,000 independent A* solvers for a 2.64x speedup at 3 threads and 88% efficiency. Past that the gains flatten out, because the cores end up sitting around waiting on the memory bus.
C++ · OpenMP · parallelism
Teaching a YOLOv8 model to tell a real dog from a fake one
Dec 2025Transfer learning on YOLOv8n over a scraped three-class dataset, ROCm training on an AMD 6800 XT, and a Streamlit app that tells you whether your dog is real. Precision and recall both landed at 0.96.
Python · PyTorch · machine learning
Fitting Space Invaders into 2 KB of SRAM
Dec 2020The whole game board is one 1-D array mapped onto the serpentine wiring of a 10x10 NeoPixel matrix. Pretty much everything else in the design came from that decision, and from having 2 KB of SRAM to work with.
Arduino · C++ · embedded
Errors encountered: there were… so many
May 2021A post-mortem on data structure choices and an entity manager I wrote almost entirely before ever testing it against the renderer. Everything rendered upside down, and my fix was not very good, but it worked.
C# · design
File System Performance Evaluation
Dec 2023Five Linux file systems benchmarked bare-metal with IOzone across file sizes from 64 kilobytes to 2 gigabytes, on five 20 GB partitions of a dedicated SSD.
Linux · file systems · benchmarking
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