Projects

Work Projects

My Poster Presented at Society for Neuroscience 2023

Patrick 2023 SFN Poster.pdf

This was huge in real life, so forgive the small text. If you actually wish to read it, you should be able to click on the file above, and open it in Google Drive and zoom in. For more background about the actual project, see my work experiences where I describe this in more detail.

Personal Projects

Published Android App I made entirely by myself: Skyblock Bazaar (22,000+ user downloads, see detailed stats below)

As a showcase of my independent problem solving in the app space, I created an Android App, starting from basically knowing nothing about apps, downloading the Android Studio IDE, and solving a creating an app that had personal interest to me.

Context: There's a Minecraft (video game) server that provides an API to retrieve live pricing data for in-game items. These game items fluctuated in price, so there was almost an "impromptu stock market" that existed, as you could both play the game to acquire items, but you could also buy and sell the items for profit, and as player demand for items spiked, you could easily make lots of "free money" if you had access to real-time pricing data, which this app provides via a basic but functional user interface.

To see my developmental notes I made while writing it, have a look at this doc:

Skyblock Bazaar Calculator Development History

Click above to see the live Google Play Store listing for my app. Unfortunately, an Android device or emulator is required to run it, I didn't make one available for Apple

See the screenshot of my "developer statistics" for this app below, this information is from November 14th 2024. 

PGS refers to "Play Games Services", which was typically used for achievements, leaderboards, in apps. However, I figured I would utilize it as a mild proxy for "user engagement", as I didn't want to do official tracking, but re-purpose a well known system.

My "leaderboards":

Number of times app was opened

Coins earned in this one minigame I made

Total notifications received

If you own an Android device, feel free to download it and play around with it.


To see the public Github Repo of this code, check here: https://github.com/Celeria/Skyblock-Bazaar-Status

It doesn't follow all Android recommendations perfectly, but I made it from scratch knowing nothing, and it does mostly function, and I wrote it a while ago, so take that into account, and hey, even today, the basic functionality still works, even if I haven't kept up with every new feature added to the game, as I no longer spend any time playing the game, but I did take pains to ensure flexibility of the code, so that as new items or features were added, it should intelligently adopt to it with minimal hard coding necessary. (Seems when the developers of the app named some of the items, they had variable names that didn't match the in-game item names, so I manually corrected for those, but as of recently, it seems most items are named more consistently as they had more experience with the API as the game gathered more players and such).

I believe the playerbase of the game is still at at least 10k at any given time, I just personally lost interest, but it's cool that a lot of people still find this useful.

Basic features of this app:

A way to see and search all prices of various in game items.

A calculator customized to the game, that based on market prices, tells you exactly which "resource production method" (minions, as they are referred to in the game), would net you the highest profit at any moment, if you sold your stuff on the open market. (Bazaar, as it was called in the game, hence the name of the app)

The ability to receive notifications as this app would run in the background of your phone, ping the API every 15 minutes, and notify the user if anything changes that they would care about. (For example, 

A series of fun challenges I designed mostly to play with the Google Play Achievements and leaderboard system.

To get this sorted, I had to register for a Google Cloud account, and manage some stuff, to get it working.

I was able to call this app a puzzle app, and although most users didn't engage heavily with this feature, there were many that enjoyed the challenge, as I didn't really lock anything particularly useful behind the hard challenges. 

A small minority of players complained the challenges were too hard, or whatever. When legitimate issues were brought up about a particular challenge's functionality, I did my best to fix it. However, when some people just wanted to be toxic on the internet, rather than ignore it or respond in the standard "corporate politeness", as these aren't paying customers, and most of the complaints were legitimately ignorant, I had a little fun responding candidly. For as you know, you can't please everybody, and this is a personal project, so I chose to have some fun, I'm not representing any company. However, in case this disturbs you rest assured, if I am representing an actual organization, I would take a kinder approach that's more helpful than "just messing around". I've worked in actual customer service jobs in food service before, and luckily, I basically had no bad experiences, since I am competent, and I know how to diffuse situations quickly in case things start to go south. 

And I didn't work for long enough to actually run into the statistically rare, but unfortunately existing number of actual psychopaths that wander around in society. 

But for online content, especially for something like this where my intention wasn't to profit, the fastest way to spread something, is a little bit of harmless controversy, and plenty of reviews enjoyed it, and it appears I got a decently large install base.