buzsh

A field service software suite that aimed to disrupt the door-to-door industry.

First real startup experience. Had the pleasure of working with two very talented cofounders—a product manager and backend engineer. Got to see the project through initial ideation, to planning, market research, design, branding and execution. Built out an entire suite of software: Sales apps, Technician apps and pieces of the web-based Office dashboard.

Garnered a lot of niche knowledge on obtaining and working with big data, as well as presenting that data in a consumable fashion on a map with bidirectional data interactability (selecting data on the map will have the list update to match and vice-versa).

BaldursModManager was the first (and only) native Baldur's Gate 3 mod manager for Mac. Free and open source. Built with an auto-updater that scraped and parsed GitHub for new releases. Actively engaged with the BG3 and MacGaming communities to improve features based on their needs.

I only played the game through once, but the kindness shown by this community made me more than happy to continue iterating with them.

A super scrappy, all-purpose data-to-spreadsheet currency conversion product. Originally created to split App Store profits with my Video Converter collaborator, as the payout sheets only provided quantity and currency from country sold.

After discovering that all exchange rate APIs were paid services, I built a solution to scrape historic exchange rate data from BIS (Bank for International Settlements), format it for relevance, and query efficiently via SQL. The app can import and format various financial files (XLS, CSV, TSV, TXT) with automatic detection of potential exchange rate columns, plus options for manual column reformatting.

Templates for Swift was a library designed to simplify the reuse of my open-sourced Swift and SwiftUI projects. By leveraging TypeSwift, the app utilized scraping and JavaScript injection techniques to dynamically generate easy-to-copy code blocks directly from the public-facing GitHub repository pages where my projects were hosted.

The goal was to provide free, ready-to-use templates for developers without requiring additional maintenance work on my part. This system automated the process of converting open-source libraries into consumable, copy-pastable snippets tailored for quick integration.

The project eventually broke due to a major GitHub redesign, which rendered the JavaScript injection and CSS selector techniques incompatible with the updated platform structure.

TypeScript AST parser that generated type-safe Swift code that you could immediately function call via WebKit frameworks for instantaneous inoperability.

The idea was to use pre-existing business logic from web-based projects, including function calling and data presentation, in a localized container that could be used as the backend in native Swift development.

A large motivation for this project came from wanting to seamlessly use Node-based packages in a Swift environment without all the hassle of setting up a full Node environment. Connecting these two environments has historically been a large pain point. Swift is more optimized for the hardware, while Node.js allows for much more rapid development and flexibility with external libraries.

It differs from platforms like React Native and Flutter by allowing you to develop programs in purely-native Swift—with all the benefits that come with that—while re-using the logic of existing codebases to automatically generate all necessary functionality for said program. Completely contained and completely localized.

A macOS client that brought the new Apple Music platform—exclusive to Big Sur (11.0)—to MacOS 10.15 and lower. Used JavaScript injection to hack around the UI, which eventually led to custom rendered personalizations of Electron-based objects and tweaked the code for missing functionality (custom keybinds, add to playlists from certain views, etc).

This truly marked the beginning of my JavaScript/TypeScript/PHP interoperability journey with Swift, exploring the possibilities of incorporating business logic of web languages into the custom look and feel of native apps.

Based on the ARCSOFT infrastructure, but with a much more business-professional approach. Took inspiration from Adobe and Microsoft for branding, design language and overall professional appearance.

UWeb was the first app that I was able to consistently dominate in the Top #1 ranking in multiple different countries; most notably in China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, Germany and South Korea.

Retired to go all-in on the Sandbox Accelerator program.

Experimented with new ideas for a website builder based on different frameworks that were released at the time. I began tweaking with the codebase to make it compatible with mobile WebKit. The foundations of this eventually evolved into UXWeb.

Managed to bring this to the top charts, alongside ARCSOFT. Both were able to consistently rank next to one another for a time.

Took advantage of Apple allowing system-level extensions for WebKit products to build out an ad blocker. It was one of the first ad blockers for iOS and quickly reached the top charts in multiple countries.

This was before a patent troll intimidated me into removing it off the App Store entirely for using the term 'ad block' in my marketing material. I didn't find out that this claim was totally bogus until a few months after, during a Reddit AMA. Oh, what could've been.

The first website builder on the Mac App Store, as well as my first drag and drop website builder. Built on Swift and Laravel PHP, this was my first real experience with desktop-class products.

I learned very quickly that appearances were everything in the desktop space. I was periodically able to hit the Top #1 charts and paid attention to how other apps were performing in other categories. I quickly picked up on a pattern of representation and story: small teams selling their apps as 'professional product suites.' I began to follow suit, taking inspiration from non-App Store products like Adobe and Microsoft.

Following this, I began to reach the Top #1 charts in Canada, China, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates; as well as competitive ranking in the United States, South Korea, Poland, Denmark and many more.

Discontinued to make room for the UWeb brand name and product line.

The first-ever developer keyboard built for mobile devices, designed specifically for coding on the go. Released when Apple first allowed custom keyboards on iOS, DevKey was a groundbreaking tool that complemented apps like Code Master and HTML Studio.

DevKey featured language-specific key layouts, allowing developers to quickly switch to the coding keys they needed based on their programming language. This included easy access to symbols and shortcuts commonly used in coding, reducing the time spent searching for them on standard mobile keyboards.

The keyboard also supported customization, enabling developers to tailor key layouts to their preferences, making it an indispensable tool for mobile development workflows.

Contributed to projects adjacent to the Appulous and Installous codebases. Mostly worked on drop-in scripts and tools that allowed prospective file hosting providers to setup shop within a few hours. It was also preferable that these scripts required little-to-no technical knowledge to get up and running. These codebases had to be extremely compatible such that they'd work with any selection of offshore hosting servers with strange configurations.

I was never involved with the core development teams or their resulting codebases.

Built tools around the Slowloris Perl script, which exploited a vulnerability in Apache servers by maintaining many simultaneous connections—you know, typical kid stuff. These tools automated and enhanced the original script's capabilities, particularly targeting phpBB forums and vulnerable Apache configurations.

Was an active member and forum moderator of underground hacking communities including Pr0x, Hackulous and BlackHatWorld. Had to be voted in by community members to moderate these forums. These communities were instrumental in fostering my early interest in security research, system vulnerabilities and SEO manipulation.

This period marked my introduction to the technical underpinnings of web servers and security, eventually leading to a deep fascination with iOS jailbreaking and low-level system modification.

Not super proud of this one, but it's probably where my attention to detail in design came from: I created a phishing setup that perfectly replicated the OSRS web and Java Applet UIs. I then created a 'stats changer' program in Visual Basic and recorded a video demo of this program effectively maxing all stats to 99, via client-side memory manipulation, on a private server account. I then posted it to YouTube with a link to the phish, where it eventually went viral, reaching hundreds of thousand of views before being taken down. I still feel bad about it to this day.

This project became a valuable early lesson in ethics and responsibility in software development. Looking back, I was too young to fully grasp the implications of creating tools that could negatively impact real people. This experience shaped my future approach to software development, emphasizing the importance of considering the broader impact of software beyond functionality. I was also super grounded by my parents when I came clean.

Developed Java injection tools for RuneScape (OSRS) automation, including auto fighters, auto fishers and flax clickers. I started with tweaking other people's scripts, tinkering with them to understand how they worked and how they manipulated the client. I eventually evolved these techniques into my own suite of tools.

This included techniques such as bitmap pattern matching and hex code extraction. Other techniques involved human behavior simulation to create natural-looking mouse movements and clicks to avoid macro-major bans from Jagex/Jamflex mods.