Some of the things I made

This is a list of some of the personal projects I worked on. Not everything is here, but I try to keep it updated. Work-In-Progress are not included here, it's only finished and maintenance-only projects.

• TinyFeed feed.lovergne.dev

  Repository: github.com/TheBigRoomXXL/tinyfeed

  This project began out of my frustration with the current options for feed readers. I often visit message boards like Lobsters and Hacker News to find good technical blogs. Over time, I accumulated a list of RSS feeds that I follow regularly and wanted to consume them in a way similar to message boards: a simple, time-ordered list of links.

  However, most feed readers are full-fledged applications that require logins, track your reading, and have a lot of features I don’t want, such as reading inside the application instead of on the feed’s website.

  I also wanted something lightweight and easy to self-host. I found myself particularly frustrated with many so-called “minimalist” feed readers that don’t even support SQLite as a database option (looking at you, Miniflux with your need for SUPERUSER privileges on PostgreSQL).

  My solution is TinyFeed: a CLI tool that generates a static HTML page from a collection of feeds. It’s incredibly simple: no database, no configuration files, just a CLI and some HTML. Provide it with a list of RSS, Atom, or JSON feed URLs, and it will generate a single HTML page for them. Then, you can effortlessly set it up with cron, systemd, or even GitHub Pages, and voilà, you’ve got yourself an webpage that aggregate your favorite feeds.

  I’ve been using it since August 2023, and I’m very pleased with it. Due to its simplicity, it integrates easily into various workflows. For example, it started as a cron job on my server, then moved to OpenRC, then I dockerized it and added it to my docker-compose based homelab. Finally, as I removed all public-facing services from my homelab, I moved it to GitHub Pages. It’s a versatile tool that can be used in many different ways. The project has now been stable for some time and I have released the offical 1.0.0 version.

  The project has also gained some traction in the self-hosted community, with just over 200 stars on GitHub and a few mentions in articles and podcasts.

• 8086 Virtual Machine github.com/thebigroomxxl

  This is a learning project built for the Performance-Aware Programming course by Casey Muratori. A major focus of the course is understanding how your code is actually executed at the hardware level and how that impacts performance. Consequently, one of the first steps in the course is to build an 8086 emulator to better understand the structure behind assembly instructions and how they are processed.

  The 8086 microprocessor, introduced in 1978, is the foundation of the x86 instruction set, making it an excellent candidate for learning microcode from first principles. While its instruction set is fairly limited compared to modern versions (being only 16-bit, after all), it is actually quite complex compared to modern instruction sets like RISC-V as many clever hacks were used to maximize byte compactness, which was essential given the hardware limitations of the time.

  This project was a great learning experience and made me realize that while microcode seems like a difficult and highly specialized topic, it’s actually quite approachable. Since then, I’ve found low-level topics much more accessible and have developed a deeper curiosity about them.

• Games I Made tehbigroomxxl.itch.io

  HARPOON!!!: itch.io/harpoon
  Flappy Fuchs: itch.io/flappy-fuchs
  Defend Your Pink Planet: itch.io/defend-your-pink-planet
  Gravity²: itch.io/gravity

  I discovered programming when I first tried to make games using RPG Maker XP. I was 12 or 13 years old and was amazed by the possibility of creating my own world and story. I quickly moved on to Game Maker and then Godot. Along the way, I started many projects and even finished and published four of them!

  Two of these games, Harpoon and Defend Your Pink Planet, were created in just 48 hours during game jams. It’s liberating to know that everything must be done in 48h and that you can cut corners and make a lot of mistakes. It’s a great way to learn and to have fun.

  I’m especially proud of Harpoon because players experienced it exactly as I had envisioned. I’m also proud of Gravity²—it was my first game, and my friends and I had an amazing time playing it.

• My Personal Site lovergne.dev

  Repository: github.com/theBigRoomXXL/lovergne.dev

  I started this project in the summer of 2023 as a way to experiment with a more minimalistic stack and design for the web. This site is organized like a zettelkasten: everything that I write is a self-contained note that links to other resources. A tag system is used to categorize the notes into different pages of the site (awesome, blogroll, projects), and each note has its own page with a unique URL.

  I use Astro for static site generation, and there are no other dependencies (well, technically, there is normalize.css for CSS reset, but it’s so small it doesn’t really count!). The site was originally hosted on my homelab, but I moved it to GitHub Pages so that I could close all public-facing services on my homelab.

  There are a lot of little things I like about this site:

  • Light and Fast: The landing page is currently only 32KB (fonts and logo included!), which means it’s blazingly fast™.
  • Fully Accessible: Built with semantic HTML and accessibility in mind.
  • It’s Beautiful: Well, at least I think so. And I really love my little isometric logo.
  • Dark/Light Theme: Based on prefers-color-scheme.
  • Print Support: With a minimal secondary stylesheet (see print.css). I don’t think anyone else cares about that, but I like it.
  • RSS Feed Support.

  And finally, the thing I like the most is that every page is also rendered as a plain text file! Just click on the little Want Some ASCII? button at the bottom of the page, and you’ll get the plain text version. This is a useless but lovely feature. It started when I was playing with ASCII diagram characters to render tables and then read the OpenSSH regreSSHion report and though ” what if I used the same plain text formatting but using more advanced unicode characters?”. After that it turned into a deep-dive into Unicode and hacks like bold and italic formatting using mathematical characters. This was also an opportunity to work with Abstract Syntax Trees to parse the markdow, which was something that piqued my curiosity for a long time.