One year of full-time work on personal projects since leaving Google in March of 2023

I worked at Google for a bit over 12 years.

On March 17, 2023 I left Google and decided to see what I could do in a year of working full-time on my own projects.

Here is what I accomplished, in no particular order:

• Hancho
  • Created Hancho, my "simple and pleasant" build system.
  • One file of Python, copy-paste it into your repo and go.
  • Fast parallel builds inspired by Ninja, simple syntax inspired by Bazel and Python's f-strings.
  • Powerful templating system via abuse of Python's eval() and Javascript-style prototypal object inheritance.
• Matcheroni & Parseroni
  • Created Matcheroni and Parseroni, my lexing and parsing toolkit that uses C++20 templates to generate recursive descent parsers at compile time.
  • Contains a full C99 parser as an 'example' :D
  • Also a conformant JSON parser as another example
  • The generated debug symbols are horrific, but the compiled code is small and fast.
  • Documentation and tutorial links are broken :/
• Metron
  • Ported my C++-to-SystemVerilog translator Metron to use Matcheroni and Parseroni for parsing C++.
  • Documentation has rotted a bit but the test suites still pass.
• Pinwheel
  • Redesigned Pinwheel, my RISC-V microcontroller core, so that it runs 2 hardware threads (harts) at once interleaved.
  • The two harts can be swapped between N 'ready to run' threads in a single instruction.
  • Threads can read/write each other's register files, single step each other - you can in principle have a debug interface running in one hart while the other hart is running an application (implementation TBD)
  • Passes all the RV32I tests, getting it working again on a FPGA is on my to-do list (requires more work regarding block ram inference)
• PicoRVD
  • Reverse engineered the debug protocol for the 10-cent 'CH32V003' RISC-V microcontroller.
  • Wrote a GDB-compatible debug probe inteface for it that runs on the Raspberry Pi Pico
  • Can flash binaries, single-step, set arbitrary numbers of breakpoints.
  • Faster than the manufacturer-provided debug interface.
  • The debugging code was later used by cnlohr@ to add debug support to his ch32v003fun project
• Wideboard
  • Ported Wideboard to Typescript, which was a surprisingly pleasant experience and far easier than using Google's Closure compiler.
  • Wideboard is a proof-of-concept text renderer that can handle huge amounts of text at once
  • Wideboard can display the entire source of the Linux kernel in a web browser tab.
• gbmicrotest
  • Turned my collection of tiny Gameboy hardware tests into a standalone repo
• metronica
  • Pulled out just the audio portion of my game boy emulator to make Metronica, a tool for replaying Game Boy audio dumps.
  • It works but I never actually used it to play anything other than the "Link's Awakening" title screen music. :D
• plait
  • Pulled my circuit graph visualization tool Plait out into its own repo
  • It has code rotted and is not very usable
• repo
  • Created a meta-repo for all my projects and wrote some Python tools to manage it
  • My personal projects contain a symlinks/ directory that point to other projects in the meta-repo
  • This seems to be a better way than git submodules for handling inter-project dependencies, at the cost of having dependencies spread horizontally across the meta-repo directory instead of nested under a parent repo.