
Gbajs3
A browser-based Game Boy Advance emulator powered by a custom mGBA WebAssembly integration.
software is art
Building distributed systems, backend tooling, and odd little side projects that turn into much larger ones.
Explore my siteAbout
My name is Nicholas VanCise, and puzzles are my favorite pastime!
Currently I'm working on honing my craft, and building software I love while pursuing my dreams as a software engineer.
In addition to this, in my own time I dabble in emulator development, functional languages, data visualization, and infrastructure programming.
When I'm not studying or working on my personal projects I spend my time enjoying nature, reading science fiction, and working on classic vehicles!
Skills
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Projects
A mix of projects I've built for work, fun, and for the sake of figuring things out.
Project index

A browser-based Game Boy Advance emulator powered by a custom mGBA WebAssembly integration.
Gbajs3 is a full Game Boy Advance emulator available online and offline supporting the mGBA WASM core, it is freely licensed and works in any modern browser. The wasm contract and glue code were integrated into my custom core by leveraging the Emscripten toolchain, along with building the entire UI from scratch.

A native iOS metroidvania-style platformer featuring a custom engine, physics, boss mechanics, and gameplay systems.
A native iOS metroidvania-style platformer built entirely from scratch using Objective-C and the MVC architectural pattern. I implemented the animation system, collision detection, character physics, scene management, boss mechanics, and gameplay logic while adapting and integrating custom-edited game assets for modern iPhone devices.

A cross-platform list management application with fast regex-powered searching.
TheList is a cross-platform desktop application for organizing and searching multiple collections of user-defined lists. Built with the Fyne toolkit, it emphasizes fast in-memory performance and powerful regular-expression based searching to efficiently filter large collections of entries.

A distributed Apache Airflow platform orchestrating scalable, containerized IoT data ingestion pipelines.
This environment consists of a distributed Apache Airflow Cluster backed by Celery, that utilizes an array of custom docker containers to fetch and process public IoT data from webpages, third party systems, and data buckets. This data is processed and sent to the Ingestion API. This system was designed around fast and reliable setup, deployment, testing, tear down, and failure recovery. It fetched and standardized high throughput data ranging from broad spectrum satellite and ocean data, all the way to traffic counters, solar meters, and vehicle speed sensors.

A horizontally scalable Go REST API for high-throughput real-time data ingestion.
The Ingestion API is designed to function as the middle man between independent user programs orchestrated by Apache Airflow that collect IoT data, and multiple postgres database connections. This API was built with golang, and utilizes GORM and Gorilla Mux for database operations and routing, and can concurrently process multipart forms in bulk for data ingestion through http requests.

Reintroduced native iOS compilation to the Quorum programming language toolchain.
Re-integrated RoboVM into the Quorum programming language toolchain after the original compiler became unavailable. The project enables Quorum applications to be transpiled into native iOS binaries using the open-source MobiVM implementation and was ultimately incorporated into official Quorum Studio releases.

Interactive geospatial visualizations for large-scale IoT datasets.
Developed interactive geospatial visualizations for large-scale IoT datasets using Python, JavaScript, and Kepler.gl. The project focuses on transforming raw sensor and telemetry data into intuitive, map-based visualizations for exploratory analysis and presentation.

An automated pipeline for collecting and visualizing global geospatial datasets.
Built an automated geospatial mapping pipeline that collected, processed, and visualized publicly available datasets using Python, Selenium, and R. The project automated data acquisition and generated interactive world maps for exploring environmental and IoT-related information.

Personal project
A browser-based Game Boy Advance emulator powered by a custom mGBA WebAssembly integration.

Personal project
A native iOS metroidvania-style platformer featuring a custom engine, physics, boss mechanics, and gameplay systems.

Personal project
A cross-platform list management application with fast regex-powered searching.

Professional work
A distributed Apache Airflow platform orchestrating scalable, containerized IoT data ingestion pipelines.

Professional work
A horizontally scalable Go REST API for high-throughput real-time data ingestion.

Personal project
Reintroduced native iOS compilation to the Quorum programming language toolchain.

Personal project
Interactive geospatial visualizations for large-scale IoT datasets.

Personal project
An automated pipeline for collecting and visualizing global geospatial datasets.