NICK SABIA

Containerized Minecraft Development Environment

November 2023 - December 2023

The goal here was to build a Minecraft Forge mod development environment using Docker. This project exposed me to Docker Compose, which allowed me to run multiple containers that interact with one another. One container hosted a local Minecraft Forge server and another container acted as your development environment. I went down many rabbit holes during this project that taught me about SSH, SSH agents, how to use Git alongside Docker, and Docker best practices.

Containerized Web Development Environment

October 2023 - December 2023

As I worked on this website, I had times where I wanted to work on my laptop, but all the dependencies were set up on my desktop. Figuring out all of the dependencies was painful, so I figured out how to utilize Docker to build a development environment that allows me to avoid this scenario in the future.

Software Developer at Technolutions

February 2022 - Present

Technolutions was the first to expose me to what it's like working on enterprise software, and what a learning experience it's been! I dove into working on a feature called "Express Portals" that simplifies an existing "Portals" feature. This feature allows a user to build a micro-site to serve as a landing page for students that could be used to gather and store data into Slate. I've mentored others around me and adopted a mindset geared toward finding efficient solutions that work at scale.

Glorious Scraper

February 2022 - May 2022

A WordPress widget that accepts a list of Facebook group URLs and scrapes each one for event links, then scrape each event link for event info. All event info gets inserted into a WordPress plugin called "The Events Calendar". I built the scraper and data import/export functionality. To avoid getting blocked by Facebook, I utilized a proxy that rotated IP addresses with each request. This was built for a non-profit called Glorious Recovery during my Software Engineering II course at CCSU.

Volunteer Management System

October 2021 - December 2021

A volunteer management system that allows admins to create/manage events while volunteers could sign up for open time slots within those events. Admins could verify the credibility of a volunteer, reset passwords, update emails, create/edit events, and view how many hours a set of volunteers worked at any set of events over a specified time range. This system was built for a non-profit called Kevin's Community Center. I worked with one other developer to build this over the course of our Software Engineering course at CCSU.

Discord Racing Bot

October 2021 - December 2021

A Discord bot that lets you take part in races with others, buy cars and parts, fix your car, level up your driver, manage your garage, and generate tracks for race events! Each race is simulated step by step, where both driver and car stats govern the distance traveled and the likelihood of crashing, becoming defensive (safe but slow), driving normally, or being aggressive (fast, but more likely to crash) on the next step. Our team of three built this for our final project for the Design Patterns course at CCSU. This project was focused on exposing us to each design pattern defined by the gang of four, so our goal was to meaningfully fit as many patterns as possible into the bot.

Nantucket Sunset

August 2021 - September 2021

I love Cape Cod and Nantucket, I would vacation there with my mom and best friend each summer during middle school and high school. I wanted to build a scene as I remember it of being on the docks during a sunset over Nantucket during mid-summer. I had intended to make this my portfolio website's landing page, but wound up deciding against it due to performance issues on lower spec machines. I built every model handled light baking in blender to minimize light calculations. I also kept texture size to a minimum such that the entire folder is 7.22 Mb. This remains one of my favorite projects.

Shader Fun

July 2021 - September 2021

This was my first exposure to writing shaders, WebGL and Three.JS. The most challenging hurdle was figuring out that fragment shader code accepts a pixel as input and outputs color for each pixel on screen. The learning curve was worth getting over, because now I feel like I stand a chance reading code on Shadertoy! I made multiple scenes in this repo, but my favorite resides in folder 6 which I've titled 'Nantucket Sunset'.

Planetary Doom

June 2021 - July 2021

A game where your goal is to defend against alien star ships attempting to destroy Earth. Upgrade your ship between waves of enemies and prepare to face the end. I built the upgrade system, many of the sprites, and crafted the final boss. I worked with three others to build this for my Game Development course at CCSU.

Snake Game

March 2021 - May 2021

A snake game written in C for my Systems Programming course at CCSU primarily by myself and one other student. I wrote the main game loop, timing, collision logic, trophies, and movement.

Forum 492

February 2021 - Apr 2021

A security forum built with security in mind! The feature set included account registration/login, threads, and posts. Safeguards like password requirements, rate-limits, and input sanitization were put in place to make the front door that much harder to break through. This forum was built in 2 and a half weeks as my final project for Computer Security at CCSU.

Duda Search Engine

November 2020 - March 2021

Duda didn't offer a way to add search functionality for their websites, so I was tasked with implementing a search engine that crawls a Duda website, storing data in a MySQL database as it goes, then retrieves that data later via search queries supplied by the end-user. The data stored was a mixture of full paragraphs and words. Storing each word on the website into the database allowed the database to be used as a dictionary for detecting misspellings and offering suggestions. Pairing these words to a particular page allowed for a simple page ranking algorithm to be used.

SplashDash

July 2020 - November 2020

The first project in which I contributed to another developer's project. The goal of SplashDash was to act as an internal tool that allows Develomark to send SEO and marketing reports to clients. The tool allowed you to customize the layout of the report through different data-driven widgets. My contribution was the creation of a resizable widget whose text size grew along with the widget container.

Sudoku Generator

March 2020 - May 2020

A Sudoku puzzle generator that utilizes decision trees and backtracking to generate a valid board then, depending on the set difficulty, will take out random numbers around the board. This was built for my Data Structures course at CCSU.

C-Log

February 2020 - March 2020

A proprietary chrome extension that allows Develomark employees to enter a task they've completed to a Google sheet. Each Google Sheet was auto-created based on the month and year, so the first task of the new month automatically created a new sheet. Centralizing the completed tasks like this streamlined the auditing and client reporting process.

Software Developer at Develomark

October 2019 - May 2021

Scored my first software developer position at Develomark! Develomark is a company which offers digital marketing and SEO services. My main duty was to implement reusable and easy to use widgets for the designers to use within our web builder of choice, Duda.

getWeather

July 2019 - October 2019

My first project that utilized Git and second weather webpage project. Using OpenWeatherMap's API, I generated a JSON file that contains all US cities with their zip code, coordinates, and name. Using this as a dictionary, I built a city search field that suggests cities as the user types.

Began Attending College

August 2018

I began studying at Central Connecticut State University for a degree in Computer Science.
Fun fact: I originally began studying Mechanical Engineering at CCSU, but quickly realized that I don't like drawing intricate diagrams.

Sir Pale Discord Bot

March 2017 - May 2017

In the Discord servers I manage, I enjoy playing with Discord bots. After seeing how neat some bots could be, I decided to try my hand at making one! The "Sir Pale" bot let you accrue currency that could be used to buy emoji's from an hourly refreshing store. You earned currency by using the bot's various features, most notably the slot machine and random image fetcher.

It all began here...

My first exposure to the software development world was building a website that pulled and displayed weather data. The code was a mess, but it made me realize that I really like coding!