I'm a software and systems engineering lead with 30 years of industry experience developing cross platform software for the web, desktop, server, mobile and devices and have open source projects going back 25 years.

I live in Edinburgh, Scotland and I work at Unity working with a fantastic team on game backend systems for Unity Gaming Services.

You can find me on Mastodon as @iaincollins, sometimes I post on Medium.

I used to maintain some civic tech / open data / news related systems in my spare time, but I mostly only do fun side projects now.

Three different environments which can be explored in a first person view. Scenes are created at runtime using procedural generation.

It's built with Next.js an React. It uses React Three Fibre, a wrapper for Three.js, which is in turn an abstraction for WebGL. This an unconventional stack and it's a simple demo with simple physics and player movement and was fun exercise in seeing what's possible using those components and has helped me better understand how React Three Fibre and Three.js work in practice.

A constantly live-updating database of ~150 million locations, tens of millions of commodity buy/sell orders and processing million updates a day to galactic trade database, using data from players of the game Elite Dangerous, collected from game clients using an API for the game provided by the studio, Frontier Developments.

The frontend and backend are both built in JavaScript with SQLite as the database. It costs around $20 / month to run.

ICARUS Terminal is a companion app / second screen for the game Elite: Dangerous, the latest follow up to the 1984 classic space game Elite. Designed for both desktop/laptop computers and for tablets/phones, the app hooks into the game to provide context-sensitive real time information, that is event driven and socket based, by combining data from the games API with third party APIs built by fans of the game.

Built with Next.js, React, Node.js, Go and C++.

I created NextAuth.js a few years ago because there wasn't anything like it already and I really wished there was so that adding authentication to projects was easier. It now has millions of downloads a month and become one of top 1,000 open source projects on GitHub, by whatever metric they use for that.

NextAuth.js is an open source, community supported project based around interoperability with open standards. It has grown to support dozens of auth providers and a wide range of SQL and no-SQL databases. Originally developed for React - and specifically Next.js, hence the name - it has been ported to other popular frameworks, including Vue.js and Svelte and can be used with non-JavaScript frameworks, such as Drupal.

I've since moved on to other projects and am no longer actively involved, other than to look in and see how things are going now and then. To ensure it remains open source, collaborative and independent it has been spun off into a dedicated organization, with it's own core team.

Mercury is a web based video and transcript editor and translation workflow tool that lets you drop-and-drag a video in one language in and then watch it back in other languages, with an editable, timestamped transcript in each language, that can also be exported as subtitles or text.

Designed for news and media organisations, Mercury allows teams to upload, edit, transcode, transcribe and translate audio and video files in a wide range of formats, including large, unprocessed files - from anywhere in the world on any web enabled device, including a smartphone, and share them in a secure and searchable way.

I got a grant to build Mercury from Google, through their Digital News Initiative program.

Designed to fill a gap in tooling in Google Lighthouse and Google's own Structured Data Testing Tool, by providing an extendible command line tool and API that includes out of the box support for checking both Schema.org entities and social media markup.

While useful for any website but especially useful for news and media organizations as ensuring markup quality can have a significant impact on traffic coming from Google News and Google Discover, as well as organic traffic from search engines.

A library useful for data scraping, originally created to support work on civic tech and data journalism. Table to JSON is used by dozens of other packages, in other higher level scraper libraries and in projects to track a wide range of things from COVID-19 data to TV shows, news and weather to class times for students. Table to JSON is now maintained by @maugenst.