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Hi 👋 I'm Yoshiki Schmitz!

I'm a software developer that also tinkers in design. My goal is to create better tools for expressing and realizing ideas.

Contents

Introduction

I'm a big believer that computers can, when used properly, greatly enhance our individual creativity, intellectual fulfillment, and quality of life. This conviction has led me to develop apps like Hyper Room, a VR whiteboarding app that gives you an entire room to explore your thoughts in, and Linetime, a time-oriented task manager that keeps you focused on your work.

Despite all of the products that get created in tech, and utopian visions from the 60s and 70s that computers would become "bicycles for the mind, or "augment human intellect", I think we're still in the early days of exploring their potential. This makes me very excited for the future, since there's still so many unrealized opportunities!

I'm currently available for consulting work. Feel free to email me if you're interested in talking!

Currently reading: Elements of Computing Systems, Annihilation, and Dune Messiah.

Projects

🚪 Hyper Room

Tools: Unity, C#

Hyper Room was an attempt to create a VR remote conferencing tool. Users could create "rooms" where they used whiteboards, post-it-notes and other tools. My vision was to create a virtual mind palace, a magical room that treats intangible information as real objects that you could touch, manipulate, and organize. You can see a video of it in action here

🦊🐙🗑 Bithublab

Tools: React

Bithublab is a single place to search for projects on Github, Gitlab, and Bitbucket. Within several days of launching it received more than 14K views, and even got on to the front page of Hacker News for a couple of hours.

⏰ Line Time

Tools: React, Redux, Draft.js, Flexbox

Line Time is a task manager inspired by the Pomodoro Technique, a productivity method where for each task you want to complete, you pre-allocate a chunk of time and work until that time is up. You can try it out here. The source code is available for viewing here

📜 Workflowy Clone

Tools: React, Redux

This is a clone of the popular note taking app Workflowy that I made to learn Redux.

📚 Building Blocks For The Future of Computing

Tools: Notion

I've recently become interested in human computer interaction. While there's tons of amazing projects exploring and redefining our relationship with computers, I couldn't find a good centralized database of them, so I made one.

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Experience

I've worked at these companies! And I started one of them! I find immense joy in working with other capable professionals on difficult problems. There's nothing quite like the feeling of delivering a new feature, fixing a critical bug, or just exploring ideas, with a team that you trust and admire.

Hyper Room

Founder
Jun 2016 - Aug 2017

Hyper Room was a multiplayer VR conferencing application. Users accessed virtual rooms where they could talk and work together using sketches, whiteboards, and other productivity tools. Written in Unity using C# Created an extensible object network synchronization system for user movement, drawings, positioning and other non-trivial state
Got featured in UploadVR, Madison XR, Boulder Startup Week and New Tech Longmont Colorado

MasteryConnect

Software Developer
Dec 2014 - Mar 2016

At MC I worked with 30 developers on a Ruby on Rails based ed-tech web app used by thousands of teachers and students. I worked on several projects and countless bug fixes. For example in one project, I designed and implemented a Sidekiq-backed async service that handled thousands of requests per day calculating assessment scores for students(packaged as a library here) At MC I proactively involved myself in building a strong developer culture:

ShipOffers

Software Developer
May 2014 - Dec 2014

At ShipOffers I wrote and maintained an Order Management System that took orders from wholesale clients and dispatched them to our warehouse for shipping. The system was written in Ruby on Rails and had to be fast, accurate, and easy to retrieve records from.

Hobbies/Interests

I like drawing, reading about science and history, hiking, exploring cities, spending hours in museums, traveling, meeting people at hostels, cooking new foods, watching movies, writing detailed notes, and lots of other things but mostly coffee.

Painting

I've been a lifelong casual sketcher, but in 2017 I picked up watercolor painting. I find it's a great way to relax and carefully observe something in all of its detail, something we seem to do naturally as children but stop doing as adults.

Some taxidermed animals at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno, Tokyo

A couple Buddhist scultpures at the Nara National Museum

I like coming up with fantastic organisms with weird life-cycles.

These were some crows that were hanging out in a park in Tokyo.

Generative Art

I occasionally write little programs that create aesthetically pleasing patterns.

Growing Squares

This is a recurisve, organically growing piece. Smaller squares grow out of larger squares, inheriting and mutating their parent's color. Each square is then rendered by overlaying lots of jittered copies of itself to create a painterly look. You can see high-res images here.

Sierpenski Triangle

A recursively colored Sierpenski triangle.

Blocks

I like doodling, and a lot of my doodles involve repeating and extending patterns, like recursively packing circles inside of other circles. Blocks was an app I made in Unity to replicate that kind of doodling experience for 3D forms. The app first presents you with a cube, and as a doolder you're able to perform two operations on it: subdivision and extrusion. As you can see in the images above, this is enough to create a lot of vaguely architectural forms.