JesseBlacklock.com

SALVETE INTERNET GOERS!

I’m Jesse Blacklock: a software engineer living in Garden Grove, California. I earned my M.S. in computer science from CSULB.

I have a ton of interests including software development, philosophy, literature, illustration, calligraphy, art history, and many others. In terms of recreation I enjoy my weekly philosophy group meetings, tabletop role-playing games with friends, working on new features for my website, foosball, drawing OCs, and the occasional hiking adventure. I have a bunch of life goals which I'm steadily working towards such as writing a book on philosophy, publishing my custom TTRPG system, learning to dance, and possibly even starting a successful YouTube channel.

Here are some fun facts about me:

Back when I taught in the public school system, students often remarked that I look like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! — I can sort of see the resemblance...
I'm somewhat tall in real life — if you'd like to know just how tall, be sure to check out this article
While I think that personality type systems are generally unfounded and unscientific, I have tested as an INTP - 9 from the Myer-Briggs Personality Type System and Enneagram respectively

If you'd like to get in contact with me, feel free to hit me up with an email.

Happy Surfing!

— CHECK OUT THESE PROJECTS! —

Mad Minutes

Mad Minutes is a web application designed to help elementary school students practice their arithmetic. This app was originally developed in response to the remote learning constraints which arose from the COVID-19 pandemic. I made this app in collaboration with my awesome dad: a teacher with 30 years of experience in the Long Beach Unified school District.

Habeas

Habeas is a search engine that can handle .txt and .json files. Click the link to give Habeas a try. Habeas supports AND queries, OR queries, phrase queries, and near queries. Aside from performing queries, Habeas can also list the entire vocabulary of the content of the directory, stem terms, and even perform soundex searches (though currently soundex functionality is limited to the "author" field in .json files). Happy searching!

CoOpTris

A co-op game inspired heavily by Tetris. Get your closest friend and work together to complete as many rows as possible before the inevitable game over! I was able to put this project together in 24 hours for BeachHacks 4.

BeachGames Chess

During the spring of 2018 I enrolled in a class which focused on the .NET framework. The main project for the class involved creating a chess application complete with GUI using C# and WPF. I was fortunate enough to work with fellow computer science student Harold Agnote on this project. Though this assignment is technically complete, Harold and I certainly plan to optimize the speed of our AI players in future builds. This was a really fun assignment and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to work with Harold on this project. Finally, none of this would have been possible without the excellent guidance of our instructor Neal Terrell. Feel free to download our project and give it a quick play. (Note: the build currently available for download does not include the enemy AI)

SweetDreams

SweetDreams is an application which gradually lowers the volume of YouTube videos over a set period of time. All you have to do is paste the URL of a YouTube video into the input field and designate the time you wish the volume to reach zero. This application is perfect for users who enjoy falling asleep with noise but don't want to bother fiddling around with the volume of their devices. Currently this application is not compatible with Apple devices.

Ult-Tic-Tac-Toe

Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is a game I learned sometime in high school. It's an enjoyable game so I thought I'd program my own version of it. I was given a chance to complete this project at BeachHacks 3, a Hackathon hosted by CSULB. Ult-Tic-Tac-Toe ended up winning Best Internationalization. Special thanks to Codeis.Software for their excellent BeachHacks panels.