Tyler Higgs
Software Engineer

Rust puzzle generator and solver publishes puzzles to a Node server which saves them to a Firebase database. Angular frontend fetches and displays puzzles with a clean, responsive UI. Features include pencil marks and multiple difficulty levels. CI/CD pipeline runs unit and end-to-end tests and deploys to Firebase Hosting. IndexedDB is used for local storage and offline support.

Later on I thought it would be cool to make the games collaborative, so I added real-time multiplayer using Firebase real-time database. This was a fun challenge to implement, as I had to think about how to handle conflicts and merging changes from multiple users. I used an event-driven architecture and optimistic updates to make the experience as smooth as possible. To ensure consistency, I added end-to-end testing with Playwright to cover concurrent multi-user edge cases, including editing the same cell at the same time. I also added a chat feature!

Searchable cheat-sheet for Kendo CSS utilities using Next.js SSG and Fuse.js fuzzy search, improving accessibility and efficiency for developers. The site is search engine optimized, fully accessible, mobile-friendly, and supports light and dark modes.

I built this project to solve my own problem at my last company: Kendo UI is a powerful CSS framework, but its documentation is lacking. Finding the right utility class often requires digging through multiple pages of docs or trial and error. This cheat sheet makes it easy to quickly find the class you need, improving developer productivity.

I challenged myself to build this project in a week, and I did it by going with the simplest solutions possible, while still using best practices to prevent future road blocks.

Buy-vs-rent retirement calculator with reactive charts and light/dark support. UX to clarify tradeoffs and surface actionable retirement outcomes for users.

Several years ago, I wanted to know whether I should rent or buy a home. Homes build equity, but loss from opportunity cost of the down payment make this a difficult question to answer once and for all.

Beyond engineering decisions, I needed to find a good way to fairly compare the two options, while communicating the tradeoffs to users. I decided to focus on retirement outcomes assuming users invest every dollar they have, as this is a long-term decision with significant financial implications.