About Me

Hello! My name is Jadeon Sheppard and I am a computer programmer and musician. I am a fresh graduate from Medicine Hat College with two diplomas: Business Management and Software Development.

I have plenty of experience developing games for mobile platforms using C++ and OpenGL. I also have a lot of experience with web technologies such as JQuery and NodeJS. I have somewhat recently become very interested in WebAssembly, which is a system that allows programs written in languages like C++ to run in the browser at near native speed.

In my spare time I like to write music. I can sing and play guitar, banjo, piano, ukulele, bass, and drums. I also love to wake surf!

Moon Poll

Moon Poll came from a group project in my final semester of college. I made the entire frontend while the others built the backend and managed the server hardware. I was so happy with the result that I decided to continue the project on my own. With the blessing of the other people in the group I took the frontend code and built a new backend.

While the project was initially ASP, I reworked it to use JQuery and NodeJS. The web page and supporting files are served from AWS S3 as a static website, while the API is running as a Lambda function. It also uses DynamoDB as a database. Using these AWS services I have a full web app running without having to provision and manage any servers, and costing only a few dollars per month.

The entire site itself uses completely original code too, with the exception of JSCookie and JQuery libraries. I am particularly proud of my custom radio boxes which are actually just divs with some JQuery and CSS goodness. I also really enjoy the animations for adding and removing options when creating a poll. There are many more places I plan to add animations to smooth out the experience.

This website is only a prototype at the moment, but it is live and seems to function just fine.

Chirp

Chirp is a mobile game that I developed when I was sixteen years old. I was learning how to use OpenGL at the time and this is what came from that, so the only game engine used was created by myself. It was the first complete product that I saw through to the end and released.

It was initially released on the iOS App Store in December of 2012 and has since been downloaded more than 200,000 times on the platform. In 2014 it was rebuilt from the ground up due to lost code and featured a brand new visual style that is still used today.

Throughout college I would work on it off and on and in August of 2016 a complete Android version was released (even though the port was ready for a year before that).

At this point the game was considered to be in its final form. I wanted to play with other technologies and school started to take up a lot of my time. I wanted to eventually make a second installment of the game and still plan to, but that hasn't happened yet.

In April of 2018 I started to port the game into the browser. I had long been interested in WebAssembly - a form of compiled binary that can run at near-native speed in web browsers - and decided to finally start tinkering with it. At this point I have the game compiling and working on iOS, Android, and WebAssembly using all the same code. The browser version is still very buggy and certain features aren't working. The web version is certainly a work in progress, but it is available to play below.

While it might not be much, Chirp is something I am proud of to this day. It was my start and even inspired the business name that I use from time to time (Chirpadelli). It is something I'll always remember and revisit throughout my professional career.