Portfolio: Philip Peterson

Copia Automation: Diffing and Merge Tool (2022)

The software behind conveyor belts, robotics, and machinery (known as "Industrial Automation") was stuck in the Dark Ages. When controls engineers needed to change code, they typically edited project files without version control, attempting to manually track the versions via filename. This procedure is prone to error, data loss, and lack of visibility.
That all changed when Copia came around. Copia offers a record-keeping system to these engineers in the PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) space. It does this by packaging Git with additional vendor extensions and hosting it on a platform similar to Github. It therefore allows for a system of record for managing industrial automation code.
This project's goal was to implement a visual merge conflict editor. Because the code being written in the Industrial Automation space is largely visual programming, merge conflicts are also visual, and graph-based instead of text-based.
Interestingly, graph-based merge conflicts are quite complex to visualize. There are three sources of truth in a merge conflict: source, base, and target. Showing them all while still maintaining usability was a real design challenge.
Close collaboration, therefore, between me and our designer, Sinan Goral, was key to this project. Many divergent special cases developed, since certain blocks in a project might be password-protected and could not be displayed, but they still needed to be logically mergeable. Those blocks may also have failed to load due to a number of other vendor-specific issues, which also needed to be explained to the user.
The end result was a sophisticated but still user-friendly diffing and merging tool  for use in a vertical badly needing a transformative product.
Based on the customer feedback, I am proud to say we improved people's lives and workflows on this one!

ATC Sim (2015)

Could you be an Air Traffic Controller? Well, if you can beat this game, you just might have the chops required.
This is a casual arcade game made using Processing.js and joins game design together with music to create an exciting and hair-raising experience.
For this project, I was fortunate enough to secure the blessing of Antonio Pompa-Baldi to use his brilliant performance of Chopin's Winter Wind piano etude to heighten the tension to its maximum.
Play Online
Soundtrack courtesy of Antonio Pompa-Baldi

Amplitude Analytics (2016-2018)

At Amplitude, together we implemented many great business analytics features. I joined the company early in its history, Series A, as part of the Applications Team, and implemented:
This was a very close-knit team, and we had the privilege of building an application and a culture nearly from scratch together. I will always remember Amplitude as one of my foundational experiences.

Riven, Prison Island: Dynamic Sky Shader (2012)

Toward the goals of the long-running Riven remake project I was part of, I partnered with the brilliant Everett Gunther, an artist of many disciplines, to create this dynamic sky shader.
It was implemented in Unity 3D using ShaderLab, a multi-target Cg/HLSL toolkit. The design was delivered to me as a Blender material node graph (hundreds of nodes) which I then converted into code. It pushed up against the instruction limits for shaders at the time.
A controller was written to dynamically swap in and out sky images (streaming from the hard disk), fading between frames (4 frames per texture, each stored as a single-channel greyscale frame in RGBA channels). I also wrote the game logic for this area.
The sky was eventually turned into a commercial product, Ultra Dynamic Sky.
Watch Online

The Trails Airpark: Public Website (2024)

This was a pro-bono piece of work I did, a Wordpress implementation of a website for a private neighborhood, supporting bulletin board postings such as budget PDFs and meeting minutes.
I wrote the website copy to evoke an image of the peaceful and natural surroundings that the community represents, while also portraying some of the historical context unique to the airpark.