Sam Poder
GitHub ~ Twitter ~ Instagram ~ Mastodon
👋 G'day! My name is Sam. I'm an Australian who grew up in Singapore; nowadays, I'm living in the United States and learning all about computers at Berkeley. Hack yeah!
I enjoy making things (mostly involving code), running hackathons and learning about random pieces of trivia.
Here's are a couple of projects I'm proud of:
🌏 A 4D multimedia experience showcasing the upcoming challenges caused by global warming.
🎶 An interactive sound festival built for Innovation Week 2021 (built using Sonic Pi).
🌁 The behind-the-scenes of the first high school hackathon since the pandemic!
Here's what I've been up to recently (from my Scrapbook):
Sun, Sep 17
🇨🇦 Hack The North 2023! @ImDeet-U045B4BQ2T0 @fayd and I teamed up to make Hack The Geese ! It was a game that attendees could play using the QR codes on their badges. Here’s how’d it work: 1. You’d scan your badge’s QR code to log in. 2. Your find someone who you’d like to compete against and scan their badge’s QR code. 3. You’d both receive a prompt, eg. “take a selfie with a someone with blue hair”. 4. You’d race to take a fun picture based on the prompt before the other player does. 5. You either win or lose, then you got to choose wether or not to rematch! You can go to htgeese.tech/album to see all the photos that folks took during demos with the game (and many more of me stressing over the backend)! We used a slightly cursed combination of a Next.js frontend and a backend written in Go which interacted with one another through Websockets…. yeah, very cursed and very jank. We also used Vercel’s new Postgres & Blob storage services which were surprisingly good. And, of course, we used Prisma…. including it’s slightly hacky spin-off Go client. Another awesome part of the game was @ImDeet-U045B4BQ2T0 custom designed geese (GEESE!)htn-goose-1: Every player got one of these made for them when they first signed! The game was a bunch of fun to play IRL and we had people playing it throughout the demo session. Attached is a sick selfie of @fayd in his sunnies and the judge! And at the end of the day, somehow, we were selected as winners so we got to demo on stage and won a couple of prizes which was pretty cool! Here’s us playing a game with all the attendees and a couple of other photos from the weekend (including us working on the project while on #hack-night!). The GitHub is full of more photos and stories from the weekend: github.com/sampoder/hack-the-geese. O CANADA!
Sat, Sep 9
fire trails!
Wed, Sep 6
Made this fun little gizmo on HCB which let’s you generate custom QR codes for yourself! thanks @ian for helping me out with all the Rails standards and stuff
Wed, Sep 6
I’m taking a class on PCBs this term! In the first session we made a schematic for a light sensor in KiCad…. yeah it was fun (ignore the spaghetti) :D
Mon, Aug 21
the bay is incredible
Wed, Jul 12
Dev & I went to a laser cutting class at the Generator! We met a guy who was learning to laser cut coconuts
Wed, Jul 12
Dev & I went to a laser cutting class at the Generator! We met a guy who was learning to laser cut coconuts
Fri, Jul 7
@ThomasStubblefield and I were talking about ChatGPT-based games recently…. I tried my hand at making a never ending “choose your own adventure” using OpenAI’s API. it’s super hacky but its a fun proof of concept: gist.github.com/sampoder/407d146b637c06f096c80894828177df.
Fri, Jun 23
made this small little script that makes a mosaic sort of thing in your terminal using Go! it’s nothing much but i’m trying to learn a bit of Go this summer. github.com/sampoder/go-art-experiment/tree/main
Mon, Jun 12
We’re seven weeks out from Outernet! It’s time to make the event a reality. I arrived in Vermont tonight and thought it’d be nice to start a video diary of the event’s behind-the-scenes, here’s “Episode Zero”.
Tue, Apr 25
Thu, Mar 30
after fighting the PyPortal for weeks (and taking a bit of a hiatus as @arsh7chetana @NeilGhosh & I have exams), I’ve got a version of the information screen for our WHW project working! it’s scaled back from the original idea but that’s alright. next up, I’m going to get our neopixels working.
Wed, Mar 22
caches! in #caches, we created the art for the boxes that we’ll be using as caches. For a bit of fun we included a small easter egg that uses the cipher wheel! It was also interesting learning about PURL from @reesericci here’s the Figma file we’re using: www.figma.com/file/gTQBOkFdXCQUeL2yQhmuki/the-cache. The next step for us is getting these laser cut / engraved! And then ship them around the world...
Tue, Mar 21
19,626 posts have been made by 860 Hack Clubbers in #scrapbook since June 2020 (this was my first post from back in the day!). Just under three years later, it’s time for Scrapbook to evolve.
We’ve always wanted more clubs to post on Scrapbook, however, many club members aren’t on the Slack. Now you can create a Scrapbook profile entirely from the web! This will give club members a space to share what they’re creating in their clubs. Alongside that, accounts can be created / managed from the web and you react to posts like you do in #scrapbook.
Leaders: head to
Thu, Mar 16
Democracy!
Thu, Feb 23
WHW! Fixed the 500 error on gramophone-502x.vercel.app/api/currently that Toby spotted :D
Wed, Feb 22
Used Vercel’s @og-image package to generate images for the currently playing song that I can then display on the PyPortal (once I get it working). Try it out: gramophone-502x.vercel.app/api/currently!
Tue, Feb 21
whw! bashing my head on a wall as I try to figure out this error when trying to display an album cover on the PyPortal
Mon, Feb 20
still working out the jns and outs of the pyportal! soon it'll look like...
Sun, Feb 19
whw! setup by pyportal!
Sat, Feb 18
got pausing and resuming songs working!
Fri, Feb 17
Got the first part of the project working! Arsh's resin records have been coming along well as well!
Thu, Feb 16
hit a brick wall with my code! got the WiFi working but I'm still a bit stick with the RFID module... will try again tomorrow
Wed, Feb 15
worked on two pieces of software for ! I’ve got the basic RFID reading code for the NodeMCU and also some serverless functions to control my Spotify account.
Tue, Feb 14
whw! in 30 deg c anyways, today I worked on making a schematic for the laser cut box @arsh7chetana is making tomorrow :D in the meantime, @arsh7chetana made a silicone mold of a record! (poor @NeilGhosh has mock exams…)
