Sean Xie

mango is a CPU path tracer: it simulates many possible light paths and averages them into an image (Monte Carlo integration). Under the hood, it has a BSDF-based material system, importance sampling, global illumination, and tile- and scanline-based parallel rendering.

I've always liked the almost-magic trick of making a computer produce lifelike images. Physically based rendering was a natural rabbit hole for me.

neural is a from-scratch feedforward neural network. It handles tensor arithmetic and automatic differentiation, includes tanh, softmax, MSE and CCE loss, and trains with mini-batch gradient descent. I want to keep expanding the repo into a broader deep-learning sandbox (e.g. PyTorch scripting and others).

After taking a Neural Networks course at school, I wanted to see what frameworks like PyTorch were doing for me. I soon realized how tedious this is, and now I just want to use PyTorch.

impromptu is a small CPU renderer in C with a minimal OBJ loader. It takes a 3D model through the core stages of a graphics pipeline: loading, transforming, projecting, rasterising, and shading. There are basic optimizations like backface culling and view frustrum culling.

It's called "impromptu" because I started the project on a whim. I found out that graphics punishes fuzzy understanding: coordinate spaces, projections, and shading logic all need to line up exactly before the output makes sense. That made it a very useful learning project.

polygo is a Go math library for constructing, combining, evaluating, and plotting polynomials through a clean API. I'm currently rewriting it with a better internal design.

Math courses gave me the itch to implement the objects I was studying. I also wanted the library to feel pleasant to use, so choices like operator chaining and test coverage became part of the project rather than an afterthought.

tempo is an animation system with keyframes, easing, text and image primitives, and a custom script format. The web app parses a user-written script and plays back the animation in real time.

I kept using keyframes in Blender, Unity, Unreal, and DaVinci Resolve, then got curious about how that kind of system is built. The easing side also let me sneak in some math through reparametrisation.

GitHubCodeBot detects GitHub file links in Discord and replies with formatted code snippets, including syntax highlighting for many languages. If a snippet is too long, it gets split into consecutive messages.

I found it annoying to leave Discord every time a friend shared a GitHub file link. This was a small quality-of-life project, which is often the best kind.