Some things I have worked on
TI-Runner Editor, a level editor for a Loderunner-like game that I reverse engineered. This sold a few copies in 1987 before the TI/99-4A went under.
The arcade game emulator MAME, for which I did some work on the Windows UI.
Meridian 59, the first 3D MMO. I created this with my brother Chris in 1994, and it was published in 1996. It is available to download on Steam and still runs today.
My master's thesis was implementing the two-phase commit for Thor, an object-oriented database, in Barbara Liskov's group at MIT in 1995.
I built some nice multiplayer networking libraries for the Sega Dreamcast that unfortunately never saw the light of day.
Star Wars: Starfighter, a million-selling space combat game for the Playstation 2 and Xbox (2001). I wrote the graphics, animation and collision detection systems, and snuck in a multiplayer mode as an Easter egg.
Game Programming Gems, a series of books on game programming. I contributed to the first 4 volumes and was the editor of Game Programming Gems 4.
Google Desktop (2004).
Google Maps. I helped launch Maps in 2005.
Google Earth. Engineering director in 2010.
Google Maps for Mobile. Engineering director in 2011.
Google Now. I co-created Google Now and recruited and led the engineering team. It launched in 2012.
Peakbagger, an Android app for tracking mountain climbs, which I wrote in 2014. I released an iOS version in 2015.
I ran an analysis of U.S. terrain data and found 10 new county high points. Here is a KML file with the full results.
I ran an analysis of global terrain data to compute the true isolation of every mountain in the world. A description is here.
After mountain prominence researcher Edward Earl's death in 2015, I helped to restore his WinProm program to a usable state. I later computed the prominence of every mountain in the world here, and wrote a journal article here. In 2020 I updated the results to compute the subsidence of every basin in the world.