Atul Varma's (temporary) CS Homepage

This page is under construction.

My resume (PDF)
My resume, in PDF format.

My undergraduate portfolio (1999)
Includes programming projects, art projects (3D rendering/animation, 2D graphic design), papers on interactive narrative and virtual communities, experiments in storytelling, and websites. Although it's a little old, this is still a decent representation of my interests.

Toolness (2001)
Personal website created during my senior year at Kenyon; also a good example of my interests, except it focuses on my influences rather than my creations.

Mini-C Compiler (2004)
This was the final project for my independent study in Compilers with David Beazley. It's a compiler, written in Python, which scans, parses, and compiles a subset of the C language to Intel 80x86 assembly. Click on the link for more information.

The Yalnix Kernel (2004)
This was the final project for my CMSC 33000 Operating Systems course taught by David Beazley. It's an operating system kernel for a pseudo-virtual machine called "Yalnix" (the architecture is similar to that of a PDA, yet it uses SPARC assembly). I worked on this project for a period of approximately ten weeks with my partner Austin Robison; together, we implemented a bootloader in SPARC assembly, physical and virtual memory management, kernel threads, a filesystem, basic process management (fork(), exec(), wait(), etc), low-level hardware I/O, high-level file I/O using file descriptors, semaphores, and more. Aside from the obvious educational benefits of writing an operating system, I feel that one of the most important skills I gained from this assignment was the experience of collaborating with a partner on a medium-sized project using CVS.

AuctionBase Project (2003)
This was the final project for my CMSC 23500 Introduction to Databases course taught by Svetlozar Nestorov. It's a simple auction site with a Python-driven front-end; this layer communicates with an Oracle back-end, with business logic implemented in PL/SQL. Triggers are used for extensive auditing and logging of transactions and errors. The website requires support for CSS, Javascript, and cookies.

C++ Cross-platform Game Development Framework (2003)
This was my final project for the CSPP 51050 Object-oriented Architecture course taught by Mark Shacklette in the summer of 2003. This is really more of a high-level OO multimedia API than a "game development framework" per se, although I intend to expand on it at some point. The above link takes you to the documentation for the project.

Pman, the Pac-Man Clone (2003)
Pman is a cross-platform Pac-Man clone I wrote in C during the summer of 2003. I used C for a number of reasons, and there were more objectives to the project than "just finishing it"; you can read more about it at the above link, which takes you to a postmortem I wrote.

Tooltris, the Tetris Clone (2001)
This is a Tetris clone I wrote in the summer of 2001. The game itself was coded using a combination of C and C++ source files, and graphics were created in Photoshop. Unlike Pman, in which it took 3 weeks to implement the game logic and little time was spent on a GUI or "fancy effects", the opposite was the case with Tooltris.

Humanizing Microsoft Windows (2004)
While taking Jef Raskin's CSPP 56802 Cognetics and Human-Computer Interfaces class, I learned a lot of unusual and eye-opening things about what makes an interface "humane", in Raskin's own words. Unlike most other UI classes, which focus on how to make applications familiar and conformant to operating system "look and feel" guidelines, in Raskin's class we learned about a very different way of thinking about human-artifact interaction. This guide is a result of that way of thinking.

Global Thermonuclear War (2003)
My first Flash program, inspired by the film WarGames.

Working Together Conference Brochure (PDF) (2003)
A brochure I made for an interdisciplinary child abuse conference hosted by the nonprofit I worked for in early 2003. The puzzle pieces were created using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and the publication was composed in Pagemaker.

The Varmas Intro Credits (2002)
This was actually just a goofy video I put together while learning how to use my organization's DV camera (a Canon Elura) and Adobe Premiere; it was a parody of the introductory credits to the HBO series The Sopranos, starring my father as the lead character and chronicling his drive from Hyde Park to downtown Chicago. The (very) short film ended up being something of a hit amongst my friends and family, although I can't post it here because the file is too large.

Nike Satire (2001)
This is a sort of Swiftian satire/thought experiment I made while I was casually learning about economics at the end of my last year at Kenyon. Note that I didn't hate capitalism then, and I certainly don't now; it's intended purely to make the reader think, regardless of their political disposition.