My Portfolio

 

Website Design, Development, and Fun Stuff:

  • MelissaFedak.com

    This site! Designed and developed 2011. No templates, nothing fancy. Just me, my keyboard, and Notepad++.

  • Travel Map (PHP)

    Create a map of everywhere you've been (using Plotly). I wrote this in PHP and MySQL in 2026 (finally, a new mini project!)

  • Blackjack (JavaScript)

    Play Blackjack in your browser. I wrote this in JavaScript in 2002.
    Features: Chips / bet changeable at any point. Watch chips change as you win and lose. If you play enough, a waitress will offer you a drink, but you better tip her or she might not come back. A Hint option will display standard guidelines.
    Limitations:You can only split once. A blackjack wins double instead of one and a half. No insurance. Max chip display is $10,490. (Also, I never finished creating card images.)

  • Mickie's Sweet Spot

    Site for a local business and friend. Developed in 2015 using WordPress. (And now, sadly, defunct.)

  • Kanji Challenge (JavaScript)

    Practice kanji in your browser. I wrote this in JavaScript in 2002.

    I wrote this to both improve my JavaScript and my Japanese. Several hundred of the most common Kanji are input into the game. (Kanji = Chinese Characters that have been absorbed into the Japanese language, often altered in sound and meaning.) There is also a kana challenge option. (Kana = Japanese syllabary.) Definitions came from a variety of dictionaries, but the alternate choices were decided by me. (Obviously, many more cool ways to learn kanji online now exist but back then, not so much!)

  • Riverrun.us

    Site for Riverrun Designs, a local business and artisan owner (screenshot since it's now defunct.) Designed and developed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with so many beautiful images of rocks and gems) in 2003.

  • Driving in Japan (and Passing the Driver's Test)

    An internet guide I wrote in Japan after my own experiences with the matter. Designed and written in 2004 (and gawd, it's so very 90's; gag me with a font tag.)
    But if you thought getting a driver's license in the U.S. was difficult...

  • SuperMelf.com

    My previous site (still live to the world, embarrassingly enough). Designed and developed 2002. (And, no it's not that other acronym. To explain, "Mel" are the first three letters of my name and "F" is my last initial. It rhymes with elf, which I thought was cute. This is purely innocent.)

  • Generic Guestbook (PHP)

    Back in the early days of personal web pages (geocities, anyone?), there was the concept of a Guestbook where your visitors could sign in and say hello. This concept is gone now for a variety of reasons, however, in that time, I was determined to never put a guestbook on my page unless I built it myself. In 2005, I belatedly realized my goal, learned some PHP, and put together a cute little guestbook. I put the working page up briefly, but got tired of deleting spam, so took it down. But the source is still here.

    View Source Code

Writing:

  • My Travel Journals
    On this site. More than a decade of experiences and blunders living and traveling overseas.
  • The Wind and the Ticks: a Lake Baikal Trek
    A hike in Siberia and the small creatures who came along, a guest blog for the UK Travel Site The Russia Experience
  • Works in Progress:
    • No Shortcut to the Sun (Gravityball trilogy #1)
      Young Adult Science Fiction
      Avalae, a loyal rebel in an underground city, lives for the day she can help overthrow the tyrannical government. Ordered to kill a traitor at seventeen, she dutifully pulls the trigger. But the act haunts her. When she's assigned to infiltrate the highest office on the planet and assassinate the arch prime, she struggles. Doubts arise. She suspects the government is not as oppressive as she was led to believe and that the rebels may be the true tyrants. But she must not fail or she'll be considered a traitor. And she's learned firsthand what the rebels do to traitors.
    • Mona and the Talking Spoon
      Middle Grade Speculative Fiction
      Mona, a 12-year-old who can hear objects talk, is determined that, when her family moves to the city that she'll keep her 'weirdness' to herself. It will be hard. The city is deafening compared to the countryside. But she just wants to fit in and, hopefully, if she ever finds science textbook not full of pre-teen snark, become a biolgist or vetenarian. All that changes when her only friend at the school is kidnapped. But will anyone believe she knows what she knows?
    • Thirty-Nine Hours
      Adult Urban Fantasy
      Lance, a lonely immortal stuck for over two centuries in the body of a 25-year-old, saves the lives of two urban professionals from San Francisco leading to the discovery of others like him, but ones who are at odds about their greater purpose.
    • The Ayara Tyranny
      Young Adult Fantasy
      When the beloved prince of the land is mortally threatened, Elise must decide whether to risk revealing herself as a powerful Ayara to save his life, knowing she'd be condemning her family and others to execution. But is the prejudice against the Ayara as undeserved as she believes?
  • Creative Writing Activities
    A collection of writing prompts collected from multiple groups I participated in.

Programming:

  • MelfBlock (Java)

    I wrote this in Java (mostly to get back into Java) in 2005. Click to play the applet. This is a simplified version of a common game, sometimes called Breakout. You can change the speed and watch the cute little happy face fly across the screen, but you cannot control the angle in this version. However, it works as a fun waste of time.

    View Java Source Code

    Update: And..... applets aren't really a thing any longer for security reasons. Oh well.

  • System Lotto (Pascal)

    I developed this in 2001 using Delphi (Pascal) for a client. I developed this from beginning to end, including attached database and installation CD. Source not available since this is a product.


  • Chesslet (C)

    This is a silly little gamelet I wrote back in the day in plain ol' C. The point of the game is to checkmate the lone black king on the other side. There is not any Chess AI involved, but it is still a useful tool to practice endgames. To help achieve this end, the game shows you every space on the board you have protected. If the space is red, the king cannot move there. You can choose what pieces you start with (the computer player only starts with a king) then, beginning with all pieces in start position, you play out the game. However, if you like, you can download it here. (Doesn't work in Windows 7 or 64-bit OSes.)