2023

Reaction Timer was something I made for the AP Statistics class at my high school that tests reaction/response times to various light and sound stimuli.

Edit Bookmarklet was a small script I wrote to save local changes to websites using localStorage, as well as restore such changes.

Siddhartha Analysis was a website that I made for my AP Literature class analyzing Herman Hesse's Siddhartha through the guise of Siddhartha's friend Govinda. Be sure to click "Intro" first!

2022

Interactive World Cup Bracket is a website to show standings from the 2022 FIFA World Cup. It's the most popular project I had made, netting over 140K views during the course of the tournament and getting to #2 on Hacker News!

This Website! Probably something like the tenth iteration of it, but it's something I've finally settled on.

BlueJ Breakout was my culminating AP Computer Science A project, it was a remake of Atari Breakout in Java. The "BlueJ" in the name refers to Oracle BlueJ which was the IDE we used in class. It was pretty fun to make!

▓▓▓▓▓▓ is a super secret iOS App I'm working on. It's going to be my biggest project yet, and I can't wait to share it!

ErgVR [WIP] is a web application I made that connects to a Concept2 rowing machine. It is designed to emulate the style of iFit treadmill workouts, while staying free and customizable. It uses MapBox to provide realistic terrain, measurements, and imaging during workouts. Eventually it will support live side-by-side racing against other ergs, as well as many other features.

Equation Clock is a simple clock website made for my parent's third-grade classroom. It displays the time of day with simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication problems. The colors are customizable by tapping/clicking on the numbers. It is designed to be run full screen on a wall-mounted tablet.

'v' was an effort to use the kmonad keyboard configurator to emulate a global Vim-like command system for MacOS.

webwombat is a powerful web proxy service. It enables people to write complex rules to reroute and rewrite traffic.

History Timeline was a website I made for World History in 10th grade. With speedy internet, it should look pretty cool!

textiles was the first website I made for a client.

2021

The Reactor is another sort of "joke" Slack app I made that reacts to all messages in a channel with emojis. It loops through each word in the message and finds the closest matching emoji. It works best in a large workspace with lots of custom emojis (like Hack Club, which has almost 8K!), because you can get some pretty random outcomes. It gets rather annoying after a while, so I don't recommend adding it to a large channel.

koral is an ongoing attempt to create a distributed computing system.

nosource.cole.ws was a kind of easter egg/treasure hunt that I devised to test people's HTML and JavaScript skills. It got really really popular and people on Hacker News spent hours trying to solve it!

API is a small little server-side Python script that I use for a good deal of different services for different projects. It has a nice QR Code generator!

cole-wilson/dns is a custom OctoDNS workflow that uses TOML files that sync with Cloudflare DNS. It's a thin wrapper around vanilla OctoDNS, but I find it much easier to work with. Not only does it help facilitate DNS updates, but it also helps create a backup if Cloudflare goes down or if a domain expires.

oly.hackclub.com is a website for the Olympia High School Hack Club, which is a school club I co-run with another hacker. It meets every Friday during Beartime B in room 314 (if you know what that means).

Swapper is yet another Slack app that "swaps" everyone's profiles (but only if they sign up!) on Slack for a set period of time. It causes utter chaos! It makes it so that you "become" another person's account (profile photo/bio/name/etc.). After an hour or so, you are all "swapped" back to the original account.

ASCII Facetime/Zoom is a proof-of-concept project I made to transmit camera images over TCP sockets and display it in color in the terminal.

Lightning Edit was a Slack app I developed for the Hack Club Slack that automatically edits your typos using a basic syntax. For example, if you sent the message "helo", you could send "*hello" and LightningEdit will automatically edit your first message, while deleting the correction. It also features sed-style replacement (*/replace_this/with_this/gi), and can go back more than one message (just add *s). Unfortunately due to hosting issues, this bot is no longer active, but it is open source!

Adicity / Parity / Golfity are a set of projects based on the Adicity language engine. This is a Python program I made to create small specific programming languages. Adicity is the engine, while Parity and Golfity are both code-golfing languages based on Python.

Pixel Art is another Slack bot that converts images to tiled emojis using Python.

ORF-4450 Inventory was a program I made to be run on a Raspberry Pi for my local FRC robotics team (#4450) that would enable team members to scan and inventory parts in a SQL database, as well as print labels for them.

equationpainter generates interactive "paint-by-number" math worksheet spreadsheets. I made it for an elementary school teacher, and it is distributed as a packaged/frozen Python app that makes use of Chrome for an interface.

OverPop is a website that I made for my ninth grade Honors Biology class. It is an interactive view of the dangers and causes of overpopulation on today's world, with an added narration and interactive globe. The background for this website was "space themed" which provided a challenge because I had to learn a lot of CSS! This website is probably the one that really made me learn CSS for good and inspired future websites.

2020

Sailboat is a quick and easy way to distribute your Python projects! I spent an enormous amount of time on this, and it was the first large project I created. A full description is available at the link above. I presented at PyCon USA about it when I was a high school freshman. A YouTube demo of the project can be found here. The project is not under active development anymore, but feel free to fork it!

Nought is a file organizer written in Python. It allows you to sort files by date, by name, by type (even "screenshot"), by date modified, by user permissions, and run scripts on them, rename/move them and a whole lot more!

AssignmentLogger was an incredibly large undertaking that was based off of the earlier work I did on the homework tracker below. AssignmentLogger allowed students (and teachers!) to create accounts with their school emails and post the homework assignments for each class. Of course, there were no answers posted, but it helped students track their workload over time, and even had a Schoology calendar integration! It was eventually discontinued as my school district migrated to online school.

Teacher Spreadsheet was a spreadsheet I made to practice Google Sheets skills and help out a teacher I knew. It allows teachers to configure a gradebook with students and assignments, track standards and growthg, and send home progress reports to parents.

LEGO Boost Dot-Matrix Printer I created a simple dot-matrix printer by using LEGO Boost blocks and a networked Raspberry Pi. I had a lot of fun with this, and it turned out really well.

colewilson.xyz was my first website! It eventually became too bloated, but there is a ton of stuff I learned from it, like how to write CSS. I also put a little scavenger hunt into it as well....

"Scrape" Science Fair Project was a big project I undertook as part of my culminating 8th grade science project. It used a web scraper to analyze news websites and compare word frequencies between conservative- and liberal-leaning articles. I then compared these on a chart.

~2019

Homework Tracker was a simple website (no longer maintained) that provided links to homework and resources for students at my middle school. A good portion of the school used it! It was an important precursor to AssignmentLogger, which I would make later.

Visit New York was a simple 8th grade Social Studies project. It was fun! I worked with 2 others for the content.

~2018

Webmole was a PHP-based web proxy that fetched sites remotely to bypass my school's web filter. I only used it for coolmathgames.com, but it was a fun exercise to program.

"MathBuddies" was a website that had absolutely nothing to do with chess, it instead was a hosting space for Flash games like those on coolmathgames.com. It was pretty popular in 7th grade!

Anaconda was almost the first Python program I every wrote, and the first time I used GitHub. It was a graphing calculator that used Python's turtle library. It only really works on old Python versions, and I don't have the patience to go back and refactor the code. However, I put it here as a an example of my early work.