Computer Science
Sam "Shimi" Halperin
I'm an American computer scientist living outside of Philadelphia. As a Jewish-American Xennial, I’ve always been drawn to emerging technology—I was of the first generations to suffer the combination of 16bit graphics and ubiquitous (in my case a dedicated phone line) networks as an adolescent. After more than a decade working with B-Corps and nonprofits in Philadelphia, I now work as an independent maker focused on open-source projects.
Opinion
This is me 'waffling' on a variety of disparate topics. All opinions are my own and do not reflect the perspective of employers or clients.
Technical Exegesis
These are less traditional tutorial and more like dev logs of things I've picked up along the way. We used to have a whiteboard at school with the title "how did you do that", where people would share techniques. That's kind of what this is.
An exit from VR with a cautionary warning
I want to leave a footnote to my VR work as a caution, given that I am now moving on to other work. It is essentially this: VR is a ‘Gluttonous Interface’ (there is a paper by the same name from the Randy Pausch era).Fully occluding two senses - sight and sound is a terrible idea. One can imagine all kinds of cyberpunk nightmares. Perhaps VR’s saving grace is the ability to don avatars, but it’s not worth it to me.
© All content copyright Samuel Halperin, 1999–2025.