Phil Berger

Blog

Follow along as I scream into the void.

I don't want this to be a traditional blog. I'd like to think of each post as an issue in a volume of old school zines.

About Me

I'm originally from Alton, Illinois, which is a suburb of St. Louis, MO. Aside from some meandering in the UK and an ill-conceived winter in South Dakota, that's where I lived most of my life until 2017, when I moved to Rochester, New York.

I'm a software engineer with a lifelong passion for all things creative. I've been writing code for longer than some coders have been alive, and my 20-year career has been a winding path full of cool projects in a variety of industries, interesting people, side quests, and misadventures.

This site is just my little sandbox where I put stuff.

Projects

Here you will find a collection of side projects and fun little things I whip up to learn something or keep my skills sharp. I will also include a breakdown of languages, libraries, and frameworks I like to use, as well as tips and tricks, and whatnot that have helped me over the years.

Projects > Ocean Rivals' Curious People: Album As App

Several lifetimes I go, I worked in the music industry. I worked with a few bands you might know, and more than a few bands you don't. Ocean Rivals might have been my favorite. Sadly, they fell into the latter group of bands you probably missed.

One night, they invited me over to hear a new EP they were working on. They also wanted to pick my brain on how to release it. Fortunately, I did have one idea up my sleeve.

The ability to distribute music digitally opened up a lot of opportunities for bands, but it also killed the album experience. It always seemed to me that a web browser would be the ultimate canvas to create that immersive experience. The loved the idea. They gave me some artwork to play with and ten hours and a bottle or two of Jack Daniels later, we came up with this.

I kind of cringe at the code now. It doesn't hold up on modern mobile browsers, but it is gorgeous on a laptop or desktop. It's nowhere near the most visible website I've made. But it's kinda my favorite.

There's not a lot to talk about under the hood. I used CSS to create a parralax scrolling effect, and JQuery to manipulate native HTML media playing and scrolling. I could definitely make it better now, but I still stand by it as a proof of concept if nothing else.

Projects > Video Player With Auto-loading Commentary

So I love old school horror movies. The crappy B-movie kind. Which means I love MST3K. I also used to love watching "Pop Up Videos" on VH1 back in the day. So I put all of those things together into this video player that loads snarky commentary in the browser.

Projects > Sports Statistical Analyzer

Confession time: I'm a bit of a math nerd. And a lot of a sports nerd.

I've been working off and on for a while on a JavaScript library that could analyze and visualize data. And I'm using some basic sports datasets as my guinea pigs. It's still pretty rough and I'm kinda reinventing the wheel. But it's fun. And it's gonna be pretty bitch when it's done.

I'm using XML with XSLT conversions. Which is kind of old school but I like it for data. XSLT can be cumbersome until you get the hang of it, but I like the fact I can basically make an HTML database.

Photography

Photo Galleries

I compulsively take pictures. Of everything. Sometimes with a DSLR, often with my phone.

Coming Soon

Whiskey Journal - I loooove whiskey. I actually keep a journal of all the whiskeys I drink. It's in one of those big 5-subject notebooks and it's falling apart. So I'm in the process of converting it to html and I'm going to post it here as soon as I'm done with it.