Junaid Nomani

Senior Backend/Fullstack Engineer + Senior Systems Engineer + Director
Throw me the hardest problems you got, and I'll make art out of the solutions.

Professional Experience

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you are a mile away from them and you have their shoes.” —Jack Handey

Pigeon Simulator

Open World Physics Sandbox
GTA + BOTW + Roguelike

My Contributions:
- Resource Manager that guarantees framerate via async coroutines that yield CPU time.
- Building Creation/Destruction. Fully procgened and  optimized using GPUInstancing, Object Pooling, and Multithreaded Job system.
- Every floor of every building enterable via recursive constraint solving procgen algorithm.
- Runtime Road creation with easy to use tools to build roads with functional traffic, vehicles and pedestrians.
- Multithreaded performant Vehicle and traffic system.
- Refactored AI to be more performant and advanced.
- Tile Set/Plaza editor tool that allows designers to easily create nested objects that can be recursively procgened.
- Test Driven Development using Functional Programming principles. To maintain complex systems.
- Code review per commit + Detailed documentation.

A video showcasing my contributions to the game with gameplay.

Terminal

PVP Tower Defense: AI Coding Game 

My Contributions:
- Directed every aspect of development: game design, frontend, backend, and deployments.
- Managed team of roughly 4 core engineers, 2 artists, and 3 business operators.
- Created entire game engine from scratch in Java.
Online Game Server in Java using websockets.
- Fully scalable GCS tech stack: Kubernetes+Docker
- RESTful Django backend with PostgreSQL
- Frontend and game graphics via Vue and pixi.js
- Developed documentation accessible to both coworkers, as well as online players.
- Bespoke testing apparatus guaranteeing perfect
precision to ensure integrity for large prize pools.

Tournament Finals casted by my former apprentice Ryan.

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Talentstat & Assessments Platform

Game-Like assessments to test prospective portfolio managers and data scientists.

My Contributions:
- Real-time Frontend in React
- RESTful Backend in Flask + SQLAlchemy + PostgreSQL
- Optimized database architecture and queries that could handle large scales
- Robust Backend and Frontend Regression and Integration tests.

Nuclear Submarine Operating System
@General Dynamics

Gigantic C++ and Java legacy codebase

Used every OOP design pattern under the sun

Very strict military coding standards

My Contributions:
Enemy detection display,
Physics calculations for Radar,
UI components,
Intra-system networking

Independent Games

“When life gives you lemons, trade them for coffee and chase your dreams.” – Anonymous
(I'm actually a weirdo who doesn't drink caffeine, but I can do all-nighters without them)

Winnie The Pooh:
Brotherhood of Blood 

Realtime Online PVP souls-like action game, Dark Souls 2 biggest influence.

(Q1 2024 Expected Release)
- Developing in Unreal. Older working cross-platform prototype in Unity with low level socket networking
- Designed strategic gameplay focused on timing and prediction with high commitment on attacks
- Gameplay is fast paced but cleverely designed to be high ping tolerant. Intelligent input buffering and animation canceling for fluid game feel even online
- Animation acceleration lag compensation inspired by rollback netcode
- Client side prediction for instant input feedback
- Support for both Peer2Peer and Server Authoritative to manage server costs.

Coming Soon: Gameplay of an early prototype

Magi: Mind Game

Online Competitive PVP Simultaneous-Turn Strategy Game

- Full Online Backend: Python, Flask, MySQL
- Unique AI that used efficient Neural Networks to mimic real player behavior trained on their gameplay. Automated to generate new AI as players play more games.
- Advanced ranking system using Glyco2 MMR algorithm with a customized tier system on top. Providing ranking experience similar to AAA titles such as League of Legends, Battlerite, etc.
- Managed 4 person team of 3D and 2D artists, nurturing open-ended creativity while maintaining scope and coordinating vision.

Trailer (same as on steam page).

Swing Hard or Sweat Trying VR

Dark Fantasy Boss Rush VR Game Genuine Workout required to git gud

(Q4 2024 Expected Release)
- Custom real-time VR tracking and physics to enable accurate damage values for attacks based on player's real life swing speed
- Can deflect enemy attacks, physically interrupting animations. Requiring an elaborate Physics Ragdoll + Animator setup
- Created custom shaders and VFX with with Shader and VFX graphs
- Utilized Inverse Kinematics and a custom Animation Queue framework to create reactive bosses.

Early gameplay footage with placeholder graphics and VFX

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Live to Want

Online RPG where everything in ecosystem is simulated and evolves

(In development)
- Created multithreaded lockless game engine in pure Rust.
- Custom multithreaded hierarchical path-finding algorithm
- AI NPCs capable of anything players can do by inventing a new graph based AI framework similar to GOAP called Reward Oriented Action Planning
- Test Driven Development. As you can see from the picture on the right->

Older Released Games

Fear For Freedom

Short Fun Horror Game. Very hate it or love it depending on if you get the point. Over 32k+ downloads

Turtle: Voidrunner

Grapple-Hook based infinite runner. Zen-like experience, not punishing like other platformers, but still challenging.

Misc Projects

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PhD Research: Program Phases

Created low level code in C/C++ to utilize Machine Learning to augment linux scheduler.
Modified low-level Linux Kernel Code.

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Independent Yale investment group

Developed a proprietary Neuro-Evolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT)
system in Java and Python for stock prediction. Invented new mutation, fitness, reproduction and neural network structures.

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Decentralized Ring Network File Sharing System

Developed in C++ featuring: social trust
networks, gossip messenger protocols, distributed hash tables, byzantine consensus algorithms,
hierarchical directories, cacheing, and various encryption protocols

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Undergraduate Research: Code Reuse Attacks

Research into protecting against Code Reuse attacks via detecting them at the CPU level.
Paper Accepted into top conference HPCA-2013 :
"SCRAP: Architecture for Signature-based Detection of Code Reuse Attacks"

Fun Stuff

"Hahaha" - People laughing at my jokes

Hobbies

Yes, I'm aware its a stereotype for programmers to do BJJ and Rock Climbing.
Rock Climbing

I'm very bad at, but very in love with, dynos (dynamic movements). Its when you have to do jumps and stuff.

Brazilian Jujitsu

Old footage. I'm very out of shape now lol.

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Fasting

I've done some weird things like fasting (no food, only water and vitamins) for long periods of time. Longest being 14 days. Its much easier than you think trust me.

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3D Printing

I used to sell cases for making hitbox-style fighting game arcade controllers on Etsy until my account got hacked :(.

Short Stories I've Written (That People Liked)

I've written a lot more, but I'll just include some of the well liked ones. I wrote a long 110k word novel too but its not good, yet.
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Of Mice and Super Men 

Prompt: You're a supervillain with one specific power - you can force actual physics to apply to reality-breaking superpowers

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Bad Dog

Prompt: You get home and your dog's at the door waiting for you. "Who's a good boy", you ask. He starts weeping and says "Not me."

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Killer Victim

Prompt: It's your last night on death row. The fried chicken was surprisingly good. Under your beer there is a note that says, "Once they've killed you, come and find me." It's signed, "One of your victims".