dingbat has evolved many times over the years. What began as a fun way to learn more about the internal workings of emulators and the Crystal programming language became a more elaborate project. It was incredibly entertaining to take deep dives on subtle intricacies of the hardware and watch as each fix would incrementally add support for more games.

More recently, I've used this project as a means to experiment with AI-assisted translations of a codebase, porting the project from Crystal to Nim. It's been a little sad to move from crafting this project with lots of care to guiding an LLM through the paces, but it's been super interesting to experiment with the state-of-the-art tooling in this way.

Like many personal projects, Skin Stats began as a way to solve a niche problem and learn something along the way. I hacked together the first iteration of this project in high school, where it was a way to learn about web development. The next iteration a year later was my means of learning Python, and the current iteration was my means of learning C#.