I developed a Simple Telegram bot that automatically adds Spotify tracks to a shared playlist whenever they are pasted in a Telegram chat. My friends and I regularly exchange music in our Telegram group chat, and we wanted a seamless way to compile all our shared tracks into one playlist. The bot utilizes the Telegram Bot API and the MTProto API to interact with Telegram, while the Spotify Web API handles interactions with Spotify. Built using Node.js, the project comprises three main components: The server  manages Spotify authentication and tokens, ensuring secure and efficient communication with the Spotify API. The bot application handles the Telegram bot's operations, monitoring the chat for new Spotify track links and adding them to the shared playlist. Finally the populate-history script  accesses the entire message history of our Telegram group chat, extracts all previously shared Spotify tracks, and adds them to the playlist. This bot streamlines the process of creating a collaborative playlist, making it easy for us to enjoy and discover new music together.

SJGMusic Telegram Bot

In collaboration with Colliding Lines and Point Positive Publishing, I undertook the task of developing the website for Chronic Poetics, an insightful anthology that sheds light on the nuances of living with chronic conditions. The website serves as a digital companion to the printed collection, offering visitors an immersive experience into the world of Chronic Poetics. Through a seamless integration of essays, poetry, images, and design, the website encapsulates the essence of the anthology, providing a platform for individuals to explore and understand the challenges and triumphs of those living with chronic conditions. One of the website's key features is the inclusion of exclusive interviews with the artists featured in the publication, offering readers a deeper insight into their creative process and personal experiences. Additionally, the website hosts supplementary pieces not found in the printed book, enriching the audience's engagement with the content. Furthermore, the website serves as an educational resource by providing access to medical information for further reading, fostering a greater understanding of chronic conditions among the audience. It's worth noting that Chronic Poetics is made possible through the generous support of public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, underscoring the significance of this project in the realm of arts and culture. Through its approach, the Chronic Poetics website aims to amplify the voices of those navigating life with chronic conditions, fostering empathy, understanding, and dialogue within our society.

Chronic Poetics

Promaton is a dynamic team of young, driven engineers and scientists dedicated to revolutionising patient care in dentistry. I am honoured to be a part of this amazing company that deploys cutting-edge AI, cloud platform technology and advanced 3D visualisation to achieve the noble mission of making a positive impact on dental care around the world, by helping to make treatment planning safer and more efficient.  In my new role, I will be focusing on front-end UI/UX and working with advanced 3D interactive visualisations of AI-generated 3D models of dental scans.  I am really excited to be able to leverage my skills in order to enhance the user experience and contribute to advancing dental healthcare, and also to have been given an unprecedented opportunity to learn and grow, both personally and technically, by engaging actively with Promaton's culture of experimentation and new ideas, which aligns perfectly with my own passion for pushing boundaries and driving positive change.  I am truly grateful for this incredible opportunity to make a meaningful impact in the field of dentistry (a whole new world for me to discover) and improve patient care. Looking forward to this exciting journey ahead with the brilliant team at Promaton! 💪✨

Promaton

Hypseus is a curated list of things that I like, movies, books, music, video-games and comics. It is a statically generated React web-app using the next.js framework, and firebase cloud firestore to keep and manage data. It also allows for filtering categories on the items. 

Hypseus

Nêspera is an amateur project that intends to be a search engine and aggregator for Portuguese language recipes. We imagine that some reasons for its usage and spread would be the fact that it can reduce waste by incentivising the usage of existing ingredients and resources and help delay more visits to the supermarket by helping to make use of existing resources at home. We also imagine that having an ingredient map can help us for example determine the carbon cost of a certain meal, and other things. It currently maps around 2000 recipes but the plan is to extend it in the near future. It is fed via a Python web-crawler, and the app itself is written in Next.js / React and uses fuse.js to power fuzzy search on the dataset.

Nêspera

As a volunteer project for the Portuguese journalist group "Setenta e Quatro" and the museum of freedom "Museu do Aljube - Resistência e Liberdade", I developed a small quiz-type game about the dictatorship period in Portugal and its consequences, a fact-based application to help demystify truths about the fascist regime in Portugal during the period of 1933–1974 and bring some clarity on these events. This project was done with the objective of being pedagogic and spread through schools, and includes a feature of generating free tickets to the museum for anyone who gets 10 correct questions out of 10.

A Liberdade Não É Um Quiz

I renewed my personal website in June 2021, as I wanted to have a proper showcase for all my projects (software, writing, music and photography) and have a nice presentation hub to display them and share my activities. I designed and wrote the website myself, by using technologies that I had been working/experimenting with such as <a href="https://nextjs.org/">Next.js</a>, <a href="https://reactjs.org/">React.js</a>, <a href="https://p5js.org/">Processing and p5.js</a>. I used <a href="https://firebase.google.com/">Google Firebase</a> as a database and host. The website is dynamically generated, and then statically exported by using Next’s static generated pages functionality. It was a great project to work on and a chance to work with these technologies. I am quite pleased with the end result.

This Website

Switzerland's Mehmet Aslan presents his ongoing radio show, Music For Books.  Established as a talented producer and DJ, Aslan has forged a reputation for coming to music and culture from fresh and less-travelled paths, whether it’s crate-digging for rare Swiss new wave or sampling forgotten Turkish pop.  Music For Books is a show that combines the pleasure of reading with the curation of personal soundtracks. The show is an evolving examination of our passion for art across different mediums. Aslan will encourage his audience to think about literature in different ways, exploring the relationship between sound and imagination. In this particular episode, Mehmet reads and re-imagines the book 'A Wandering Poem / Um Poema Errante' by creating a journey of poetry and soundscapes, which could be considered as a third interpretation of the book, this time exploring the sensory space of the ears. 

Music for Books - Mehmet Aslan

Developed this website for artist Sara Franco's new company XIRIPITI - a Lisbon based, 2D animation and design studio founded in 2019 by Sara Franco. Sara is a professional artist with a vast portfolio in animation and design of lively TV shows , independent short films and various commercial broadcasts. Past works include Rick and Morty, Hilda, Wander Over Yonder, 101 Dalmatian Street among others. At XIRIPITI Studio they create high quality 2D animation and design. Directing in-house or outsourcing, our strength is to convey emotions through strong visual storytelling.

Xiripiti Studio

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our RIPAir Flight to god knows where. The Captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign. We are now crossing a zone of turbulence. Please return your seats and keep your seat belts fastened. If you see something wrong, please address it, as our cabin crew has all fled the aircraft. Thank you. RIPAir is an airline that takes low-cost seriously, so the principle is 'you fly yourself'. Try to keep the plane flying as long as possible by repairing the engines as they get damaged! And remember, 'FLYING IS BETTER WITH FRIENDS!’. RIPAir is a video-game that came out of Global Game Jam ’20, where our small team tried to create a small multi-player experience from the keyword “repair”. Essentially RIPAir is a video-game where two or more players can join efforts in trying to repair an airplane which is crashing, and each player needs to use their wrench to try and repair the failing engines. It was done in 48h across a weekend and we are quite proud of the end-result, as it turned out to be a funny little experiment.

RIPAir - GGJ'20

Co-organised a programming workshop for children at <a href="https://smup.pt/">SMUP</a> in collaboration with <a href="https://culturanomuro.pt/">Cultura No Muro</a> and Clube de Pequenos Pensadores where the objective was for a group of 11 children with no prior computer experience to try and develop their own interactive story by using <a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/">MIT's Scratch</a>. The session was very successful, as all the children managed to output a small interactive story which they had to present to the rest of the class. It was personally very rewarding to be able to share some knowledge with the children and appreciate their joy in creating someting.

Bits & Bitaites

Another year participating in the Global Game Jam has fresh and unforeseen results to be proud of : Keep Quiet is an exploration game. She arrives home late, and has to go to bed without waking up the parents. The game was all done in the course of 48h by a team of three people. We used free assets as the team featured no artists, but believe to have achieved an original look-and-feel with our tiny game. Our Keep Quiet team was made up of Ruben Mendes and Ricardo Rodrigues and we are quite proud of our achievement, as we believe we have created a tiny game full of ambiance, a really unique experience to play through, as it was to create.

Keep Quiet - GGJ'19

Trouva unites 400 of Europe’s best independent boutiques with hundreds of thousands of people across the world who are looking for their next unique find. There are thousands of small independent boutiques spread out there in the physical world with beautiful product selections. Being able to discover and purchase these products is notoriously difficult. As TechCrunch put it we help store owners focus on what they do best; having beautiful offline experiences and selecting the right products for their customer base.  We’ve been around for about 3 years and have been named one of the 5 fastest growing startups in the UK, and now we are expanding our product team to Lisbon. Our goal is simple: To provide independent boutiques with the technology they need to thrive online and connect them with a community of people who desire beautiful products while doing so.  Our technology platform enables small business owners handle everything from inventory management to customer support & logistics. We provide customers with access to inventory that was not available before and create a seamless shopping experience when buying from independent boutiques.  As a full stack engineer I work closely with the rest of the team to progress Trouva’s technology platform. The challenge is diverse: I work on inventory management, order processing, internal communication tools, tooling to support fellow engineers but also, and maybe most importantly, on creating an alternative shopping experience for the Trouva customer.  As a full-stack Javascript team we utilise a one-language for all approach that allows us to work together efficiently and provide great experiences. It also means that we get to play with shiny new things often which we’re quite happy about. In the end though, we are product engineers and are driven by providing the best possible experience to our customers.

Trouva

I was a proud participator of the first edition of <a href="http://emergencehackathon.com/">Emergence - Digital Media Science Communication Hackathon</a>, an event that aimed to bring together scientists, techies, artists, and others, to collaboratively create digital media based projects that communicate complex concepts in scientific research. In this intensive 5 day-long event participants were immersed in a collaborative setting where they were guided through the process of exploring various digital media technologies (e.g. Film, Interactive Technologies, VR) with a focus on creating stories for both linear and experiential formats. My group developed a mixed platform for science communication, called #ciênciadátrabalho (science takes time), which aimed to help scientists grab people from the street - through the usage of street art and provocative questions - into a digital platform where they can expose their research in a novel way - through the usage of provocation and humor. We designed the whole concept to be very much like a movement, complete with manifesto and public-space interventions. 

#cienciadatrabalho

As a developer at Baetes, I worked with modern tools and languages to ensure a great work environment. We championed a fast workflow and a dynamic pipeline and thus I took responsibility to find out what needed to be done, and was able to see the bigger picture outside my own lines of code to deliver a great product. I worked as a problem solver and produced highly optimized code since the business worked with heavy files on the browser and yet needs very short loading times. I worked with WebGL, openGL and GLSL, building shaders and customising lightning in particular - by using the three.js library. I also helped building the node.js back-end and Angular front-end for the Baetes applications.

Baetes

A video-game that spawned from Global Game Jam 2018, Spy or Die is a game about Russian and Chinese spies competing to transmit certain US National Security documents to their respective home country. Who will succeed first? A top down action game, where you must be quick and cunning enough to prevent the leaked documents from getting into the other team’s hands, while avoiding their traps! Spy... or die.. The core of this video-game was developed during GGJ’18, a 48h global jam, where participants are expected to produce a video-game in that short span of time. Hipponaut was done with the Unity game engine, and represents a collaborative effort of artists and engineers. The game was developed using Unity3D and C#.

Spy or Die - GGJ'18

Mover-a-Montanha is a Portuguese blog focused on citizenship and political consciousness, gathering the thoughts of a variety of citizens and public figures from the Portuguese civil-sphere who find in Mover-a-Montanha a platform to share their opinions and publish articles that are relevant not only for the Portuguese readers who might be particularly interested in politics and related topics, but for every citizen that might be concerned about Portugal, Europe, social issues, health, politics, military and many other themes that are a part of our everyday life. I worked together with developer <a href=“https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardoadspinto/“>Ricardo Pinto</a> and designer <a href=“https://www.linkedin.com/in/bernardomarinho/”>Bernardo Marinho</a> to develop this platform which not only includes a simple but beautiful front end, but also an administration back-office, which allows the contributors to manage articles, authors and subscribers, and have a statistical overview of the site’s usage. 

Mover-A-Montanha

The official website for "Um Poema Errante / A Wandering Poem” was built by me and designed by Angharad Hengyu Owen and even though it didn’t use any advanced web-technology (it was purely made in HTML/CSS and a tiny bit of Javascript), it was a great opportunity to try out some interesting and bold UI/UX approaches - thought of by Angharad - which resulted, in the end, in a pretty unique website with a very singular interaction which we believe is extremely original and previously undone. The website included multiple sections and different visualisations, trying mostly to mimic the look and feel of the book, including a section listing all the bookshops that sold us, video media, interactive image galleries, and other types of information. We were as incredibly proud of it at launch as we are nowadays, and the fact that it keeps being the best channel to sell our book seems to be proof of how intriguing it is. 

A Wandering Poem

At PUSH we developed in partnership with <a href=“www.cycloid.pt>Cycloid</a>, the first-ever Virtual Reality experience for <a href=“vodafone.pt/“>Vodafone Portugal</a>. This experience was supposed to take place in a person's living room, where a virtual character invited the user to come on a trip through the internet. The user was then pulled inside the router, and made a voyage through cyberspace. The experience was developed mainly for the Samsung GearVR platform (using the Unity3D engine, and C#) but we also ported it to be used with the Oculus Rift.

Vodafone VR Experience

A video-game that spawned from Global Game Jam 2017, Hipponaut is a cute space shooter, where Hipponaut - a Hippo astronaut - is on a quest to save the galaxy. The core of this video-game was developed during GGJ’17, a 48h global jam, where participants are expected to produce a video-game in that short span of time. <a href=“https://pushvfx.com/“>PUSH</a> participated with a team, and the result was Hipponaut, a video-game that we are proudly developing into a product. Hipponaut was done with the Unity game engine, and represents a collaborative effort of artists and engineers. The game was developed using Unity3D and C#.

Hipponaut - GGJ'17

Immersive Box Office (IBO) is an innovative ticket sale system, that transforms ticket purchase into an interactive and immersive experience. Through the most recent technologies of 3D for the web, IBO transports the buyer into an appealing and immersive 3D environment, simplifying the purchase of tickets, through a whole new navigation and virtual reality paradigm. Simultaneously, IBO simplifies the sales system through a web-based technology: WebGL, enabling a multi-platform and compatible usage. IBO intends to solve all the usability issues with current ticket sales systems, while rendering the whole process more interesting and desirable for end customers. IBO presents a series of innovative features like a 3D interactive interface, VR experience, Immersive Advertising and Multi-Platform compatibilities.  On top of all this, IBO is also usable as a VR conference room, allowing speakers to broadcast live videos, or play deferred videos to a series of attendants. This is made using the latest WebRTC technologies, and has unlimited potential, in the areas of education, video-conferencing, and many others. The whole project was developed using three.js/WebGL, Javascript, PHP and MySQL and WebRTC.

Immersive Box Office

On the road to developing the first VR experience for Vodafone Portugal, we at PUSH developed a small experience re-using assets from our game Hipponaut in order to create a virtual-reality ride on rails, where the user would experience a short space ride across a mix of fantasy and sci-fi settings. This helped us better understand how to create such an experience and gave us the knowledge and motivation to later develop an application with much more complexity, both visually and technically.

PUSH VR Ride

Co-founded <a href=“https://pushvfx.com/“>PUSH</a> Interactive, a tech company venturing deep in the realms of digital interactive experiences, pushing the digital world to new limits. I work as head of technology, developing interactive 3D products (spanning technologies like WebGL and Javascript) and managing the software development team. Most of the work is full-stack development, touching every little detail of the development process.

PUSH Interactive

I worked as a Consultant Software Engineer for Amadeus on behalf of Aubay Consulting, in Sophia-Antipolis, Nice, France. Working on Amadeus Payment Server, a highly available transactional back-end dedicated to payment services. Tasks include software design and implementation, analysis and monitoring, problem tracking and solving. Topics include credit card authorization and capture, alternative methods of payment and fraud screening. I was stream leader of the implementation of the Korean Airlines Loyalty System interface with Amadeus. Expertise on online capture and loyalty systems. Main technologies used: C++, Oracle DB, XML Schemas, UNIX, Python. 

Amadeus - Payment Server

I was involved in the creation of the iOS video-game 'Panic Plane' as a developer/programmer and as a musician, contributing in both areas. I worked with a multidisciplinary team of friends called 'Castaway Team' in this project and it was an absolutely wonderful experience. The game is no longer available in Apple's AppStore, although it was on sale for the period of one year. The game was developed using the Cocos2D game engine and Objective-C.

Panic Plane

As part of a research team for the NAADIR (A New Approach on Architectural Drawings Integrating computer descRiptions) project on behalf of <a href=“https://www.fct.pt/“>FCT</a> (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) with the joint effort of <a href=“https://ciencias.ulisboa.pt/“>FCUL</a> and FAUTL, I developed a prototype visualizer for 3D models, implementing a new perspective paradigm for three-dimensional visualization - the Extended Perspective System - allowing the users to experience the visualization of 3D models in an innovative way. The whole project was developed using the QT Framework and C++. The project was then showcased in the Lisbon’s <a href=“https://www.ulisboa.pt/en/unidade-organica/national-museum-natural-history-and-science”>Museum of Natural History and Science</a> in the <a href=“https://museus.ulisboa.pt/pt-pt/exposicao-formas-e-formulas”>Formas & Fórmulas</a> exhibition. During this project I also published two scientific papers - the <a href=“https://res.cloudinary.com/dhgkpiqzg/image/upload/v1623937274/christianmarques.com/naadir/caddfutures.pdf”>first</a> in the <a href=“https://www.caadfutures.org/index.html”>CAAD Futures</a> 2013  conference in Shangai, and <a href=“https://res.cloudinary.com/dhgkpiqzg/image/upload/v1623937274/christianmarques.com/naadir/Visualizador_EPS.pdf”>another</a> in the <a href=“http://interacao2013.utad.pt/”>Interação</a> 2013 conference. 

NAADIR

At Marsh I performed tasks related with Information Technologies, giving support to colleagues (help-desk), helping to find solutions for problems using IT and helping maintenance of the data-center. I feel this job gave me a great deal of experience in relating with people, team-work, communication and most of all, where to stand while working at a multinacional corporation. Overhall it was a great experience, having left only to pursue my future carreer in Software Development.