norelock
web / reverse engineer / music producer / developer
i'm from poland and i spend most of my time somewhere between making music, programming things and starting projects that are probably way bigger than they needed to be.
hey, i'm norelock.
i make things. then i break them.
breaking them is important too. i don't want my entire personality to be “software engineer” — i just happen to really like making things.
i don't really like describing myself as just a developer or just a producer. i've been doing both long enough that they're basically two sides of the same thing for me.
sometimes i'm sitting in ableton at 3 am fixing a kick for the twentieth time. sometimes i'm staring at wireshark wondering why one packet decided to ruin my entire evening. sometimes i'm doing both.
i don't have a grand philosophy behind any of it. usually something bothers me, interests me or just doesn't exist the way i wish it did. then i make a repository. then it's three months later and there's a backend, a custom protocol, a desktop client and seventeen services i absolutely did not plan.
i like learning things by building them, and i don't mind throwing away an implementation when i realise there's a better way. i'm also incredibly good at turning this should be easy into a week-long engineering project.
01 / build
web & realtime
typescript is where i feel most at home, but i've worked with c++, c#, lua, rust and whatever else a project needed. i'm much more interested in building actual systems than making another crud dashboard and calling it a day.
02 / make noise
music & sound
i produce mostly in ableton and i don't like locking myself into one genre forever. releases so far: hellfire, arcadia, internal, in my dreams, sky, hyperarcadia and no memory, pt. 1.
realtime web
real-time networking, multiplayer synchronization, protocols, game clients, servers and software that talks to other software. usually the things that keep me interested.
tooling
not in the movie-hacker sense. i just like taking something apart to figure out how it works. memory structures, entity systems, hooks, and every weird decision made twenty years ago that you're now forced to understand.
a few things keeping me
busy.
there's also a graveyard of side projects behind these. some got rewritten, some got rewritten again, some sit untouched on github for six months until i randomly remember they exist.
summer hideout
a story-driven game about building a car from the ground up and poking at things that should not be happening, set in the polish countryside around 2005. i handle the networking side — native multiplayer, keeping players in sync, the groundwork underneath it — and i write music for it too, which is the first time both halves of what i do have ended up in the same project.
vanta multiplayer
exists because at some point i looked at gta:sa multiplayer and thought okay, but what if we did this differently?. hooking into the game, synchronization, player state, entity management, launchers, and figuring out how a twenty-year-old game behaves internally. not meant to be another sa-mp clone — the interesting part is building the underlying tech and seeing how far it goes.
borealise
started from missing the era when listening to music online actually felt social. not here’s a spotify link, listen later, but actually sitting in a room together, taking turns playing tracks, talking shit in chat. queues, djs, moderation, playlists. it’s one thing to make a project that works on localhost, another entirely to have real people using it.
enough portfolio.
here are the links.
right now i'm mostly bouncing between music, vanta, borealise and whatever new idea hijacks my brain that week.