Astrograde

Hello world, I'm Zi7ar21! I'm interested in exploring the universe, experimenting and doing science, studying physics and astronomy, using computers to simulate complex things, meteorology and weather, geodesy and surveying, metrology and chronology, networking and (ethical) hacking, taking (astro)photographs of awesome phenomenon, rendering and light transport, (ethical) hacking, cars and racing, rockets and enginnering, studying and using optics, radio and electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and computational chemistry, religion, ethics, and politics, etc. Name anything, it will probably be something that has piqued my interest at one point or another.

I hope to start attending college soon so I can study to become a computational astrophysicist, and write massively parallel codes for simulating astrophysical phenomena (e.g. HPC codes for things like galaxy formation, stellar dynamics, etc).

This website is currently under construction, but you can check out my github.io page if you would like to know more about some of the things I've made. Shown below is an image I took of the Andromeda Galaxy.

"What kinda stuff do you make?"

I can't point to everything all at once, but I post a lot of neat shaders on my Shadertoy page, so you should check that out. There is also a new WebGPU alternative called '@compute.toys' which some of my friends are working on, you may want to check out my profile there too.

I quite like GLSL, it's the first "real" programming language I learned. I have been fascinated by computers and graphics since I was a little boy, and think it is so neat that it's possible to render such detailed images using computers. A friend told me about C, so I gave it a shot and realized it's just like GLSL, except instead of rendering thousands of pixels simultaneously it's a single entrypoint that gets called once. I now like to write C/C++, although I mainly only use C++'s standard library features such as std::vector.

I'm currently working on Starflood, an open-source SPH and N-body code written in C/C++, and utilizes OpenMP for parallelization. Click here (or on the image above) to go to the Starflood GitHub Repository!

"What does 'Astrograde' mean?"

It's a combination of the prefix "astro-" (as in astronomy or astrophysics) and tardigrade, a fascinating microscopic animal notorious for being able to withstand harsh conditions (such as the vaccum of space!) I came up with it when I was trying to register a domain so I could complete Hurricane Electric's IPv6 Certification (by the way, nice folks, please consider checking them out for a fun and educational challenge, or for all of your IP Transit needs. They also have an awesome BGP "Toolkit" which I love).

"Where can I find other cool people like you??"

Over my time on the Internet, I have met a lot of really neat people with similar interests to me. If you are interested in the same kinda stuff I am, you should check out these friendly people's websites too (all of them have more interests than I mention!)

• Mykhailo Moroz - Simulations, Rendering, Compute Shaders, Physics, etc.
• peabrainiac - Rendering, Mathematics, Fractals, etc.
• loicvdb (GitHub) - Rendering, Fractals, Shaders, etc.
• WAUthethird (GitHub) - Machine Learning, Programming, Fractals, Rendering, etc.
• Devaniti - Rendering, Game Development, Programming, etc.
• Shelby (GitHub) - Fractals, Rendering, GPUs, etc.
• Dimas - Rendering, Programming, Rust, etc.
• Ashen - Game Development, Rendering, etc.
• Bean (GitHub) - Programming, Rendering, etc.
• wrightwriter - Rendering, Fragment Shaders, Art, etc.
• xacer - Machine Learning, Games, etc.

We also maintain a community Discord server (contact me if you are interested in joining) with many channels for discussing (but not limited to): Simulations, Rendering, Physics, Math, Nerd Sh*tposting (STEM memes), and much, much more!