🐧 Brian Hungerman

Senior Software Engineer incubating A.I. U.X. with Microsoft Applied Sciences

🌐 mutilar.github.io · LinkedIn · GitHub · Blog · Spotify

A career told through six acts of a penguin that never read the manual.

From thick shells, penguin hatch upon desolate tundras; only on snow and ice will they ever waddle… or so they naïvely assume. The first artifacts: a hand-sewn quilt, a FIRST Robotics competition bot, a real manufacturing contract for AMAX's assembly line. Making things before knowing what "making things" meant.

Huddling close to keep winter's chill at bay; survival instincts keep each penguin alive, but radiant heat means the whole colony thrives. Five leadership roles, 100+ students taught across game design and robotics, $50K fundraised. The lesson: you don't learn by receiving; you learn by giving.

Kicked out of the nest, they venture to the seas; blithe to the dangers below, oblivious to the waters' depths. UC Merced, Computer Science & Engineering, Magna cum laude (3.74). Director of HackMerced hosting 300+ hackers. Nine hackathon trophies.

Diving 1,800 feet into pitch-black depths; on a single breath they hunt, only surfacing with a full gizzard. Three lenses sharpened here: U.I. ("how it looks"), U.X. ("how it feels"), H.C.I. ("how you use it"). Design intent precedes implementation; experience precedes code.

Wings adapted into flippers; they never stopped being birds, they just learned to fly underwater. The same instincts that built robots and hackathon prototypes now build platforms at Microsoft: 6 9's reliability, 50+ DCs, GA launches on Azure ML.

Penguins dutifully return to their colony; bringing sustenance from the abyss; regurgitating every hard-won catch. 50+ open-source repositories, 3 robots built, 6 games shipped.

A quilt is many discrete patches — each one cut, shaped, meaningful on its own — stitched into a single coherent surface that's greater than the sum. The metaphor maps cleanly onto what Brian built here:

The portfolio is a quilt: individual cards (projects, skills, games, decks) that only tell the full story once laid out together on a scrollytelling canvas. The engine is a quilt: 13 JS modules, each independent enough to be polymorphic across sites, stitched together by SETTINGS.json and BOOT.JS into one system. The bio modal is literally named QUILT-MODAL because its narrative is stitched from penguin lifecycle panels — left/center/right triplets — each a patch of allegory that only resolves into a professional identity when you've scrolled through all of them. The penguin itself is a quilted object — the hero image is a photo of physically quilting a penguin quilt, grounding the entire digital metaphor in a tangible craft.

Breadth satisfies at a glance; depths reward the curious; traversal reveals the path. Information wants order,dimensionality, and parsability.

From first-principles, until everything harmonizes, efficiency is ruthlessly pursued. One HTML file. Twelve scripts. Zero NPM dependencies. Zero frameworks. Zero build tools.

From retrofitting a decades-old robot with modern circuitry… to reimagining the control interface via a Valve Steam Deck… to enabling new A.I. experiences on a robotics platform.

Bridging experiences from FRC Robotics to evolving design skills, MARP is a test-bed for robotics and AI experimentation.

Hardware: 24 V NMC lithium battery (240 Wh) · KH56 stepper motors (drive) · M55SP-3NK steppers (turret) · TB6600 drivers × 4 · Arducam IMX708 camera · Kinect RGB/depth/IR via libfreenect · NEBULA Capsule Air mini projector · WS2815 addressable LED face ring · Sharp GP2Y0A02 perimeter sensors · Wi-Fi Direct hotspot (no router needed)

Diagrams: High-Level Wiring · Data Flow · User Story · System Architecture (Mermaid-sourced)

From integrating Iterate's interpreter into a gamified environment… to pitching at four consecutive Microsoft Hackathons… to open-sourcing an educational game engine built in Unity and C#.

BitNaughts isn't just an educational programming video-game — it's code gamified! (2016–2026)

Hackathon Pitches: '20 · '21 · '22 · '23

Two primordial gods: Order & Chaos, and three factions emerge: Faithful, Greedy & Defiant… except Faith does not Save, Wealth does not Protect & Rebellion does not Free… for Mortality is merely a Door, not a Wall.

The Dusk Rose Codex transforms Magic: The Gathering into satirical Vorthos scripture, bound by hand in crimson thread.

Full 100-card decklists with card art galleries viewable on the site.

Video: Dusk Rose Codex (3:26)

From building platforms to fight cancer with machine learning and big data… to teaching game design, coding, and robotics across the socioeconomic spectrum… to analysing hydrologic and ecosystemic implications of Central Valley agriculture.

From discrete mathematics and data structures laying the groundwork… to algorithms, networks, and databases building the toolkit… to robotics, software engineering, and computer organization tying it all together.

UC Merced — Computer Science & Engineering · Magna cum laude (GPA 3.74)

From empowering those with asthma with real-time air quality data… to leveraging big data to promote sustainability initiatives… to providing an intuitive learning environment for young programmers.

From using augmented reality to visualize the missing link from farm to table… to an autonomous, room-mapping robotic tank for first responders called SRIRACHA… to optical character recognition on nutrition labels as a FitBit for your stomach.

Videos: Blindsight Demo (1:44)

From hands-on applications of graph theory and data structures… to tinkering with finite state machines and model view controllers… to understanding challenges in big data processing, rendering, and visualization.

Graviton, SpaceNinjas & VooDoo are playable in-browser via WebGL on the portfolio site.

mutilar.github.io is itself an open-source project — a single-page app with zero build tools and zero frameworks.

Structure: index.html · css/ · js/ (parallax.js · scroll.js · modals.js · data.js · pdf.js · radio.js) · csv/ · png/ · games/

Each technology in the Constellation Map visualization has a unique emoji "whisper". These same emojis are used as a compact alphabet in PORTFOLIO.json's TECH field — a string like "🍃⚛️💚" decodes to MongoDB + React + Node.js.

Run node scripts/inject-tech-field.js --dry-run to preview auto-extracted TECH fields, or without --dry-run to write them into PORTFOLIO.json.

Glassmorphism, consistently applied. Every surface is frosted glass floating over a dark parallax cosmos.

Semi-transparent black fill (rgba(0,0,0, 0.33–0.4)) + Gaussian blur (backdrop-filter: blur(12–24px) saturate(1.2–1.4)) + white hairline border (1px solid rgba(255,255,255, 0.33)). Nested glass panes flatten to backdrop-filter: none to avoid double-blur.

Four accents, zero freelancers. Every non-neutral color derives from the Microsoft brand quadrant:

Category colors flow through --tc (RGB triplet) → rgba(var(--tc), alpha). Light mode uses --tc-light for contrast shifts.

Interactivity is communicated through luminance intensification; nothing swaps hues. Three tiers: resting (soft ambient shadow), hover (triple-layer radial bloom: tight/medium/wide), pulsing (ease-in-out oscillation between two shadow states for attention cues like win-pulse, bio-tour-pulse, tile-glow-pulse).

Springy entrances; ambient idles. Scroll reveals: translateY(30px) over 0.7s cubic-bezier(0.4, 0, 0.2, 1). Elastic pops: scale(0.88) → overshoot scale(1.04) → settle, 0.5s cubic-bezier(0.34, 1.56, 0.64, 1). Perpetual bobs and edge-width pulses on ease-in-out infinite. Content swaps crossfade; no hard cuts. Full prefers-reduced-motion: reduce support.

Parallax sandwich: fixed star canvas (z-index: -1) → transparent windows → frosted opaque bands → glass tiles → fixed nav (z-index: 100) → modal overlays (z-index: 200+). Content never sits directly on the canvas.

Light mode is a 600+ line parallel implementation via html.light-mode class (user-toggled, no prefers-color-scheme). Surfaces invert (rgba(0,0,0,x) ↔ rgba(255,255,255,x)), borders invert, text flips to #1a1a2e, accents shift to darker/saturated variants, every pulse animation has a -light counterpart.

I welcome opportunities to connect, learn from others & share my expertise!

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Brian Hungerman · 2026

13,400 LOC portfolio site built in 14 days with Opus 4.6 (fast mode).

Each session: call to adventure (the prompt), threshold crossing (context gathering), trials (debugging, refactoring), transformation (the commit).

Systems theory: boundary spanning.