Aman Dhoot

About Me

I'm an Enterprise Architect in my day job, previously a Software Engineer, in the financial services industry. When I am not working with overcomplicated products, I like to work on random personal projects because I miss making cool stuff.

Inspiration strikes at unexpected times, for instance when I'm feeling ill and spend a whole day watching old episodes of Jeopardy, or when I get frustrated when Crofty doesn't tell me about an insane race-winning undercut in the middle of the race because the TV director didn't think it was important enough to show.

My Projects

Open F1

Open F1 is a F1 Live Timing TUI, which allows users to get all the information they could ever need live during any F1 session. The TUI supports variable stream delay which allows you to sync up the live timing data with what you're seeing on your TV, and even allows you to replay previously recorded (or downloaded) sessions in real-time.

With the Open F1 TUI, you'll be one of the most informed viewers and will be able to understand everything about the race strategies being employed by the teams. You might even begin to read Martin Brundles' mind and say stuff right before he does.

Feature Highlights:

Timing Tower showing for each driver:
- Live sector times, with colouring for personal/overall fastest
- Last & Best Lap
- Current tyre
- Age of current tyre
- Interval to driver in front
- Gap to leader
- Gap between a selected driver and all other drivers (useful for monitoring pit windows)
- Change in Gap to drivers around over the last 5 laps, to help identify trends and if drivers are catching
Race Control messages including investigations, penalties, lap deletions, and weather
Lap-by-lap Timing History to observe gaps over time
See more features and installation instructions on GitHub

OVault

OVault is a super simple OTP app for your two-factor authentication codes. I found that other OTPs apps I was using (such as Authy) were becoming frustrating to use, and losing important features such as OTPs in Widgets. As such, I decided to create my own.

The app is available on iOS and macOS app stores, and uses your iCloud Keychain to store all the information needed to generate your codes. OTPs can be imported by scanning the relevant QR codes, tapping on otpauth:// URLs, or added manually by typing in your secret. The app exposes all the configuration options for OTPs, such as length and hash algorithm, which means you can use it for more obscure TOTP uses which sometimes have their own unique apps for vendor lock-in (looking at you, HID Global).

Open Trivia Night

Open Trivia Night is a online group trivia game, in the style of Jeopardy. It is designed to be played in reasonably large groups, with out-of-band communication required (i.e. the group must be together in-person or on the same group call). The game works by having a Host (doing their best Alex Trebek impersonation) create a game by either creating their own questions (or categories), or generating questions from the integrated trivia question databases. Each question has a point value associated with it.

During the game, the Host reads out questions and Players buzz in to attempt to answer. The Host determines if the answer given matches the correct answer to the question, and if it does the Player earns points. If it's wrong, then they lose points.

Grid Battle

I liked playing along with Only Connect (BBC), and liked the Connecting Wall round even more after I started playing the NYT Connections game. But when playing Connections with my friends, the one thing I missed was being able to easily compare my performance with theirs.

In response to this desire, I created Grid Battle. Grid Battle allows you to play each days NYT Connections puzzle, along with many AI Generated or User Submitted grids. It records the amount of time it takes for you to solve the Grid, applying a 10 second penalty for each mistake you make. Compete with other players on the leaderboard to get the best time.

Grid Battle even allows you to play battle against your friends in real time to solve Grids in a special Battle Mode. Battle Mode lets you create a room with your friends and play any Grid in real-time and see who performs the best over any number of rounds.

Recording the time it takes to complete a Grid adds a different dimension to the NYT Connections Grids, and brings it a little closer to how the Connecting Wall round works in Only Connect. It incentivises you to try what comes to mind quickly instead of planning out every single category, making red herrings much more relevant. Not having a limited number of mistakes further incentivises this, but the time penalty for mistakes still ensures that spamming guesses isn't a successful strategy - like it sometimes is in at the start of the Connecting Wall round in Only Connect.

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