Charlotte Som,
multispecialist technician & computer multimedia artist.

I like playing in the intersection between a lot of disciplines! I’m a programmer, a music producer, I’m interested in visual effects, and I like solving problems.

Currently, I’m working at a startup where we make browser-based game technology. I really think casual games really fit the browser as an application platform, since they can be asset-light & install-free.

In my free time, I reverse-engineer & make mods for games, make little websites and applications, write real-time audio plugins, and do music production. Currently, the project that takes up the majority of my time is a work-in-progress software additive synthesizer.

You can find some of my software projects on GitHub and at git.lavender.software.

If you’d like to get in contact, you can email me at charlotte AT som DOT codes.

Software

I’ve been programming for a long time & written a lot of software so far. Here’s a selection:

• Paramorphism (discontinued) - a JVM bytecode obfuscator targeting Java/Kotlin.
• Koffee – a programmable JVM bytecode assembler DSL in Kotlin.
• phoebe - a best-effort double-puppeting bridge for Discord and Matrix.
• ssh-lockbox - an auto-deployment solution & store for SSH public keys.

During my time computer-touching, I’ve specialized in a few software niches:

• Java bytecode & JVM internals
  • Check out my article on circumventing the JVM’s bytecode verifier.
• JavaScript semantics & V8 engine internals
  • At work, we are using deno_core (and rusty_v8) to do server-side hosting of user game code.
• Systems development around Linux and systemd
  • Check out systemd’s fdstore. If you architect right, you can upgrade applications without dropping any important state!
• STM32 embedded development (keyboards!)
  • I’ve gone lower-level before, but nowadays I mostly just run QMK.
  • Some day I would love to build keyboard firmware on Hubris as an ≈RTOS.

Gamehacking

Professionally, I used to sell a custom client for Minecraft, and a subscription trainer menu for GTA Online. In addition, I love modding Unity3D games. There’s something about MSIL that activates the Java bytecode part of my brain.

Games are a really fun playground for me because there is a bunch of emergent behavior: Here’s a video demonstration of a fast infinite obsidian glitch in Minecraft, it’s a limited instant block breaking exploit chained with a special world interaction.

Languages

I like learning languages as a hobby. I got two for free by birth (English and French) and I also speak conversational Spanish (learned at school) and Korean (self-study).

In addition, I’m interested in Japanese, Italian, German, Dutch, which I’ve learned on-and-off casually (I would not call myself conversational in any of these yet!).

I’d also really like to learn Russian (I can read Cyrillic already, at least!) and Mandarin (I know some super basic grammar) but haven’t found the time.