ZEH FERNANDO

About

Headshot Image

My name is Zeh Fernando. I live in New York, NY, where I work for Meta’s Reality Labs as a Software Engineer in the Spark AR AR Glasses Wearables division.

I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil. I grew up loving both drawing and coding, starting with a TK-85 when I was 10, and then later being entertained by things like the MSX, the Apple IIe, ANSI art, and the demoscene.

I’ve been working as a programmer since 1994, initially developing business database systems and multimedia CD-ROMs. Nowadays, my work revolves around creating design-driven interactive experiences. What I love doing is writing code to bring ideas to life on a screen, be it for the Web, mobile applications, or out-of-home experiences.

I’ve also created and helped maintain several open-source projects. These include MC Tween and Tweener (for ActionScript animation), usfxr (for real-time audio effects synthesis in C#/Unity), and others.

When it comes to programming, I am largely language-agnostic after all these years with different platforms. Nonetheless, most of my professional work is currently written in C++, while personal projects are usually based on TypeScript and Rust.

I can be reached by email at zeh@zehfernando.com.

Networks

Awards

A lot of the work I've done in previous jobs was for digital/online campaigns, at agencies and studios doing third-party work for big brands. Contests (and thus awards) are quite common in that space. Because of that, there's a number of awards I've earned through the years. I'm proud of each of those, but I like to acknowledge the context.

Interviews

Acknowledgments

As mentioned in the project list section, projects listed in this portfolio are projects I played a significant role in. My actual role in each is also always stated on the project page. Projects that I only contributed to in small parts are not listed.

Projects that are still unreleased are not listed either.

I take pride in giving as much credit to people as possible. As such, all projects listed on this site have a list of additional credits listed, with links to each team person’s own portfolio where appropriate. If you think a credit entry is incorrect, missing a URL, or a name is missing entirely, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

Similarly, all awards won by a project have links to the actual award page with more information, and the actual category and level of award it won. This is not always perfect, as some award sites tend to take their archive from earlier years offline after a while. If you notice any incorrect URL that is not marked as such, or know of better URLs for any award entries, please let me know.

Some projects have a “pure programming time” field added to them. That lists the number of hours and minutes I spent writing code for the project inside an IDE, as reported by WakaTime (testing and research time is not accounted for). This information is purely for curiosity, but I thought others might also find it interesting.

This website was created using TypeScript, Astro, and many of the related web technologies. It is a playground of sorts, and as such has gone through many refactors.

Work statistics

This site has 40 projects listed, with 1 hidden from view by default. A further 157 historical projects are waiting to be added to the site.

Since all these projects are added and detailed, I can generate some statistics about them as charts below. This is not super useful, I suppose, but it reflects how I like to look at things — I am not a very instinctive person, and prefer looking at results from different angles (or metrics). In that sense, I feel looking at the data below is insightful in understanding the kind of work I have done in the past.

Project Types
Web
24
Mobile App
9
Application
4
Game
4
Online Campaign
2
Out Of Home/Kiosk
2
Command Line Application
1
Game Mod
1
Programming Languages
ActionScript 3
13
Java
8
JavaScript
7
ActionScript 2
6
TypeScript
4
C++
3
Objective-C
3
Other (5)
6
Development Platforms
Adobe Flash
17
Android
9
HTML
8
iOS
4
Linux
3
OSX/Windows (Cinder)
3
Windows
3
Other (3)
6
Notable Programming Libraries
React
5
OculusVR
4
Redux
4
FFmpeg
3
OSC
3
OpenGL
3
QuickTime
3
Other (21)
24
Employer
Firstborn
19
Work & Co
9
None
8
Gringo.nu
4
Grafikonstruct
1
Main Role
Lead Developer
24
Solo Developer
4
Developer
2
Lead Developer, Frontend
2
Tech Director
2
Designer, Lead Developer
1
Developer on Video Recording feature
1
Other (5)
5
Completion Years
2004
1
2005
1
2006
2
2007
3
2008
3
2009
0
2010
5
2011
3
2012
2
2013
4
2014
3
2015
2
2016
1
2017
2
2018
3
2019
1
2020
4
2021
0
2022
0
2023
0
2024
0
2025
1