Welcome to my website!
I'm Charles Samborski, a French Software Engineer actively contributing to Open Source projects, with an emphasis on developer tooling and full-stack web projects. Currently, I mostly use Rust Typescript, Node and Postgres. I want to help improve the world through software.
I learned to program by myself in 2011 with PHP and JS. I started with a personal website and some browser extensions for Twinoid. I also participated to a few Ludum Dare video game jams.
By the end of high-school I started one of my long-running projects: Eternalfest. Eternalfest is a platform to share modded content for the Flash platformer video game The Caverns of Hammerfest.
In 2013, I joined the engineering school INSA Lyon. After two-years of general STEM courses, I entered the INSA Lyon Computer Engineering department (ranked among the best of France). I spent a semester abroad at EPFL (in Switzerland) and graduated in 2018 as one of the top students.
During these years I started actively contributing to Open Source projects. The first main project I joined was "Gulp". At the time they were preparing to release the major version 4.0 and needed help to update the ecosystem: I sent hundreds of PRs to major libraries and the transition went by smoothly. It let me work with various other Node projects. In general my attitude is that if I encounter an issue with an Open Source project, the best is to solve it myself. The projects section offers a good overview of the various projects I worked on.
We opened Eternalfest to the public on Christmas 2018 and keep releasing new content regularly. The players are happy.
Another important project to mention is Open Flash. A project to preserve Flash files. The initial goal was to continue the work on a Flash player after Shumway got discontinued. With the advent of Ruffle, the focus shift to documentation and static analysis.
In March 2020, the Motion-Twin announcement the retirement of their Flash-based web games. As part of their announcement, they release the source code for Hammerfest and formally gave their approval for the content we made on Eternalfest. This sparked interest in preserving all the Motion-Twin games. This led to the creation of Eternaltwin: a common platform to help the preservation projects for all the different games to come together.