Developer & Designer

Mehrezat Abbas

I build things for the web. This is a tidier version of my regular digital playground: here, you'll find professional projects, personal interests, and some of the stranger products of my experimentation.

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About

Mehrezat Abbas

I'm a developer and designer based in Rapid City, South Dakota, with a BA in Computer Science from Claremont McKenna College and Harvey Mudd College. Day to day, I work full time on internal web systems for a contracting company, which means a lot of full-stack ownership across a consistent stack of C#, .NET, and Vue.

Outside of that, I design and build websites for small businesses and creative organizations, and I take on freelance and collaborative work — especially projects with room for unconventional ideas. I'm also interested in continuing the remote-sensing research I started in undergrad (light emissions from vegetation as a proxy for photosynthesis and CO2 intake), and — someday — partnering with National Geographic to help document endangered cultures and ecosystems.

I'm also drawn to ethnography and oral history — sitting down with people and asking how their world has changed. That interest carried a Fulbright proposal on climate and cultural change in Kyrgyzstan to the finalist round; further down is the version of that project that actually happened.

I care about software that's careful and legible, but I don't take it too seriously — most of what I build for fun is purposefully a little strange. More on that below.

Selected Work

A couple of the more polished projects I've built end to end.
howWEfeel
Web App · Hackathon Winner

howWEfeel

A communal mood-journaling app with accounts, a daily check-in flow, and a history view for tracking how the world's emotions have shifted over time. Built solo for a 5C (Claremont Colleges) hackathon against roughly 100 entrants — won the Health & Humanity track.

Visit project →
ABECRUX
Web App · Omnitech Internship

ABECRUX

My first project as an intern at Omnitech, built under a deliberate constraint: plain HTML, CSS, and JS — no frameworks, no WebSockets. Players take turns placing letters on a shared grid; first to spell a valid 4+ letter word wins. Multiplayer turn state is tracked in a SQL table, and it mostly holds up — though a known race condition can occasionally knock two players out of sync.

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Technical Experiments

Pieces built around an idea rather than a product spec.
ZX Spectrum sheep sprite
8-bit · C

Sheep on a ZX Spectrum

A walking sheep sprite for the ZX Spectrum, written in C and run through the Retro Virtual Machine emulator — no higher-level tools, since the images had to be pushed directly into memory as raw bytes to render at all. The real constraint was space: after a lot of work getting anything into memory correctly, there was only ever room for 4 rotating frames.

See it live →
You Are Lonely
Satire · Supabase

You Are Lonely

An early-2000s dating-cult ad — the guestbook is a real, working feature: a Supabase-backed table with input validation, live inserts, and a reload on submit. Feel free to sign it!

See it live →
More in this vein

A couple of smaller pieces in the same aesthetic register as the two above. No real point, just a creative interest I keep returning to.

Cage for Scum

Cage for Scum

A little pacing thing behind bars.
My Dancing Friend

My Dancing Friend

A puppet, dancing in an infinite hallway. Try picking him up!

Field Work

Interviews supported by code.
Der Erinnerungskorb
Oral History

Der Erinnerungskorb

In January 2025 I traveled around Germany interviewing strangers — a 92-year-old who grew up under Nazism and later the GDR, a police officer, a street musician from Columbia — about their home, their lives, and their childhoods. Built as a browsable interface with per-person audio and toggleable translations. This project was born from the same interest in ethnography that carried my Fulbright proposal on climate and cultural change in Kyrgyzstan (interviews with farmers and herders) to the finalist round — this is the version of that idea that actually happened.

Visit project →

Work In Progress

WIP · Largest personal project to date

ratwest

ratwest — a rat-headed man in a plaid shirt at a rural mailbox

A side-scrolling narrative game rendered in a photo-collage art style, cast entirely with anthropomorphic rats. A young man returns to his small Midwestern hometown to look into a local ghost problem, and ends up pulled into the ghost realm altogether: a place full of cowboy spirits he has to set free, one by one, by uncovering what they're each hiding.

Structurally it's an adventure game — people to talk to, clues that log into a journal, connections to draw between them. The centerpiece is a confrontation mechanic built for the big reveals: six clue "bullets" loaded into a timed, shootout-style standoff, where picking the right one under pressure is what cracks a character's guard and gets you the truth.

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