Developer & Designer

Mehrezat Abbas

I build things for the web — sometimes for clients and companies, sometimes for no reason at all. This is the tidier version of my site: the projects, the work, and a couple of the weirder things I couldn't help but make along the way.

Get in touch See the unfiltered site →

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 larger projects I've built end to end.
howWEfeel
Web App · Hackathon Winner

howWEfeel

A mood-journaling app with accounts, a daily check-in flow, and a history view for tracking how your emotions shift 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.

Visit project →

Technical Experiments

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

Sheep, on a ZX Spectrum

A rotating 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, played completely straight — but the guestbook underneath is a real, working feature: a Supabase-backed table with input validation, live inserts, and a reload on submit. Sign it if you dare.

See it live →
More in this vein

A couple of smaller pieces in the same aesthetic register as the two above — liminal, looping, a little unsettling. No bigger 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 alone in a hallway that never ends.

Field Work

Interviews, not 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, students — about their country, their lives, their childhoods. Built as a browsable interface with per-person audio and toggleable translations. It's the same interest in ethnography that carried a Fulbright proposal on climate and cultural change in Kyrgyzstan (interviews with farmers and herders about what's shifted over the last 20–30 years) 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

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 (loosely my own — Rapid City, SD) to look into a local ghost problem, and ends up pulled into the ghost side of the world altogether: a place full of cowboy ghosts 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.

Take a look →