Joe Crozier
engineer - entrepreneur - developer
engineer
entrepreneur
developer
engineer
I’m currently entering my third year of a Software Engineering and Management program at McMaster University. I’m a returning band member in the McMaster Engineering Musical. I also participate in groups like HackItMac and Spectrum.
entrepreneur
I started my first company (First Stop Computers) at age 15. In 2014, I started iPhone Joe, and everything changed. iPhone Joe is an iOS device repairs and sales service. I operate the company out of Collingwood while I'm around, and out of McMaster while I'm in school. I received the Ontario Summer Company grant to start iPhone Joe, a fantastic program which I frequently recommend and mentor for.
At McMaster, I work as the co-president of the McMaster Entrepreneurship Assocation along with Dave Nidumolu. The MEA is a student run organization which aims to assist, educate, and inspire entrepreneurs around the McMaster community. We work closely with Spectrum, HackItMac, and SocialSpark.
developer
I'm an iOS developer currently available for freelance work. Below is some info on the four apps I've publicly released and are available for sale.
Predict the odds of a snow day tomorrow using local weather data. My first app!
Learn to solo better by playing over a variety of original backing tracks.
Start an adventure with just one tap in this retro RPG game.
Discover the benefits of mindfulness meditation in just 5 minutes a day.
I've also developed some non-commercial, learning projects outlined below.
An arcade style Python game which was the runner up in the McMaster EPIC Lab Game competition.
My final group project for a software development class - identify songs using musical contours.
My first Node.js project - browse a random selection of high quality reddit posts in a fullscreen browser.
Maestro is a C++ app which uses the Myo to simulate the feeling of conducting an orchestra. 4th place at YHack!
The Snowday App
The Snowday App was my first venture into iOS programming. I originally wrote it as a grade 10 science fair project attempting to prove that it is possible to write computer software to predict the liklihood of snow days. As any Ontarian can tell you, snow days are a rare silver lining to otherwise brutal winters, causing the app to gain a moderate following in my home town of Collingwood. The story was picked up by some Georgian Triangle newspapers and stations, and so at 16 I enjoyed my small moment of local fame.
The app works by retrieving an XML document containing weather data for a specified area, then sending this data through an algorithm which returns the liklihood of a snow day occuring on the following day.
The Backing Track App
The Backing Track App was released in 2013, and for the first time, I was able to combine my love of music with my newly found passion for programming. The app allows the user to generate backing tracks to practice soloing and improvising over. I personally recorded and edited every track included in the app. By selecting a key, style, and tempo, the app will return a personalized backing track for which can be played through speakers or headphones. The tracks vary from simple accoustic guitar riffs to compex jazz beats.
One Tap Adventure
One Tap Adventure is a joint project by myself and fellow software engineer, Niko Savas. It is an arcade iOS game, partially inspired by 16-bit RPG classics. One Tap Adventure is coded using Apple's new SpriteKit. Though gameplay is simple, it has been described as impossible to put down. Niko and I created original sprites and music for the project, making every asset of the project entirely our own. The game features integration with Twitter, Facebook, and GameCenter APIs, allowing users to share their scores among the platforms.
Being my first game to reach the public market, creating the app was an excellent learning experience and gave me a great deal of understanding of the game development process. I'm now very confident in my knowledge of the SpriteKit infrastructure, desoute having began with little experience with it.
Take5 on the Go
Take5 on the Go is a contracted app developed for Vicky Looby by myself and fellow software engineer, Niko Savas. Take5 was my first experience in contracted software development and proved to be a hugely educational and enlightening experience.
Take5 is a mindfulness meditation assistant app designed to slowly introduce users to the habit of daily meditation. It features a variety of original meditation tracks recorded by Vicky which are meant to be listened to during a user's meditation session.
Take5 features a daily meditation tracking tool called the 30 Day Challenge. Every day the user completes a meditation session, a marker is placed on the app's built in calendar. By completing 30 successive days of meditation in a row, the user completes their challenge and unlocks the ability to meditate using longer tracks. The progression the user experiences moves from 5, 15, to 30 minute tracks.
Eng Life
The first project Niko Savas and I ever worked together on was a top-down Python game called Eng Life. We made the game for McMaster's EPIC Lab's biyearly game challenge back in 2013. We ended up placing second, a result which as young first years, we were very happy with. The game is written purely in Python, using the PyGame library. It was the first game I ever worked on to completion, I handled most of the physics, animations, and sound and Niko worked on gameplay and bossfights. 
The game features a nameless protagonist who is tasked with fighting off hordes of arties, commerce students, and football players in order to fulfill his destiny of becoming a True McMaster Engineer. Armed only with a calculus textbook (and later the ability to throw McMaster Eng Fireballs), the protagonist battles through four levels and three boss fights before a final battle against our programming teacher, Dr. Smith.
Check out EngLife on Niko's GitHub.
MidiFind
MidiFind is a musical pattern recognition tool made by myself, Vicky Bilbily, and Tyler Post. Effectively, MidiFind is a way of quickly and easily identifying a song which you know the melody for, but do not know the name or artist of. By expressing the tune as a musical contour, anybody is able to input melodies into MidiFind, regardless of musical training.
The contour is then converted into a simple string and using string searching algorithms taught in our algorithms class, MidiFind searches through our database of 70,000 MIDI songs and tries to find a matching contour.
MidiFind was developed purely in Python 3, it utilizes the PyGame library for the GUI and MIDO for MIDI input/output.
Check out MidiFind on Tyler's GitHub.
InfiniteReddit
InfiniteReddit is my first experience building a full webapp. It's a website for discovering and exploring old, high quality content from reddit. InfiniteReddit is based on the premise that a huge amount of content on reddit can be enjoyed without the context of time. That is to say, content from subreddits like /r/pics, /r/earthporn or /r/woahdude could be enjoyed for years to come after its initial post date, as the time that the post was submitted is often not very important. Content presented by InfiniteReddit is deemed "high quality" by ensuring that it only presents links which were in the top 25 submitted from that week.
The backend for InfiniteReddit is built in Node/Express. It uses a Mongo database to score its collection of links and Mongoose to help integrate with Node. The front end is based largely off of the RedditP project
, while the main page is a simple BootStrap grid.
The project isn't live yet, though it's nearing completion. I plan to host it here on joecrozier.ca, and ideally continue updating and improving it.
Check out InfiniteReddit on my GitHub.
Maestro
In October of 2014, I attended my first ever hackathon at Yale University in New Haven, CT. YHack is an annual Hackathon and one of the largest in North America.
3000 students attended, and approximately 500 projects were completed at the 36 hour event. Niko and I paired up to create Maestro, a C++ app meant to give the user the illusion of conducting an orchestra. The app uses the Myo, a wearable armband device from Thamlic Labs which translates muscle movements in the user's arm into signals to be processed by the computer. While Maestro is running, a customized orchestral track plays in the background and changes depending on the user's arm movements and hand gesture.
Check out Maestro on DevPost.