Maurice Volaski

I am a freelance software dev available for hire for small to medium-sized projects, mobile, web (single page), and desktop

Bio

I fell in love with the Mac while mapping trees for a college project. That spark launched a lifelong journey in software — from Mac HyperCard to modern phone apps for science.
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In undergrad, I took a course in botany and got roped into revising a campus map of the different trees on campus. I had no idea how would I would do my project. As it turned out, the school had two Mac computers. The project, which took two years, turned into an 80-page tour guide to all the trees and shrubs on campus. I did it all on a Mac and fell in love with the machine.

I was itching to tinker more with it, and while in grad school, I did. Hypercard had come out, and I started writing stacks, the equivalent of mini-apps. Then came Pascal, and, before long, I was writing freeware utilities to enhance the experience and productivity of Mac users worldwide. I had become one of the most prolific authors of Mac freeware during the late 80s through mid-90s. You can see all my old creations at fluxsoft.com.

That involvement along with my writing a Fortran program for my graduate study in experimental psychology led me to a job lasting 34 years. During this time, I wrote a bunch of programs including an electrophysiology data acquisition and analysis app and an accounting software for managing the budget of an academic department. I then transitioned to help desk/server administration for many years. Recently, I have moved back to my first love, software development, starting with a web-based database for managing worm strains and then a phone and web-based database for managing zebrafish housed in industrial aquatic systems.

Developer Philosophy

The best software does what the user wants and not what the developer wants.

I call this the A to B principle. The gist of it is this. A given user begins in some initial state, let’s call it state A. However, the user wants to be in a different state, let’s call it state B. The goal of software is to get the user from A to B and to do it most expeditiously. There are innumerable instances where software fails to do this, a result I call an A to B violation. Worse, it may send the user to state they don’t want to be in at all, state C. This is an A to C exception. My blog is currently dedicated to collecting examples of these.

Notable Work—Web

I built a web-based laboratory app for managing strains of the roundworm for use in biological research. I built it with Javascript, jQuery, Bootstrap, PHP and MySQL. The source code is here. You can see a screenshot here,.

I built a web-based app for cheating at hangman and other word games. I built it with Dart and Flutter. The source code is here, and you can check out the app itself.

Notable Work—Mobile

I built a mobile (also available on the web and on the desktop) app for managing industrial aquatic systems (rooms with hundreds of tiny aquariums) for maintaining zebrafish for use in biological research. There are two versions. The source code for the original version is here, its successor here, and some screenshots of its successor here.

Notable Work—Desktop

I got my start converting a DEC PDP-11-based Fortran program to the Mac (in Pascal). The app collected and analyzed electrophysiological data from goldfish brains. I later upgraded this app to C++ with Metrowerks’ PowerPlant framework.

When we switched the neurobiology department office to Macs, they had to run their DOS-based grant accounting program on a PC emulator. To remedy the situation, I wrote an entire accounting program managing their annual mucho-million dollar budget using the relational database 4D.  I wrote it in the mid-90s, and it’s still actively being used in 2025. You can see a screenshot here.