Hi. My name is Dave Hammerle, and I am a software developer. This is my personal website. I'm primarily doing web application development, currently.
For a good example of my web application development skills, see the 'Ratings' page here. It is a search page allowing you to look through a big list of electronic entertainment media of all kinds in a database and see how much I liked each one.
One of my main personal interests is something called 'effective altruism'. It is a form of altruism that places an emphasis on cost-effectiveness. The idea is that it is not only good to help other people, but it is also important to try to figure out the most effective way to provide the most help possible.
For this purpose I am pursuing something known as 'earn-to-give'. This is where, rather than doing volunteer work, a person tries to make money in order to donate it to a particularly cost-effective charity.
I already have a good idea of which charities are cost-effective because there is a website called GiveWell that focuses on exactly that question. Additionally, in fall of 2023, I completed a bachelor's degree in a field called 'global health' to help pick good charities. Global health is like public health, except that it has an emphasis on low income settings like sub-Saharan Africa. In places like these, the money goes a lot farther because there is less money available. Almost all the charities mentioned on GiveWell are global health-oriented charities. For a while, I was donating to one of the most popular global health charities, the Against Malaria Foundation. More recently, I started donating to a much smaller charity named Lafiya Nigeria, which provides family planning services in Nigeria, both counseling and contraception. I switched because, according to my calculations, Lafiya Nigeria can save the life of a child under 5 years old for less than $1000, which is about ten times as cost-effective as the Against Malaria Foundation. As ridiculous as that may sound, I've spent a lot of time looking into this, and it seems to be approximately correct. If you want details, check out the Altruism dropdown at the top of this page.
A lot of my past computer programming experience has been in video games, both professionally and in my free time. Professionally, I primarily worked on games for mobile phones, and I did a little bit of work on web games.
In my free time, there were 4 main games that I worked on over the years. If you would like to take a look at them and/or try them out, they can be accessed via the 'Video Games' dropdown above. Eventually, I figured out that I didn't like game development much more than other forms of computer programming, and there are plenty of other people who are incredibly enthusiastic about working on video games, so it tends to pay a lot less than other kinds of programming work. So I gave up on video games and got a job doing web application development for the New York State government. But a lot of the algorithms I developed while working on those 4 games are still some of my most complex and impressive work.
These games are © 2025 David Hammerle. All Rights Reserved. You are granted permission to download and play for non-commercial, personal use only. No redistribution or commercial exploitation is permitted. For any other use, please contact davehammerlecoder@gmail.com.
I started making board and card games when I was about 8 years old, long before I started to learn how to program in college, but I never tried to actually sell any of them. At first, I didn't think they were good enough. Much later (~2022), I started thinking they might be good enough, but I thought I could make more money and/or accomplish more by spending my time on other things.
If you want to look at some of them, they can be accessed from the 'Board Games' dropdown, above. You can also play them, but most of the games would require some time spent creating cards for the games and might require you to find or purchase some items you don't necessarily already have. For each board/card game, I included a section 'Putting the Game Together' that describes how to create the cards and what else is needed (other than the rules) to play the game.
There are quite a few other board and card games that I've made over the years, but I especially didn't retain card lists and rules for most of my earliest work, and, even beyond that, there were a lot of games I didn't write down and keep. I also didn't include any games that I didn't play at least once with another person.
These games are © 2025 David Hammerle. All Rights Reserved. You are granted permission to download and play for non-commercial, personal use only. No redistribution or commercial exploitation is permitted. For any other use, please contact davehammerlecoder@gmail.com.
This whole website is 'accessible', meaning it should work with screen readers for people with visual impairments, for people who are color-blind, and for people with a few other disabilities. It is also 'responsive' which means that it should work at any reasonable resolution, whether on a computer, tablet, or phone.
If you would like a more exhaustive list of tools and technologies I have experience with, please see my resume. But, of course, I can also learn new tools and technologies as needed.