Hi, my name is Evan and I’m the creator of Anukari. I’m also a guitarist and video game enthusiast.
I’ve been building software since I was 13 years old. I got started by accident: I wanted Snake Game on my TI-82 calculator, but it didn’t have a data port to transfer the game from another calculator. I don’t remember how I discovered the “EDIT” menu that let me see the BASIC code for Snake Game, but I somehow figured out that if I were to copy the text there to my calculator, character-by-character, I would have Snake Game on my TI-82.
So instead of paying attention in class, I spent much of the 7th grade manually typing in the code without really understanding what any of it did. In the process of copying it, I made mistakes and saw what happened. I slowly came to understand what the code was doing. And eventually I got to play Snake Game whenever I wanted!
My professional software career began in the field of renewable energy, and later I became a tech lead at Google and worked there for 11 years, focused on stopping fraud and demonetizing web sites with hate speech and other harmful content.
I really enjoyed my time at Google, but eventually I got a bit burned out by corporate life.
I have been a musician my whole life, and I’ve always enjoyed electronic music production and synthesizers. I wanted to find a way to merge my lifelong love affairs with both music and software.
So I left Google to build Anukari.
Video games are what got me started building software, and outside my professional career, I built many little half-baked game engines for fun. Among many others, I built a Worms clone and a Minecraft clone.
My favorite game engines always involved physics in some way. I’ve just always found it fun when computers mimic the mechanical workings of nature. Seeing a ball bounce around in a realistic way on a computer can still make me giggle.
In the late 2000s, one of my little side projects was to take a video-game-style physics simulation of masses and springs, and see whether I could make it produce audio. It was just a few lines of code, but it made some neat sounds!
So when starting Anukari in 2023, my first thought was, “what if I took that silly little spring-mass demo and made it into a real-time plugin?” I have a background in physics, but no background in DSP at all. So this idea was quite attractive!
I spent a few days prototyping the core physics simulation, and as soon as I heard the sounds it made, I knew that it was worth going all-in to make it into a real product.
So Anukari was born, melding together so many of my interests: video games, music, and software. I even managed to sneak in my hobby of working on cars: the 3D models include things like pistons and cams. :)
Ultimately I am building Anukari because I think it’s fun and different. It’s tactile and playful, and it scratches that itch of building something with Legos. In other words, it’s the synthesizer that I wanted to play with. And I hope that a few other people might enjoy it as well!
