Programming

The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Genuary 2026: And so it ends

2026-01-31 in Programming

I just wanted to make a quick montage of all 31 sketches:

You can combine all of the preview images and then add some nice text with a pair of imagemagick commands:

montage content/programming/2026/genuary/*/gen26.??.png \
  -tile 6x6 \
  -geometry +2+2 \
  -background none \
  gen26-grid.png

mogrify \
  -gravity southeast \
  -pointsize 200 \
  -fill "white" \
  -stroke "black" -strokewidth 2 \
  -annotate +20+20 "Genuary 2026" \
  gen26-grid.png

Genuary 2026.31: Shader

2026-01-31 in Programming

I have very little experience with graphics shaders, but I’d like to learn. Perhaps I’ll take a month to redo all these prompts with shaders. That’d be neat.

But for now, one shader, messing around a bit.

Genuary 2026.30: Bug

2026-01-30 in Programming

A throwback to what’s probably one of my earliest programming projects (originally in qbasic…): bugs!

It’s very simple: each frame, each bug moves randomly and the draws a dot.

That’s really it.

I’ve updated it a bit with various parameters to tweak. Play with them. See what they do!

Genuary 2026.29: Evolution

2026-01-29 in Programming

That got quite a bit more than I expected. So now it’s basically an evolving programmatic image generator. 😄

Genuary 2026.28: No Libraries, No Canvas

2026-01-28 in Programming

Whelp. I’m not a fan of that, but it was interesting enough. I got to brush off my tabbed view code. And do some weird things with CSS. Whee?

Genuary 2026.27: Lifeform

2026-01-27 in Programming

So this one really fits better for Genuary 2026.25: Organic Geometry and that one is a lifeform like this one, so… we’ll consider them swapped or something.

Anyways, spawn branching nodes and draw a bunch of squares. Not only an organic looking lifeform but creepy to boot! I do love it without borders and with fade.

Be careful with high child count without either a high segment length or death rate to compensate, it will get slow.

Genuary 2026.26: Recursive Grids

2026-01-26 in Programming

A favorite technique of mine. I’ve already done it on day 5, day 7, and day 13. But now we can go one a-maze-ing step further…

See what I did there? 😄

Basically: generate a maze. For each cell in the maze… generate a smaller maze! Recursively.

Genuary 2026.25: Organic Geometry

2026-01-25 in Programming

So basically we have a simulation where each of n different species has a weight of attraction/repulsion for each other species. This is, by itself, enough to generate some pretty organic behavior!

Edit: This one probably fits better for Genuary 2026.27: Lifeform and that one here.