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!

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Recent posts

AoC 2022 Day 5: Stackinator

2022-12-05

Source: Supply Stacks

Part 1

Given a list of stacks of syntax 1 and instructions in the form syntax 2, apply each instruction to pop qty items from the stack src and put them on dst one at a time.

Syntax 1: Stacks

    [D]    
[N] [C]    
[Z] [M] [P]
 1   2   3 

Syntax 2: Instructions

move 1 from 2 to 1
move 3 from 1 to 3
move 2 from 2 to 1
move 1 from 1 to 2

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Advent of Code 2022

2022-12-01

Let’s do this thing!

I’m going to try Rust this time, since it’s 1) awesome 2) fast and 3) crazy. :D

Let’s see how it goes!

If you’d like to see the full form of any particular solution, you can do so on GitHub (including previous years and possibly some I haven’t written up yet): jpverkamp/advent-of-code

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Stateful Solvers and Iterators

2022-10-16

Rust, yet again! Let’s take what we did last time with Solving Sudoku (again) and improve the code structure a bit more.

Goals:

  • Create a ‘Solver’ struct that can maintain state (such as how many states we’ve visited, how much time we’ve spent)
  • Track the above stats
  • Turn the ‘Solver’ into an iterator which will iterate through given solutions (a single call will give the first solution or you can run through the iterator to get all of them)

If you’d like to follow along, I’ve started uploading the code here: https://github.com/jpverkamp/rust-solvers

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