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. That’s about where I am today!

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

Genuary 2023.10: Generative Music

2023-02-10

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

10) Generative music

Wikipedia: Generative music

NOTE: Because of limitations in JavaScript autoplaying sound, you must click to start.

NOTE: This currently doesn’t work in Safari. Something funny with the p5.sound addon. I’m working on it.

Redis in Rust: A REPL Client [Part 3]

2023-02-09

Okay, we’ve got a server and we can ping it. Let’s actually make a simple client, so I don’t have to do funny things with echo any more. Specifically, let’s make a REPL!

Genuary 2023.09: Plants

2023-02-09

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

9) Plants

Genuary 2023.08: Signed Distance Functions

2023-02-08

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

8) Signed Distance Functions

Genuary 2023.07: Sample a color palette

2023-02-07

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

7) Sample a color palette from your favorite movie/album cover

Genuary 2023.06: Steal like an artist

2023-02-06

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

6) Steal Like An Artist

Genuary 2023.05: Debug view

2023-02-05

Genuary! Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'. Let’s do it! 5) Debug view I like Boids. Here are some Boids with debug vectors drawn showing the three forces acting on them (red to stay away from one another, green to move in the same direction as their friends, blue to move towards the center of their friends).

Redis in Rust: An Echo Server [Part 2]

2023-02-04

Following up from Cloning Redis in Rust: RESP [Part 1], we can parse the protocol. So now… let’s do something with it.

The obvious(ish) next step, in my mind? Make a server. It’s all going to be over the network eventually, so it’s either here or storing data. Here it is!

Specifically, my goal is not to build the networking and data structures for this project from scratch. Where there are primitives or libraries that will do something like networking for me, I’m going to use them.

Ergo:

tokio for networking (+ async)
tracing for logging

So, how do I write a simple server in Tokio?

Genuary 2023.04: Intersections

2023-02-04

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

4) Intersections

Genuary 2023.03: Glitch art

2023-02-03

Genuary!

Spend a month making one beautiful thing per day, given a bunch of prompts. A month late, but as they say, ’the second best time is now'.

Let’s do it!

3) Glitch Art