flooey.org

Jan 6, 2024

Zigging through Advent of Code

Advent of Code is the highlight of December for me and, as I do every year, I completed it in a language I had never used before. This year’s selection was Zig, which describes itself as “a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software”. (Previous languages I’ve used include Crystal and Common Lisp.)

Jan 1, 2024

My Year In Cities, 2023

Like last year, here is the list of cities I visited during 2023, in chronological order.

Mar 2, 2023

How Do Humans Think?

My various feeds have been filled with a lot of discussions of ChatGPT, its value, its use cases, whether it’s good or bad, how it works, and all sorts of other stuff. Some of it is interesting or useful, some of it is just noise, but mostly I don’t want to talk about any of it.

Jan 5, 2023

The Many Faces of Crystal

Last month I did 2022’s edition of Advent of Code, and, like every year, I did it in a language I had never used before. (Last year I did it in Common Lisp, for instance.)

Jan 1, 2023

My Year In Cities, 2022

Like last year, here is the list of cities I visited during 2022, in chronological order.

Nov 26, 2022

Multiple Signatures in EVE Online

In case you aren’t familiar, EVE Online is a space-themed MMORPG in which players build, buy, and upgrade ships, space stations, and planets to generate resources in order to enable them to do even more building, buying, and upgrading. One of the main late-game mechanics is corporations, where players band together in order to pool their resources and enable commanding ever greater portions of the galaxy.

May 8, 2022

Redactle-Inspired Edits

My favorite Wordle-related game right now is Redactle, where you have to try to guess a random Wikipedia article by the words it contains. It’s great fun trying to tease out what word could go where based on sentence structure, word length, other words around it, typical Wikipedia phrasing, and so forth.

Jan 2, 2022

My Year In Cities, 2021

Like two years ago, but unlike last year when I never left my home, here is the list of cities I visited during 2021, in chronological order.

Dec 31, 2021

A Closed and Common Lisp

I just recently finished up Advent of Code for 2021, and, like last year, I did it in a new-to-me language. This year’s choice was Common Lisp. My total previous exposure to Lisp was a couple weeks writing Scheme in my Programming Languages class at university, so it was almost entirely a novel experience.

Dec 28, 2020

A December with Julia

I first did Advent of Code last year, and I decided then that I wanted to use it to learn a new programming language each year. Last year it was Rust, this year it was Julia. Unlike last year, this year I managed to complete every puzzle on the day it was released, and in the process I think I got a pretty good introduction to Julia.