Well since I was here past midnight, I decided to roll into day 74. So far I have done the Knapsack exercise on both the Java Script and C# tracks. C# has just two exercises left, both marked hard. They are React (build a reactive system), and POV (reorient a binary tree). Of those React is shared with the Java Script track and the other is not.
Today I got another award, “Persistent Perfectionist” for uploading 20 revisions on the Java Script track.
I might come back and update this with more fun stuff, or that might be it for the day. We will see how things go.
Turns out I had no time so staying up late saved the streak.
Another day another Advent of Code visualization. This time we are filling in patterns on a tiled floor and seeing which two red tiles make rectangles with the largest area. For part two you need to fill the loop made on the floor and make sure the rectangles are only those contained within the filled area.
It took me a looong time to figure this one out. I wanted to do a flood fill but that exceeded memory. So I only took the rows and columns where there was a red square. Then I flood filled that. (I tried figuring it out with horizontal and vertical spans but got nowhere.) Anyway I had some debug output that looked nice so I decided to make an image out of it. A visualization if you will. It is only at this point I realize my visualization is hugely distorted by clipping out the unused columns and rows. Probably would look cooler otherwise. Still it is kind of cool so you get a post with a picture of it
Since I had a C# console app it didn’t want me to let me make the image (System.Drawing didn’t have the Bitmap class probably need some sort of library added). Instead I did it in Python. Looks like I am a bit rusty, but I got there in the end. If you look at the far right of the diamond shape there is a spot that didn’t flood fill correctly. I guess that didn’t affect the final outcome.
Looking at the subreddit, if you don’t exclude the unused columns/rows the output is circular, pac-man like.
I dropped off on Exercism.org once I got to the Zebra puzzle. I can’t get it working. I hope to give it another go soon.
I have however been participating in Advent of Code. Only 12 days this year. It was a lot so I am ok with that, but I do think that without a global leaderboard it is missing something. Even if people did ruin the global leaderboard with their “enthusiasm”.
I like all the visualizations you can see on the reddit page. So I decided to try my hand at one this year. Today we were trying to connect extension cords between pairs of closest junction boxes. On part two they want it connected so that is is one single big circuit. That is what I visualized.
That’s a lot of extension cords and junction boxes. I made my code spit out a wavefront obj file so I could open it in blender. Unfortunately I don’t know enough Blender to render it well, so you just get a screen grab.
Anyway I thought that was fun. Looks like I should have used Kruskal’s algorithm.
I remember looking at this one many times, and saying to myself, haven’t I done 20 iterations yet? I feel like I should have got this one by now. Well, today I finally did get to 20. I think it was a dumb test that did it too. The test was checking how random my random BigIntegers were for DiffieHellman. Apparently they weren’t random enough. I took off the bit of code that tried to clear the highest bit so the number wasn’t negative, and that did the trick to get it to pass.
It looks like there is a BigFloat class in C# too. I wonder if I could do a deep Mandelbrot zoom with that.
Seventeen exercises left until I am done with the C# track. I think I am going to be stuck on the Zebra puzzle for quite some time.
During my 2025 run of 100 Days of Code, I was using exercism.org as a fallback if I didn’t have a project idea/ as a warmup exercise / keep the github green when I wasn’t ready to check things in yet. Well I decided to keep at it until I finished the C# track (probably sometime in November at this rate). Anyway I got a new badge today and wanted to share. Here it is Object-Oriented October. The exercise wasn’t really object-oriented the but the language C# is.
PS. I have 29 left at the moment, I am at 146/175 exercises.
I started 100 Days of Code for 2025 somewhat on a whim. I was working on porting the LazyDevs Simple Shmup to LovePotion so I could play it on my newly modded 3DS (why not mod it, the thing isn’t supported anymore). I liked having my own personal project and wanted to have more of that with a reason to keep going. That is when I remembered the 100 Days of Code Challenge. I figured it could get me to keep going after it gets boring/tedious.
It was a lot of work and left me tired. So I can’t do it continuously. But I am already thinking of trying it again in 2026. Or keeping an unofficial side project or two. I also may keep the exercism exercises going.
I kind of wanted one big 100 day project when I started but couldn’t think of one I really wanted. So I put up a list of possible project ideas and just worked through those. I think I did a good job of getting through the list.
LazyDevs Shmup was almost done when I started 100 Days of Code. I did however get the correct icon working eventually.
Minesweeper didn’t really need anything I must have fixed it previously, but I did toss some old debug messages out.
Seven Day Roguelike had already come and gone, but I did do the OLC Code Jam 2025 which was a lucky overlap instead. Seven days is probably too short anyway.
From the games list I did Tic-Tac-Toe and 2048. I had some 2048 code from Al Sweigart’s “The Big Book of Small Python Projects“. Comparing it with other 2048 implementations it actually runs a bit different. I wanted to make it graphical and animate the tiles. The graphical part worked ok, but the Tile animation just isn’t right. Tic-Tac-Toe is better, and matches my Python Minesweeper look and feel (although I should add the help system). I am not sure if the alpha beta is working right but it does seem to get harder/easier when I change the difficulty level. I would like to make this a web game I can put on itch.io (maybe both if I rip out the tile animation in 2048). It would also be nice to upgrade the tic-tac-toe to checkers or chess.
This still leaves tetris/columns, pac man, and platformer game ideas for next time. I still need to go find my hangman code.
Huzzah I finally got the to-do list in ruby off my back and have a django version too. Would still be nice to get some angular and vue experience but maybe with a different web app. The problem is I just don’t know what web apps I want. If I redo my “homelab” that might open up self-hosted apps a bit. Or maybe I will port the minesweeper or tic-tac-toe code to a web app to put on itch.io.
Things I didn’t have planned:
BASIC interpreter. I have been thinking of making my own language for years now. I worked through a YACC/LEX book until the chromebook I was working on corrupted and I lost my code. The exercism track had a forth subset exercise with an odd parsing library which worked but I couldn’t figure out very well. So when I ran out of Pi Pico lessons I just started a new interpreter. I learned to program on GW-BASIC back in the day and it has had a soft spot in my heart ever since. So a BASIC interpreter it was. No parser library either, just regular expressions (I used to be afraid of Regular Expressions). I got through all of the BNF I wanted from the Rosetta Code BNF page. I didn’t get to the secret extension idea I wanted to do of making it into a .NET compiled language. Some of the code is absolutely awful, and it crashes easily but I am quite happy with it. I do probably need to rearchitect it. Maybe I should port it to C/C++ and use LLVM to make it a compiled language.
I like that several of the programs in the “Big Books of Small Python Projects” will run on my BASIC interpreter. I could probably get more working if I tried.
Guess the Number
Bagles
100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall
Guess the Number
Speaking of the Pi Pico. I gave some of my nieces/nephews a book and a parts kit for the Pi Pico to encourage learning to program a few Easters back (I try to gift books on Easter — they still get candy too). I was complaining that none of them even tried it and realized I hadn’t done so either (I also gifted myself the same thing). I didn’t want to be a hypocrite so I decided to add it into the 100 days of code challenge. It was actually a lot of fun. I went and purchased some new supplies just to print “Hello, World!” to an LCD display and made it the final day’s project. I am now thinking I should make a Simon game with the Pico Pi and 3D print a shell for it. More expensive than just buying one of course.
OLC 2025 Jam. I am rather hesitant to join game jams anymore they are always too short and usually have a theme that I don’t like and can’t think of a match for. Well the OLC Jam is 10 days which is much better than just a weekend. The theme was shapes and I thought of Tempest so off to the races I went. I would like to return to it sometime and add more things the arcade has (more enemies, spikes, level transitions, etc.). For a game I have never played much I think it is fairly accurate. Even with 10 days a small arcade game subset is about all you have time for. I need to go grade some fellow entries.
Mazes. I shouldn’t be surprised. I like maze generation programs. My grudge against amazing.bas is in part that the code is too wretched to figure out what is going on. Anyway the “The Big Book of Small Python Projects” had some maze programs in it. The first one I decided not to peek and try to remake from memory. The second I wanted graphics and the third I wanted orthographic 2d. I should go back and look at the first person view version in his book.
Ideas for a 2026 run or ongoing side project.
We can continue the games list: Columns/Tetris, Pac Man, Platformer, maybe even a Run n’ Gun like Contra. I would like to make a version of Berzerk (maybe in 3D overhead view – still want the text synthesizer voice)
I could also add in web versions of: Minesweeper, Tic-Tac-Toe
The minesweeper game in part was to have my own version of games that used to be included with windows but have since been removed such as Minesweeper, Solitaire, FreeCell, Mahjong, etc. I feel they were stolen from me since they want to shove ads down your throat and require a Store login to get them now. So I wouldn’t mind adding Klondike Solitaire or FreeCell to my list.
I have wanted to do an enhanced version of my text adventure “Lost my Ball” hopefully for the web (I want a nice web-console of my own). Was thinking of watercolor backgrounds of the places on the map.
I would also want 3DS versions of some of my code, no reason I couldn’t do it for Vector Storm. A genesis version of something tile based would be nice too (was trying to follow the 2nd LazyDevs shmup tutorial on Genesis and never got far — scrolling wasn’t working like I wanted)
The advanced Shmup tutorial still seems cool but at about 100 episodes of 1 hour or more each is intimidating. Should I try the roguelike series?
Go upload that hangman code already, and put in up on Gitub too.
I should be doing more web stuff, but I don’t have many ideas I care about that look resume worthy (yes, it would be resume fodder in large part).
Online recipe list/cook book.
Bug Tracker (I think both Gitlab and Github already have this)
Online calendar
Art Portfolio
Weather scraper (grab today’s weather and post it to an LCD display on the home lab with a web page that shows the results too. Update it hourly by cronjob or similar) Use an API of course (for the resume fodder)
Speaking of books I could go back to the GameDev book idea. What language should I do it in? Kind of want to make it in Markdown/Restructured Text so I can build it from the command line. I could use that for documentation practice too.
Build the new home lab I have been thinking of. My current Raspberry Pi 3 is a bottleneck. I am thinking of putting the following on it.
Pi-Hole
Jellyfin
NAS (Open Media Vault/TrueNAS)
Gitlab
PostgreSQL server
Jenkins
Nginx (host my apps I think it can do DNS stuff too)
Ruby and Rails to run my Ruby on Rails To-Do list (I think GitLab already needs this)
Docker (might run proxmox on the server and have everything be a docker container)
I should do some resume fodder like Machine Learning/LLM (Large Language Model)/NLP (Natural Language Processing)/AI. I already mentioned web stuff. I have a co-worker that seemed to like Kaggle I also have a machine learning from scratch in python book I could read.
I have also been thinking of making my own text editor. I am thinking of using a Piece Table or Rope data structure.
Wouldn’t mind learning a new programming language like say Go, but not Rust (the community is crazy).
