Programming

TradeWars 2002 built its universe from a random number and then threw the number away. The whole map, every warp and every port, turns out to be recoverable from three sectors, because the number was never random enough to hide.

I spent weeks hunting for the compiler that built a 1990s DOS game byte-for-byte. The instruction no Turbo Pascal would emit turned out to be a single overlay directive I'd never tested.

Building a 22,000-line Unix shell from scratch in Go with a parser, pipeline executor, job control, and structured data pipes.

A recovered home directory from New Mexico State University, circa 2001. Tokenizers, red-black trees, a Unix shell, parallel Mandelbrot sets, and a Dots-n-Boxes AI that knows it sucks.

Designing and implementing a 60,000-line programming language in Go that combines Lisp's homoiconicity with Python's readable syntax.

A recovered archive of Turbo Pascal homework from Balboa High School in the Panama Canal Zone, 1993-1994. BBS door programs, blackjack games, sorting benchmarks, and a 16-year-old trying to get on the Internet.

Rediscovering the source code of Signalnine, a 2002 blogging platform built by CS students that pioneered community-driven web platforms before WordPress.

Building a 28,000-line Python blackjack simulator with event-driven architecture, immutable state, and realistic shuffle physics to understand casino math.

Using Ghidra to reverse-engineer a Delphi 4 DOS game executable, reconstruct its binary data formats, and rewrite the game from scratch.

Solving Project Euler problems in Python, from brute force to optimized algorithms like prime factorization with the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

Exploring domain-specific languages through building a web server: parsing JSON configs, handling keep-alive bugs, and weighing tools like Boost Spirit and ANTLR.

Refactoring a C++ web server: adding dynamic mime typing, CGI support, and hunting down a memory leak while keeping the design clean and extensible.

Explore how JVM garbage collection works and the escape analysis optimization technique that allows objects to be allocated on the stack instead of the heap.