I had a go at the first couple of weeks of problems from Advent of Code this year. I’ve posted my answers over here. I stopped after day 13 because the problems were getting harder but the time I had to devote to them could not increase. I hope to come back to them at some point. But today I wanted to point out something interesting about the day 2 puzzle. Read more

As part of a job application process I was asked to write a short explainer article on something technical, and I decided to write a little bit about how testing for randomness works. The brief was to write something playful and friendly, hence the weird framing of this piece. I didn’t get the job, but I did learn a bit about randomness Since I’ve written the damn thing, I thought I’d share it, and International RNG Day seems like the perfect opportunity to do so! Read more

Over the past couple of years I’ve taught myself programming and data science. I’d been at a big computer nerd and at least programming-nerd-adjacent for a long time (linux user since 2005, emacs users since 2011) but in 2020 I made a conscious decision to pursue learning to code as part of a plan to find an alternative career. Over the past couple of years I’ve tried out quite a few different resources for learning programming and data science. Read more

Let’s say you have a list, and you want to “interleave” or “riffle shuffle” the items in it. That is, you want to split the list in two, and then make a new list, alternating items from the first and second halves. In Python, there are a number of ways of doing this. Now we are left with the problem of which of these ways should we actually implement? One key factor in making this decision is performance: how well do the various methods actually perform. Read more

The problem of coming up with a good password is finding something memorable enough that you will remember it, but not so obvious that it’s guessable. A password manager essentially makes sure that your passwords are not guessable, but it also makes them impossible for you to remember them, so you have to outsource remembering your passwords to a database on your computer or in the cloud (i.e. on someone else’s computer). Read more