It’s not often that I have considered what happens in my local area network. For the longest time I’ve subscribed to the standard model of procuring internet from the cheapest ISP and plugging in their modem/router/switch device. BUT all this convenience comes at a cost:

Ascii art has always been an interesting topic to me. Though it’s style may seem a little dated it still finds plenty of use amongst modern terminal emulators today.

The hype and buzz around Wordle may have significantly died down but there’s always time to plug an extension that makes it even easier!

Recently I watched a Youtube video made by Geoff Marshall (General railway infrastructure and London related transport Youtuber) that introduced the notion of travelling on the minimum possible stations on the underground network to cover every single character in the english alphabet (a-z).

Some time ago I started developing a “snake cheater” that would effectively play the snake game automatically. The solution involved something called Hamiltonian Cycles but lead to an ultimately very slow “completion” time. I remarked at the time it might be worth exploring some path finding opportunites so that’s the purpose of this post.

MongoDB provides a no SQL database that’s easy to use and generally quite quick and easy to setup. However there are times where it might be painful to have to manage both a client application and a seperate instance of the DB (integration testing springs to mind). Enter Flapdoodle a Maven dependency that can manage MongoDB alongside our application.

C++ has always been a language that has interested me. Coming from a more web-orientated environment it’s easy to forget how much other languages and frameworks abstract away from the developer. The aim here is to write a (very) small Tic Tac Toe game that inherits multiple improvements over time!

Kotlin is the brainchild of JetBrains and having used IntelliJ IDEA exensively it felt only fitting to see what the languauge itself is capable of and how it’s supported (as a relatively fresh language) amongst the web development community.

A few weeks ago I developed a small program capable of defeating Snake. The ‘science’ behind it was fairly simple: follow a set pattern until victory was achieved; and it worked. But it would be nice to develop a more advanced solution so I decided to augment the codebase to provide me with more information to make smarter choices. I’m still working on how to make those choices however…

This might be another Snake related post but finding ways to cheat in this game provides some interesting challenges indeed.

Packaging up applications written in Java to run stand alone has never been easier thanks to JavaPackager.

Packaging up applications for other people to use once you’ve developed them can be quite the battle. This post explores packaging up our favourite snake game to run in a Windows environment via a double click with NO dependencies!

JSON is a fairly standard data-interchange format and is readable by humans too. It’s common with microservice architecture that individual components will communicate via JSON. Things can get slightly more complicated when less is known about the shape of incoming JSON. This post investigates writing dynamic JSON, mapping it back into POJOs and writing it to a noSQL database (MongoDB).

The game snake is a classic in the development world. It’s not overly complicated in design and should be instantly recognisable and easy to play. I chose to ‘introduce’ myself to React by developing a simple implementation of the classic game!

Annotations have been a key part of Java since they were introduced, and often provide convenient and fairly intuitive usage. It’s little wonder that they’re widespread and don’t just add ornamental value to code. This post explores implementing some custom annotations and processing them at runtime!

Writing java objects to ‘comma seperated values’ is nothing new. It turns out there are many ways to accomplish this and enough to warrant this post about a couple of approaches I took.

Automated testing has always been a prominent part of our service pipelines. These tests provide the feedback and safety net vital to our continuous deployment strategy but there exists a problem… We have too many!