A random mishmash of things I do:

I code more than I research, but I do love reading about computer science

• Especially data structures.

Plain old C

• It's beauty is in it's simplicity.
• I'm ALWAYS telling people to read the K&R C Programming Book
• Even if you don't write C code for work/play

C++, C++-11, C++17, C++2a

• I absolute love this language
• clang-16 on Debian Bookworm is absolutely amazing

Node.js

• I began professionally writing Node.js about 4 years ago.
• I need to have more hobby projects in this language so I can get into the flow state

X86-64 Assembler

• FASM is a great standalone assembler for 64-bit architectures (and more).
• I'm an old school NASM user
• It's beauty is in it's simplicity IMHO.
• I can read AT&T ASM syntax, but I usually never write it
• I know basic gdb commands... enough to figure out where things went wrong

Networking

• Securing and understanding the network stack
• Not a big fan of ARP
• Occasionally prototyping encrypted protocols over UDP/TCP

Raw socket programming

• It's been awhile, but I still love crafting low level packets

Writing web applications in C++ using Boost

• yes, it sounds crazy, but this is the most fun I've had in a long time
• I think that there is still a demand for FAST binaries
• Node.js is super quick but a well-written C++ binary can be very rewarding to write and deploy

I am a HUGE fan of The Lightning Mapped DataBase

• LMDB is a key/value store that is super quick and efficient, but most importantly, it's thread-safe
• It's based on the B-tree algorithm
• Always learning something new... THe best documentation is in lmdb.h. All the comments are super helpful

Linux/UNIX enthusiast

• I love Debian, Devuan (lol, tinfoil hats ahoy), Ubuntu, and FreeBSD.
• I don't have issues with systemd. Instead, I have issues with giant monolithic systems that absorb everything.
• Honestly, my main gripe with systemd is that sometimes it causes shutdowns/boot times to drag out for whatever reason
• other than that, it's whatever. I'll use it for most stuff that I don't really care about

Frontend UI/UX design

• I am somewhat a Unicorn in that I can write server side code...

... and I can write the HTML/CSS to turn an image into frontend code

HUGE SHOUTOUT!

The HTML you are viewing was kindly converted by a sed script. But not just any sed script... it was converted using this AWESOME repo (https://github.com/stamby/md-to-html)

Development Journal

blog/journal/2024-05-04.html: The endless fun of hacking on Cloudflare Workers

Some of my projects

Conway's Game Of Life (javascript)

Conway's Game Of Life is a cellular automaton. It's fairly simple in concept. I decided I'd write it in Javascript and utilize the Canvas API. It should work in most modern browsers.

• The code is here https://github.com/wmerfalen/conways-game-of-life on my github profile
• ... and the demo is here

Challenge: Remake a popular site

Twitter as a ReactJS App ... Unfortunately, no demo for this yet. I'll probably create a Cloudflare Pages project for it

• This project is in ReactJS and it's my attempt at proving what I could do with HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Project creation was a couple years ago, so I've definitely leveled up since then.

Tactical Denial Mud

• A military themed MUD. Utilizes lots of C++ refactorings.
• Just a hobby project
• At one point I setup a server and made it public. It wasn't very popular, so I shut it down for good.

Source code

/etc/passwd parser in C

• Parses /etc/passwd

Source code

knockd - A port knocking daemon written in C++

• This utilizes libpcap to capture packets. It then pokes a hole in the firewall when the correct port knock sequence is completed.

Source code

C++ SSH Config Parser

• Parsing is fun. Hoping to add more features soon...

Source code

Github API - Release Manager ... in bash!?!?!?!?

• Yeah, I wrote some wrapper scripts that help you manage github releases
• Requires bash

Source code

Tyrion - The node.js IRC bot

• Named after the little guy in GoT
• Written in Node

Source code

Slenderize - A minimalistic PHP templating system

• Yeh, I used to write PHP.... DONT LAUGH

Source code

Ghost DNS - An LD_PRELOAD hack

• The idea for Ghost was to create a scripting language that can control DNS lookups on a per-application basis.
• Work still needs to be done to make that scripting language more powerful.
• Lua sounds nice
• Or maybe if TCC has a library that I can call into...

Source code

Built at 2024-05-08 04:22:11