Posts about Code

As of the end of 2024, I’ve done at least some of Advent of Code for 7 years in a row. I’ve had the most fun and practice parsing and transforming the input data for each puzzle.

I learned pretty quickly from the puzzles to store the common grids as sparse maps to save lots of memory and keep the problem in memory. I sometimes got stuck on the puzzle and the algorithm, but I still got lots of practice in general Clojure. I definitely see that the Clojure data structures lend themselves well to the puzzles. I’ve gotten to effectively apply lots of common Clojure libraries like core.async and core.logic.

My incidents project scrapes an RSS feed of emergency response incidents in Lancaster County and stores them into an XTDB database for history. It generates static site of current events with hiccup and historical charts with Clerk.

Running this project day-to-day, I learned that the Clojure/JVM start up is a bit too heavy to start frequently from cron, so I run it as a service in systemd with its own scheduling. Clerk and the amount of data I’m processing is also a bit heavy, so I have that scheduled to rebuild less frequently than the scraper. The site is still all static.

With this CLJS project, I was trying to derive a standard shadow-cljs workflow to make sure I could start any new CLJS web project quickly. It started using Reagent, and I migrated to Helix to be less-insulated from newer React features. I also wrote code to migrate data in local browser storage from an old Transit format to EDN. I’m constantly learning the better flows for data in React and local storage.

The beginning of 2020 provided some of us with lots of downtime, so I started loading and analyzing Johns Hopkins University’s data on COVID with my own data warehouse and web app to display my data.

The data was pretty messy early on, and it changed over time, so I needed to parse lots of different formats. I generated a static site with my historic graphs and focused on World, US, and counties in Pennsylvania. It was a classic ETL for a star schema data warehouse, since I wanted to refresh my experience on that. I initially stored in in a SQL database using hugsql and next.jdbc.

After a bit of time, this became my first project to explore CRUX/XTDB and NoSQL data structures. I learned a bit about how changes applied in XTDB and how to limit history and otherwise save space on my small server environment. I could easily apply core.async when it was time to get things done faster.

The web app project that I added later provided a more dynamic Reagent app in CLJS that used the static data produced by warehouse project.

I wanted a simple tool for conducting planning poker in sprint planning, so I built one in JS to run on mobile phones. When I started learning CLJS, I converted it to Reagent and used Leiningen to build it.

I’ve enjoyed finding there are ways to apply Clojure to everything!

As of the 0.15.957 release, clerk tables have a ::clerk/page-size parameter, so I use that now instead of the code above.

I’ve been coding for a very long time, so I’ve had lots of projects in various languages, on various platforms, and stored very differently.

I got nostalgic on and off over the past couple years and went digging around to recover the source for some of those old projects. I uploaded the more notable projects to my GitHub account.

I spent money to buy a 3.5-inch USB floppy drive and an old 386 PC with a 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy drive, so I could ultimately copy files from really old 5.25-inch floppies that I used in the late 1980s and early 1990s to my live storage of today. Among those old files were binaries and source in GWBASIC and QuickBasic.

I found one of the first games I wrote and sort of distributed, Gravity Blocks. I could play the compiled binary with DOSBox and read the main source file, but some of the source code for my common libraries is still locked up in a compressed format from QuickBasic 4.5. I may need to dig deeper into QB64, a clone of QuickBasic 4.5 that seems to be able to read, run, and compile those old compressed files.

I also found source code for the first software I wrote for the local fire company to help track statistics on calls and print reports to submit to the local municipalities we served.

It was written in GWBASIC, so I was able to decode the compressed source where needed to read it. I published my CALL-REP source, so I could go back and have a look at the simple, but useful, things I used to write as a kid.

I continued to build stuff through college (and obviously beyond). Some of it was in C, PERL, and Java.

I recovered these bits of source code laying around in backups and copies of old Linux servers I’ve run over the years. This source was in old Subversion repositories that used old versions of Berkeley DB. Initially, This BDB version mismatch kept svn checkout from working, but the current Subversion tools have an svnadmin recover command that could fix the repository for normal reading today. I’m sure some of those old SVN repositories had previously been migrated from CVS.

I found the source code from my final project in the Java class in my last year of college in 2000.

Pop-a-Prof is a clone of my favorite puzzle game, Bust-a-Move. It’s a Java Applet that ran in Netscape allowing any number of players, and it coordinated everyone’s play with a shared public server, Each round lasted 5 minutes, and any time you topped-out, you’d lose some points, and start over, so no one needed to sit around watching the last people battle it out.

After school, I started on Pop-a-Prof 2. This one ran as a plain Java application, and implemented rebounding balls in the game. It was more of a proof-of-concept for the new game mechanics, and it never got network play.

I liked running little bits of code, like applets did, so I continued into writing Java ME (J2ME) for my feature phones around 2005.

I did a gas-logging app that stored fuel-ups and drew graphs to show fuel economy.

I also wrote a quick little game called Ben’s Backhoe to give the kids a little something to do on my phone. By the time I was building this sort of thing, though, I’m a decent Java programmer, so it’s not the fun mess that we see in the other old project.

I spent most the day poking around at various old BASIC files and trying to tweak them a bit to run in PCBasic or QB64. I used lots of weird graphics modes from the Tandy 1000 and didn’t think much about portability. I may post more projects over time.