A belated writeup of a project I did in 2018, to scale the puzzle game 2048 down to a smaller board where it could be exhaustively analysed, and learn from the results.

A detailed look at a still from a 16-year-old film, which I recently found to make a good educational exercise, with the bonus of being fun.

A sequel to my previous posts on finite-state transducers for aperiodic tilings: if you have a tiling you can’t build a transducer for, here’s an algorithm to turn it into one you can.

An application of algebraic extensions of the rationals: cheating (arguably) at elementary geometry puzzles.

A collection of semi-connected rants about context-free grammars, parser generators, and the ways in which they aren’t quite as useful as I’d like them to be.

A description of some of my personal computing habits, focusing on avoiding things ‘just turning out’ to last for ever in a disorganised manner.

A PuTTY user asked about the history of its logo and icon collection. I discuss the design intentions and technical aspects.

My personal projects are in Git, but not on a ‘forge’ style website. I talk about why, and how to interact with them.

An introduction to the boolean and bitwise XOR operators, their uses, and some advanced topics they lead in to.

An explanation of some post-quantum public-key cryptosystems, simplified to the level of pop-science.

A design thought about how bug trackers could use a more accurate data representation to make queries easier.

The history of all the mistakes I've made trying to detect loops in graphs while writing my puzzle collection.

A taxonomy of frustrating code review behaviours, and some thoughts about them.

A definition and discussion of my term “symbiosisware”, describing software consciously designed for only yourself to use.

A sequel to last month's post on finite-state transducers for aperiodic tilings.

A sequel to last year's two posts on combinatorial coordinates, this time applying regular-language theory to them.

(Yet another) guide to writing commit messages in version control, with a focus on what facts and rationale are good things to include.

A short opinion: bubblesort is an awful sorting algorithm and I wish people would stop teaching it.

A short opinion: command-line tools shouldn’t print long help text as well as an error message.

Some thoughts about coroutines in general, why I like them so much, and ways of using them and thinking about them.

A detailed introduction to the C++20 coroutine system, written in the course of teaching myself about it.

A description of the big design limitation of C11's _Generic feature, and various workarounds, mostly involving using more instances of _Generic to patch up the original one.

An article about getting the most out of error messages, particularly OS and network errors. Adapted from a talk I gave to colleagues last year.

A description of the algorithms for generating the Spectre tiling in my puzzle game Loopy.

A description of the algorithms for generating Penrose and Hat tilings in my puzzle game Loopy.

A retrospective of the development of the headline new feature in PuTTY 0.78: OpenSSH-style certificates on host and user keys.

An overview of PuTTY's development from its genesis in 1996 to the state of affairs in 2020. Written in response to an email query.

A description of the technique for generating guaranteed-soluble Minesweeper grids in my puzzle game Mines. Written in response to an email query.

A description of the automated solver in my puzzle game Net. Written in response to an email query.

What I had to do to make PuTTY compile for Windows on Arm as well as on x86, plus a deep dive into the NEON-accelerated cryptography.