RLFO#28: Put the Hours In

This post originally premiered on Random Links Found Online.

Getting better as a programming primate is the same as getting better at riding a bike. First time you may scratch your knees, but it’s a rite of passage that every bike rider has to go through. Same thing applies to bugs, compiler and IDE errors, infinite loops that should’ve ended 42 iterations ago and off-by-two errors. In today’s RLFO, you will find interesting but useless side projects that most likely nobody but you will care about. But you will get better.

Building WebRTC Video Chat Applications

[link] Long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I was tasked with “building a chat app similar to WhatsApp, with End2End Encryption and Audio/Video calls” for a niche market of people who, for confidentiality and compliance reasons, couldn’t use existing E2EE platforms… whatever that means. E2EE is already a solved problem, WhatsApp had a whitepaper explaining how they generate keys and how they share them. And for the video call part, we instantly thought of WebRTC.

Writing a chess engine in C++

[link] I suck at chess, so I try to play other games. Like Hex and backgammon, but I suck at them too since not a lot of people know how to play them… It shouldn’t be extremely difficult to build your own chess engine. The rules are not that difficult to understand and/or translate to code, and you can do it over a weekend if you put your back into it.

Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python

[link] Writing a compiler builds character as a programming primate. Once you get down to writing your implementation of a programming language, you start to appreciate the funny bugs and “undefined behaviors” of other languages. Writing a C compiler is not an easy task, and it’s even more tedious to have to do it in Python… But it’s a stepping stone towards a deeper understanding of how computers think.

Analyzing Spotify stream history

[link] Normies use Volt.fm and while I have nothing against them, you can do better by yourself. All you need is to download all your data (which should belong to you either way) and some basic Python scripting, and you’ll have yourself a portfolio project for your future Data-related job.

Signed distance functions in 46 lines of Python

[link] Some of us prefer donuts the pastry, others prefer donuts and burnt tyres, but this article stars “graphically” rendered donuts. Graphics are hard, and quaternions are harder. True, implementing a 3D spinning ASCII donut is not something that will make you land your dream job as a REST API developer. But as with the rest of these Random Links found Online, they might give you a deeper understanding of the field you will spend the rest of your foreseeable future working in.

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