Blog Posts

Imagine you are building an application that relies on a word bank. One design choice that might arise is whether this data should live in an external text file or should be baked directly into the compiled binary. While modern development often favors the flexibility of external assets, performance purists out there will argue in favor of the raw speeds of internal embeddings.

I've been programming for a decent amount of time. I started building mini games in middle school, learned fundamentals in high school, and now I'm about to graduate college. Throughout this journey, my beliefs on certain matters like OOP have changed due to personal experience and education. However, one core belief that has stuck with me is that deterministic programs are the ideal. Bugs are reproducible, answers are absolute, and my sanity stays intact. Living in a world of race conditions and side effects where my program *might* work was unimaginable.

Most image formats are both compressed and encoded into raw bytes. Compression helps with reducing the size needed to store the image while encoding defines the layout of how the bytes are organized. Because computers need the original data to render an image, these formats must be decoded and decompressed before use. Luckily,most common image formats publish specifications detailing everything from their compression methods to their data layout. Thus, unless it's some proprietary format, we can follow the specification to extract the width and height of an image from different formats. In this article I will specifically be covering: PNG, JPEG, WEBP formats.

In a recent personal project, I needed a logging system that would never exceed a certain file size limit. The logs were meant to serve both as a debugging tool and as a rolling history of events. Because the system would be writing large volumes of events continuously, performance was critical. An additional requirement that made sense to me was also logging the most events in chronological order (most recent would be at the end of the file and the oldest at the beginning).

Recently I was working through some old projects and I came into a situation where I had to animate an expanding floater-ish background hover effect for a card component. If you ever worked with CSS before you'll know that it isn't possible to transition between width and heights of value 'auto' which was the tricky aspect in regards to this problem. The inability to animate to auto is a well known CSS issue so there are many solutions such as using a wrapper with grid. However, for this specific effect I needed to expand the card radially in a way that aligned the main content with the rest of the containers in the UI layout which is where I leverage opacity and scale properties.

Have you ever wondered how tools like autocorrect can guess what word you meant to type or how Google manages to correct your search queries when you make a typo? While it may seem like magic, these processes are powered by simple yet effective algorithms. One popular variation of such an algorithm is known as the Levenshtein distance algorithm which measures how similar 2 strings are to each other. In this article, we're going to be exploring how to approach string similarity in an intuitive manner and also how to implement Levenshtein distance from said intuition.

If you've been around the web development world a decent amount of time, you probably know the meme about how there's way too many frontend frameworks. Most of these frameworks aren't worth mentioning let alone using. For many frameworks, it's just different ways of accomplishing the same thing and introduces added complexities that don't make a whole lot of sense for me as a developer. However, I've recently been wanting to revamp my portfolio website to add some additional features and I found it a perfect time to use one framework I personally think very highly of which is Astro.

There's a really cool event called advent of code that I enjoy participating in. It's a problem solving "competition" that features 25 Christmas themed puzzles. It's a lot of fun and sometimes frustrating, but there are always some very interesting puzzles from year to year.

I've been meaning to write this article for a while now. Ever since going to my first hackathon back in 2022 when I was still a baby freshman in college. However, it remained an after thought as I became increasingly busy. Now, 2 years and many hackathons later, I've finally decided to sit my ass down and write this article on why you should go to a hackathon.

I recently went on a trip to Seattle and I want to talk about it. For some context I went on this trip with my sister near the end of the 2023 summer season. Both my sister and I were busy with our respective internships, but we really wanted to travel some place together and get some quality sibling time. As such the only available time between our internships and school starting again was this small chunk of time in August. Now out of all the places we could've went to, why did I choose Seattle? Well it's because I thought it was the perfect city for me. The weather was cold (especially compared to Texas), I heard that people drive really slowly (especially compared to Texas), and there's a lot of _high paying_ tech jobs.

The other day I was browsing around Reddit, laughing my ass off at the shithousery going on with the whole NextJS app router fiasco, when I came across a post from r/csMajors titled 'Why is everyone godlike in comparison to me?' Now I usually tend to ignore any posts from r/csMajors because a majority of the time it's some pessimistic bum complaining or some elitist flexing their 4 quant offers. However, this post made me pause for a moment, and in that brief moment of thoughtlessness, swayed by my unnerving curiosity, I opened the post and started reading.