Book review: Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programming
What’s the difference between an expression and a statement? What makes code imperative or declarative? What does it really mean to program at diffe...
Posts by Year
2021
Brian Harvey’s CS61A course: getting OOP Scheme programs working in 2021
I’ve been working through Brian Harvey’s CS61A course, as recommended by teachyourselfcs.com. It’s mind-blowing, but it’s also almost ten years old now and u...
2020
Advent of Code 2020
This was my first year of Advent of Code. Sucked in by the fun but achievable challenges of the first week, I made a commitment to a couple of people that I ...
Project: Job vacancy data scraper
I’ve just completed a new project: a command line Python program to scrape job vacancies for a given search term from Indeed.co.uk, geocode, and save in JSON...
cs50: pset 8 (SQL, user authentication, API calls) and why early decisions matter
This is the big one! A stock trading app, allowing the user to register, log in, buy and sell shares and log out, all using Flask, SQLite and an API call to ...
cs50: pset 7 (more Python, Flask, managing user input and responsive design)
Part 2 of my summary of CS50 and problem sets 7, 8 and the final project. This is where it gets really cool. If you’d told me at the start I would be coding ...
cs50: weeks 3 - 6 (bitwise image manipulation, hashtables, html/css and PYTHON!)
Wow, what a journey. CS50 complete and certificate issued! And, I am ashamed to say, not much in the ship’s log past the fourth week. I’ve put together this ...
Project: MoD fuel order form
I’ve just completed a new project: a responsive web form for military units to order fuel. It uses HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the Mapbox API, and features cus...
2019
cs50 week 3: review
Harold Wilson said a week is a long time in politics. Well, he may have been speaking about Harvard University’s CS50 course. My last post, completing week 2...
cs50 week 2: cracking crack
Almost a month after finishing caesar and vigenere from CS50 pset2, I thought I’d give the final problem set crack a, well, crack.
cs50 week 2: review
Another week of CS50 and another classic computer science problem solved. This time, the Caesar cipher: how to encrypt your top secret military messages by s...
cs50 week 1: review
cs50 is essentially a weekly two-hour lecture followed by what can seem like a million hours of head-scratching, googling, and trial-and-error-ing to solve t...
Perfect is the enemy of good
Voltaire is alleged to have delivered this pearl of wisdom that resonates across the ages.