Blog

Essays on software, algorithms, books, puzzles and game development — since 2011.

2026

24 May What we lost when we stopped programming A personal reflection on programming after generative AI. 7 min
17 May My Mental Model for “Is It Worth Automating?” Has Changed Disposable scripts suddenly make sense when the implementation cost collapses. 11 min
16 Apr A Free Chinese Dictionary, and Why I Built One Introducing the Moya Chinese dictionary — 120,000+ words, sentence parsing, and a small blog about the long tail of Mandarin. 7 min
3 Mar Moya Chinese A new iOS app for learning Chinese, 11 years in the making 7 min
7 Feb New Game: Picnic on the Moon Picnic on the Moon is a daily puzzle game. A robot tells you what it's bringing — can you figure out the rule? 1 min
31 Jan Should Makers Still Care About Code Quality? If it works, it works, let the LLMs worry about the code… right? 12 min
30 Jan Cryptic Crosswords: What They Are and How to Solve Them If you were ever left confused by a cryptic crossword, you're not alone. But once you know some tricks, they become less cryptic. 5 min

5 Jan Solving Every NYT Spelling Bee Puzzle, Now and Forever How many possible puzzles combinations are there? Can we solve them all? 11 min

21 Dec 3 Books for New Engineering Leaders A shortlist for software engineers moving into engineering management and leadership 8 min
15 Dec Moving my Blog from Hugo to Zola Zola is the static site generator I almost built myself, but thankfully didn't need to 6 min

9 Jul 3 Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books Heuristics I use to decide which nonfiction books to read 14 min

1 Oct Efficient Bit Manipulation in Go 1.9 Exploring the maths/bits package 5 min

3 Apr Diary of Building an iOS App with React Native The story of how I built the first non-Facebook React Native app to be released on the app store 10 min
26 Jan Excellent Open Source Go Projects A list of high quality Go projects to learn from 5 min

13 Dec Solving Regex Crosswords using Go Are you into solving regular expressions for fun? You've come to the right place! 9 min
19 May Running the Go Race Detector with -cover Overcoming an issue in Go versions before 1.3 3 min
3 May Efficient String Concatenation in Go Benchmarks of various approaches 5 min
16 Apr Why is Golang popular in China? Indeed, much more than anywhere else 9 min
14 Apr The Popularity of Go Some observations from Google Trends 2 min
19 Jan Rugby An Algorithmic Approach 11 min

23 Dec Minimum Palindrome Partitions Given a string, partition it such that every substring of the partition is a palindrome 7 min
23 Dec Integer Square Root Implementation An algorithm to find the square root of a given number 3 min
14 Aug I Rewrote my Blog in Go Streamlining from Django to Go. Here's what happened 8 min

5 Dec Lessons Learnt from Startup Weekend Lessons learnt from Startup Weekend, for software engineers 6 min