zserge's blog

This is a story of an old toy webpage that used to entertain kids with hand-drawn animated doodles.

This is a continuation of a series of posts about building tiny “clones” of popular web frameworks.

Every good abstraction solves a problem, and this post will cover everything I know so far about a brilliant math abstraction - tensors.

We love coding agents.

VisiCalc Spreadsheets rule the world for almost half of a century.

When people talk about computer vision, they usually think of OpenCV or deep neural networks like YOLO.

So, you want to build a web app, but you are not a backend developer.

Last year, I noticed that routine programming no longer brought me the same joy it did decades ago.

I love music.

Recently with friends we talked about an early web site I’ve programmed, probably the very first web service I’ve ever done.

This is part 6 from series “Tiny Great Languages”.

This is part 5 from series “Tiny Great Languages”.

This is part 4 from series “Tiny Great Languages”.

This is part 3 from series “Tiny Great Languages”.

This is part 2 from series “Tiny Great Languages”.

This is part 1 from series “Tiny Great Languages”.

Previously we covered early chatbots, bots talking gibberish, and self-taught number crunchers.

Previously we explored early “intelligent” software based on rules and Markov chains, but the results were not too convincing.

Eliza was an impressive chatbot of its era.

In the year 2023, AI took center stage in the media, stirring up discussions about whether it was mere hype or real progress.

I grew up with BASIC and Turbo Pascal.

Git can be confusing.

We got deadly viruses, nuclear war threats, economy heading from one crisis to another deeper crisis, politicians going out of control… You know that feeling.

Transpilers, or source-to-source compilers, is a type of a translator app that converts source code from one programming language to the other.

Every developer eventually wants to explore new programming languages.

If you look at the HackerNews headlines and comments - you may notice that every now and then people praise Zig, a relatively young programming language for low-level programming.

One-time passwords (OTP) are short sequences of numbers that authenticate user for a single login.

The Small Web.

There is a strong belief that every programmer in their life must write a ray tracer.

You probably shouldn’t read this article.

C is almost 50 years old.

1-bit music is probably the most challenging electronic music genre, and definitely not the most mellifluous one.

CSS-in-JS is a relatively new and a very contradictory way of writing CSS.

Some time ago I wrote a similar post about React, in which with a few lines of code we have built a tiny ReactJS clone from scratch.

Yes, modern web development is complex.

Audio I/O is a complex topic, which scares away many inspired musicians who are into programming (or programmers who are into music).

Let me start with a picture. int main() {float f ;char c;int d,o;while(scanf( "%d%c%d ",&d,&c,&o) >0){c&=31;for(f=!

Those who ever owned an old Nokia phone like 3310 or 3210 might still remember its wonderful ability to compose your own ringtones straight on the phone’s keyboard.

We are all familiar with a traditional office suite - a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, maybe a diagramming or note-taking app.

How would one write a code editor in JavaScript?

Somehow I got curious: what would be the smallest bitmap font that would still be readable?

The previous post about JVM turned out to be well-received, so I would like to uncover another fun topic related to JVM - Java agents.

Whether we like it or not, but Java is one of the most widely used programming languages.

This post is meant to be a counterpart to the previous KVM post, but about containers instead.

KVM is a virtualization technology that comes with the Linux kernel.

Tmux has liberated me from tiling window mangers.

While self-isolating orchestras and amateur musicians are playing ‘Ode to Joy’ from their open windows, I would like to give it a try with my ode to J.

(The story of github.com/zserge/headline).

In this article we will try to understand how chess engines work by porting the sunfish chess engine to Go.

Turns out we got a bank holiday here in Germany, and it freed up some unexpected time and suddenly my thoughts broke loose.