Python

Use secrets, not random, and remember the shuffle

Python gives you two ways to pick something at random, and only one of them belongs anywhere near a password. random is a Mersenne Twister. It is fast, it is reproducible, and that second property is exactly the problem: it is a deterministic algorithm driven by internal state. Observe enough of its output and you can recover that state and predict everything it will produce next. For a dice roll or a shuffled playlist, wonderful. For anything that guards access, disqualifying.

Sunday, August 24, 2025 Read

Parsing Markdown by alternating on odd and even

I worked through boot.dev’s Build a Static Site Generator, a guided project that has you write the thing that turns **bold** into <b>bold</b>. The architecture is the course’s: a TextNode type for chunks of formatted text, an HTMLNode tree to render, and separate passes for block-level and inline parsing. This is a write-up of the piece I found most elegant, not something I invented. The inline parser is a genuinely neat idea, and it took me a while to see why it works, so it seemed worth explaining properly.

Wednesday, March 5, 2025 Read

The particle fade that never faded

Asteroids on boot.dev is a guided build. Its chapters cover Pygame setup, the game loop, the player, and the asteroids: enough for a working game. Everything past that is left to you, and that is where I kept going, adding momentum, a start menu, lives, scoring, and explosions. The explosions were the fun part. Shoot an asteroid and fifteen white particles fly outward and fade to nothing over half a second.

Sunday, January 26, 2025 Read

Space has no drag, so I added some

The boot.dev Asteroids course gives you a ship that moves while you hold a key and stops when you let go. It works, it is simple, and it feels nothing like being in space. What I wanted was continuous motion: you thrust, and then you keep going, because nothing out there is slowing you down. That is a small change to describe and a surprisingly interesting one to build, because the honest version of it is unplayable.

Sunday, January 19, 2025 Read