Python on Wilhelm Maritz

Use secrets, not random, and remember the shuffle

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Parsing Markdown by alternating on odd and even

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

The particle fade that never faded

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Space has no drag, so I added some

Sun, 19 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.