Founder & Software Architect @ Cerb for 23 years, building web-based team email and workflow automation. 100% source-available & customer-funded.
I've been obsessed with coding since the dial-up BBS days of the early 1990s. My daily stack is PHP/MySQL/AWS/Docker, with increasingly more Python for devops/ML.
Learning piano and German.
#php #mysql #aws #docker #python #programming #machinelearning #compilers #bootstrapping #german #music #piano
| Work | https://cerb.ai |
| Github | https://github.com/jstanden/ |
I've completed "Christmas Tree Farm" - Day 12 - Advent of Code 2025
I was _deeply_ unsatisfied with this solution, so I've been turning it into a game and working on an actual solver instead.
https://github.com/jstanden/advent-of-code-python/blob/main/2025/day12.ipynb
Quick visualization while untangling AoC 2025 Day 11 Part 2.
Handy tip for Safari screencasts: Preferences -> Websites -> Page Zoom -> (host).
When I started screen recording web apps I always hit Cmd-Plus to zoom in, but that resets on page change. I switched to adding a CSS "zoom" override, but that interfered with UI element widths.
A better approach is to override the page zoom by host in Safari's preferences. My screencasts are usually on localhost, so it doesn't interfere with my other browser tabs and windows.
Here's my 1-minute setup for screen recording 9:16 aspect ratio videos (Shorts) from Safari on a Mac.
This is really handy for demoing features for responsive web apps on social feeds without resizing your entire desktop or using an actual smartphone.
I use Safari's "Responsive Design Mode" dev tool and CleanShot X, which can both set custom resolutions in the same aspect ratio.
Total overkill, but great practice. Rendered pixel art for Advent of Code 2024 Day 12 (Garden Groups) in Blender using 20,000 cloned cubes.
This would be a good one to practice procedural mesh generation and just creating faces for the outer vertex loops.
Another Blender visualization for Advent of Code 2024 Day 14 Part 2 (Restroom Redoubt).
I found the cycles early on, but was just looking at text output expecting an ASCII Christmas tree to be somewhat symmetrical between the quads.
Nope.
I ended up dumping frames to an animated GIF and visually inspecting it to notice another cycle of vertical distortion, which I assumed would eventually coalesce into an image. So I dumped another GIF with that interval and it printed a tree in ~63 frames.