If you can believe it: a few neat tools I made to get better items in the game Diablo 2 are the bedrock of my programming career.

This post is about the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool I made to pickup “good items” in D2 and encouraging kids to pursue weird passions.

Whenever rich people tell me to invest in something and give improbable predictions of how much money something will be worth in one year, I tend to think, “How is this a scam?” I remember in 2017 hearing Bitcoin will be worth 100K by the end of 2018 and saw a few friends of mine lose quite a bit of money after the crash from its peak of 19k.

The discipline of computer science is typically likened to varying types of engineering such as mechanical, civil, electrical and so on. In terms of planning, this makes a lot of sense. A software developers process is similar to an engineer’s “development loop” in the early stages in the sense that a developer (usually) plans out a broad architecture and

WebSockets are great. They provide a bi-directional, real-time data flow between the server and the client. This connection can often be an elegant solution when one needs a constant stream of data to/from the server. There’s a whole host of everyday use cases, one of which will I will explore here.

When I first learned about the new Digital Ocean App Platform, I was pretty excited to see Heroku have some competition! We use Heroku on many projects and love its simplicity, but hate how quickly it can get expensive.

I attempted to set up one of our client’s projects on this new platform to give it a spin. Here is my experience.

The marching squares is a well know algorithm in computer science. I’ll show you how to recreate this demo in Javascript, but first mess around with demo, and see if you can figure out how it is done!