Articles by Andrew Z Allen

I wanted to show a webpage I've been toying with to a friend today. The project is in Django and I didn't want to take the time to deploy it to a permanent host like heroku. I know it is easy to do that, but I was just feeling lazy. I came up with a cool trick today for doing exactly this. I have a server that I leave on 100% of the time.

I realized that I could use this server as a simple proxy and forward any web requests that came to a special domain.

Using ...

Want to play a game?

This is a very simple implementation of a Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) game.

Weighing in at 157 lines of JavaScript and 179 lines of Python, the application tracks previous users play patterns to create a probability distribution of your next throw. Given this probability distribution, the game takes a weighted guess at your next throw and then throws whatever will beat that.

All source is available at my github.

I just quit my job, 1 week ago in fact. I've had a lot of time to think about it, and there were some things that didn't go well, but there were some things that really did. I worked for a company called GoSpotCheck and helped them build one of the best systems I have ever had the pleasure to be involved with.

When I started doing web development, website design was static pages with all content fully loaded. Everything was loaded through a portal, a phrase that I still don't fully understand. After a few years ...