Recent content on The Lonesome Crowded Web
It has been roughly 17 years since I undertook any kind of formal education or learning. While attending university, my approach was just about the worst kind you can imagine—waiting until just days (or even hours) before an assessment or examination was due before acting. For an assessment, it was using the pressure of a deadline to force myself to produce something I could submit. For an…
Writing about my experiences with Advent of Code has become something of a yearly tradition for me, and while 2020’s entry has lapsed into 2021, I am here to continue the tradition all the same! In a year otherwise marred by difficulties for so many people on so many fronts, it was nice to have the distraction of programming puzzles for an hour or so each December evening. My only goal this…
Two years ago I wrote about creating a simple Four In A Row game with boardgame.io . It continues to get some traffic, despite being somewhat outdated due to continued improvements to the boardgame.io framework. As such, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the framework again with a new game, Yatzy . At a minimum I will make the following improvements over my previous game: Build a more…
Another year, another Advent of Code event completed! I’ve blogged before about participating in the 2018 event and catching up on the 2015, 2016 and 2017 events , so I thought I would keep the tradition going by sharing my experience with the 2019 event that has recently finished. This blog assumes a certain level of familiarity with Advent of Code - if you don’t know what it is,…
Earlier this year I posted about my experience participating in Advent of Code 2018 . For those who aren’t familiar, Advent of Code is (to quote the website): an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. On each December day leading up to Christmas all players are presented with an…
I recently participated in Advent of Code 2018 . Overall it was a very positive experience and I thought I would share some thoughts about the whole thing (albeit a lot later than intended!). I learnt about Advent of Code less than 24 hours before the 2018 event (the fourth of its kind) began, after it was shared with me by a friend who has participated in previous years. My first thought was of…
Google recently released a “not an official Google product” framework called boardgame.io . To quote the documentation: The goal of this framework is to allow a game author to essentially translate the rules of a game into a series of simple functions that describe how the game state changes when a particular move is made, and the framework takes care of the rest. You will not need to…
Last year I blogged about Building a Small Site on Azure Functions . It was an interesting experiment, though not a serious solution I’d recommend to anyone based on that experience. Still, the site has been running away in the background serving the very occasional visitor since then at the cost of just a few cents per month. At some point in the last month or two (some form of monitoring…
I’m a big fan of the DbUp library and its approach to database management. Rather than go over all the benefits of this approach, I’ll leave it to the docs which do a much better job than I could. Suffice it to say, all the things it brings to the table - tight control, predictability, ORM independence, the power of raw SQL - are all good things! Historically I have been able to do…
I recently stumbled upon Is it on AWS? and its accompanying backstory . It sounded like a fascinating way to create a small, focused website. I thought it would be a positive learning experience to create a similar site with Microsoft Azure. Introducing IsItInThe.Cloud This blog will detail the steps taken to create the site; but first, a few notes: Credit to Is it on AWS? for the initial…
I was recently trying to renew the Let’s Encrypt certificate for this site, but doing so failed with the following error (and an accompanying 404 Not Found): Cert is due for renewal, auto-renewing... Renewing an existing certificate Performing the following challenges: http-01 challenge for lonesomecrowdedweb.com http-01 challenge for www.lonesomecrowdedweb.com Waiting for verification...…
I’m Patrick Johannessen, a software developer based in Brisbane, Australia. I work with the amazing team at SixPivot . I enjoy coding, video games, reading, writing and dreaming. This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages and is powered by Hugo and the PaperMod theme. The name of the site is an homage to The Lonesome Crowded West . Comments are powered by CommentBox , or you can reach me…
The following is a list of personal projects I’ve worked on over the years. While none are particularly noteworthy and only a few are publicly availabile, they all mean something to me and are worthy of at least a mention here! The Lonesome Crowded Web Website | Source Code The Lonesome Crowed Web is my personal blog - the one you’re reading right now! It is hosted on AWS S3 and…
I like to read. I also like making lists; so I have combined the two below! I try to read regularly, but sometimes life gets in the way. Currently Reading Software Requirements, by Karl Wiegers, Joy Beatty 📓 2025 Sad Cypress, by Agatha Christie 📓 One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, by Agatha Christie 📓 My Dream Time, by Ash Barty 📘 Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, by…