a Programmer's blog

I recently took on a new project: building a crossword generator. Instead of starting from scratch, I decided to test out Windsurf AI in VS Code. It was an interesting five-hour sprint that gave me some working code and a few key takeaways about AI-assisted development.

My biggest lesson was that you have to break down the problem. Giving the AI a single prompt to “build a crossword generator” was overwhelming and unproductive. The successful approach was to tackle smaller, more specific tasks, like generating the grid or placing a word.

The code it produced was functional, but it wasn’t perfect. I quickly learned that the AI is a great starting point, but it doesn’t always produce performant or elegant code. A developer’s critical eye is still essential. I spent a good amount of time reviewing and refactoring the generated code with the AI to make it more efficient.

Debugging is still a part of my workflow, but it’s a different kind of debugging. I’m now less focused on finding errors from a blank page and more on refining and optimizing the AI’s output. It makes me wonder if there’s a way to feed my debugging process and code improvements back into the AI automatically.

The end result is a functional crossword generator (code on my GitHub) and a clear takeaway: AI is a powerful accelerator, but it’s a partnership that still requires your guidance.

With my new job, I haven’t had much time to add much to this website.

So here’s this small perl script I wrote that sends a summary of the weather in SMS format from my iPhone daily.
There was a need, so I figured why not help out those who need the weather forecast =].

use LWP::Simple;
use JSON qw( decode_json );

my $lastRun = 0;
open (MYFILE, 'weatherSMS_LastRun');
while () {
        chomp;
        $lastRun = $_;
}
close (MYFILE);

my ($S,$M,$H,$d,$m,$Y) = localtime($lastRun);
my ($S2,$M2,$H2,$d2,$m2,$Y2) = localtime(time);
if ( $Y2 == $Y && $m2 == $m  && $d2 == $d ){
	exit 0;
}

$json = get("https://api.forecast.io/forecast/APIKEY/LATITUDE,LONGITUDE?units=ca&exclude=currently,minutely,hourly,flags");
my $decoded = decode_json($json);

#ensure we can write the file
open(F,'>weatherSMS_LastRun') || die "Could not open file to mark execution";
print F time;
close(F);

my @timeslot = @{ $decoded->{'daily'}{'data'} };
my $forcast = "";
foreach my $f ( @timeslot ) {
	my ($S,$M,$H,$d,$m,$Y) = localtime($f->{"time"});
	$m = $m + 1;
	$forcast .= "$m/$d: ".sprintf("%.3f",$f->{"temperatureMin"})."-".sprintf("%.3f",$f->{"temperatureMax"})."C ".$f->{"summary"}."\n";
}
#printf($forcast);

`/Applications/biteSMS.app/biteSMS -send -carrier PHONENUMBER "$forcast"`;

In order to execute this daily, the following plist was used:

	Label
	com.joshho.weatherSMS
	LowPriorityIO
	
	Nice
	1
	AbandonProcessGroup
	
	OnDemand
	
	ProgramArguments
	
		/usr/local/bin/perl
		/location to perlscript/weatherSMS.pl
	
	StartCalendarInterval
	
		Minute
		0
	

Submit it to be executed hourly by running `launchctl load [path to plist]`

Edit
Edits were made to cover the fact that your phone may not always have internet.
(It may be locked/sleeping – which may turn off the wifi?)

Not much to say about this one… after completing Pacman, I had an itch to do tetris.. an old favourite of mine.

Completed it in 2.5 days…
At this rate, I’m definitely going to need to step up my productivity for this if I want to make something comparable to Ludum Dare quality.
(2.5.. as a consolation it only included about 14 hours of coding.)

You can play it here.

I recently received an email from cadenzainteractive.com inquiring about a distribution method for steam keys for their then-upcoming giveaway. At the time, all I had was a key-captcha webpage here that utilized captchas to prevent key farming by bots.

After investigating what existed, I found python script – code here  – that had successfully distributed 50,000 keys. This script required you had python and additional imports installed.

I was then interested to see if I could write something that others could get started in 1-2 minutes. I ended up whipping up a prototype tool written in javascript/php here within a day of that email.

Getting back to cadenzainteractive, using my tool, they successfully delivered 4,000 steam keys on reddit: http://redd.it/ve7dj.

Try it here

Notes:  The program uses the reddit API to reply back to unread messages from reddit users requesting a key.

Hi all, been busy with work!

but I found some spare time to try out HTML5 for the first time and I ended up making the game Snake – the classic game from the nokia phones.

Play the game here.