how having a website feels
it's exciting to have an internet canvas
so here's the deal: i was never drawn to frontend development before. but it is pretty cool to do things and actually see them for once. when you write algorithms, your mind flows places and you travel between objects and methods in your head. but when you see your little project in the browser, you get so many ideas.
yesterday, i built the website from scratch, bought a domain, and deployed it. it was a lot of work, i got to know so many new concepts, and at the end of the day, i actually had something to look at.
still, it looked kinda plain and generic. so today's mission (in very limited time) was to make it a bit more mine. and you know what my online username is. so i swapped the logo in my navbar with a really cool animation of bogosort.
i made a component that actually simulates it using a bar chart. it initializes randomly, then shows the comparisons and shuffles. it's a fun little trinket and it's what made me love programming in the first place.
sorting algorithms were one of the first things i went and implemented myself without having to do it for work or school. i remember looking at merge sort and doing my own java implementation from looking at wikipedia pseudo code and some videos. then, quick sort followed. after that, i read about a dumb algorithm called bogosort. why would anyone ever implement it?
well i did. in java because that's all i knew at the time. and i implemented it wrong. i optimized it a little by going through all permutations instead of randomly shuffling. no more infinite worst case.
it was good enough to sit in the lecture room and run it for 2 hours to sort a list of 8 or so elements though. i was kinda proud of it.
that's how i got my name. it might sound a little silly, but it means a lot to me. using this name, i became a visible part of our discord community and that led to meeting so many cool people i still talk to today.
so yes. this feels a little like stepping into a new home that feels so foreign, then placing your favorite plant in the corner next to the window. time to get settled.