Home screen of Color Griddlers game

Color Griddlers Game

Color Griddlers is a picture logic puzzle game in which cells in a grid must be colored or left blank according to numbers at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture. It is based on popular Nonograms pen and paper game. The game is also known as Paint by Numbers, Picross or Pic-a-Pix. This is an implementation of the game in React with typescript. It saves progress in local storage....

April 7, 2024 路 4 min 路 696 words
An artistic impression of a fast bullet train, generated with Adobe Firefly

Benchmark Database Access with Java 21 Virtual Threads

Virtual Threads become available in Java 21. They are a new type of threads that are not bound to a platform thread (also called OS or kernel threads), but instead are managed by the JVM itself. Virtual threads are very similar with Kotlin coroutines, or Go goroutines, and they were created to solve the same problem, but there are some Java specifics. Under the hoods, the work is still done by platform threads which are managed in a FIFO work-stealing ForkJoinPool....

January 4, 2024 路 14 min 路 2801 words
Picture of Pingui

Pingui - Making a Simple iOS Game

When I was visiting a museum with the family, my daughter saw this little plush penguin which was kind of sad sitting there alone all day long. She saved him from this terrible fate (in exchange for a small amount of my money), and we took him home with us. He told us that his name was Pingui. Pingui became her favorite toy (at least for a while). One day, my daughter saw that I was playing a game on my phone....

May 28, 2023 路 5 min 路 1045 words
UI Screenshot of Category Colors

UI for Least Wrong Category Colors

This UI has originated from the article How to pick the least wrong colors by Matthew Str枚m. The article describes a generator for category colors for charts and visualization that uses a simulated annealing algorithm with a cost function that is maximizing the differences and accessibility of the colors in the set. The article is very nice and has accompanying javascript code, but can be used only from command line....

March 12, 2023 路 2 min 路 289 words
A castle with a random fictional name

Fictio - Fictional Name Generator

Fictio builds configurable models from lists of training strings and generates random names from pre-build models. It can be used to generate random names for fictional characters, places, etc. on web apps. Building the Model The idea with build phase is to create a small model from a list of training strings. The strings can be anything, but the more they are similar to the expected output, the better. For example, to build a simple 2-gram model from a single file containing one name per line, the following code can be used:...

November 4, 2022 路 2 min 路 376 words
Screenshot of the math puzzle online generator

Math Puzzle Game

I made this math & reading puzzle generator for my daughter to practice her math skills when she was 5 years old. It is a simple math game masked as a puzzle game. The player needs to find an animal by solving a math problem. The online generator is available at https://aleris.github.io/math-puzzle/#/. The UI is for generating sheets of puzzles, and the puzzles can be printed and solved on paper....

March 27, 2022 路 2 min 路 349 words