auxiliaire/ca-2011

Cellular automaton game

Welcome

Thank you for visiting this dark corner of github, where I store some of my code that I swept together during the ages. These are mostly experiments with different languages, toolkits, technologies, paradigms or concepts like date arithmetics, cellular automata, or fluid mechanics. A small board game from my childhood also tends to recur, because it's interesting yet easy enough to implement and lets me focus on the technology at hand to study.

If you're interested about the programmer behind the code, keep on reading.

-- Viktor Daróczi

Bio

My passion for programming started with the Commodore 64, but no worries, back then it was already an outdated machine. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop me from learning Basic, and writing programs, even with a GUI, to plot functions and render the Mandelbrot set (I can tell you, it took ages). As soon as I could grab a PC (286 – also outdated), I learned Pascal, in which later I wrote my little concept application about cellular automata. Since then, I rewrote that several times, and the most updated version is written in C#.

From Pascal, my journey led to Delphi, which I used to write a database management application for a local real estate agency. Shortly after that, I learned Perl and PHP, and volunteered to develop a website and Content Management System for our local community to publish books and articles online. PHP happened to be sticky, and after writing a small WYSIWYG online website creator for university projects, it made me got hired to develop a food ordering and home delivery portal, which at that time were present throughout Europe, including Germany and France. I stayed there for more than five years until its acquisition, and for a short while I also worked on its mobile integration, during which I learned Java and Android development.

Of course, web development could not happen without mastering SQL and JavaScript, which latter – through several side projects – gained more and more emphasis, while PHP remained my main language for a couple more years. I worked with quite a few monolithic frameworks including Zend Framework, Symfony and Laravel, but also had projects in Python and Django on Google App Engine. I’ve been working in small teams developing e-commerce portals, polling and aggregator websites, payment gateways, and other online management solutions. I used SOAP to make system components communicate with each other securely, and designed and implemented REST APIs, and even a food recommendation subsystem.

Gradually my attention bent from PHP towards JavaScript, Node.js and Java, and I took part in the development of an Internet of Things platform written in Groovy using Vert.x and Grails, which I consider one of the most exciting experiences during my carrier. This foundational experience opened my eyes for microservices and non-blocking and event-driven systems along with Functional Programming, and shifted my interest from traditional databases to NoSQL, like document and graph based databases using CouchDB, MongoDB and neo4j. During this period I also got a taste of serverless developing an app for Alexa and the necessary interface to integrate it into our system.

This experience however couldn’t last long, and I had to switch once again. For more than two years I've been developing frontend using Node.js and Angular, having TypeScript as main programming language. I was responsible for developing interactive ads, that collected actionable audience data, and a platform to create and manage them.

Lately I entered the domain of Java once again when joined a fintech company as a software engineer developing a wide range of payment solutions.

Although I took the Object Oriented approach during my carrier most often, I’m a huge fan of Functional Programming and the concepts behind it, leading me to learn Clojure, Scala and Haskell, which I consider a ‘pure’ joy.

My headquarter is in Munich, Germany, from where I initiate my explorations to collect long-lasting memories of exciting journeys towards beautiful places of our planet in the company of the three beloved girls, my wife and our two daughters, whom I tend to bore with talking about programming, math and ancient human languages.

Philosophy

So why does PHP/Java developer maintain a code base written in a variety of programming languages like Erlang, Python and C? The sole reason is to keep the fire burning, and preserve the enthusiasm I felt writing my first programs. To have fun, to get excited, be curious and keep exploring. I'm convinced that our job should be boring, and our spirit should be playful.

I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. -- Alan J. Perlis