Hi, I’m Chidi. I’m a software engineer, currently working in the finance industry in London. Before my current role, I built consumer and business fintech products at a startup in Lagos.
I write articles about what I’m learning and building on this blog—most of them about programming and technology. Outside tech, I also like to read and play music.
You can find me on Twitter at @chidiwilliams__ or send me an email at [email protected].
Recent
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A Wordle Solver
How to make an AI player for the game of Wordle
January 12, 2022 -
2021: Year in Review
Reflecting on what I worked on and learnt in 2021
January 1, 2022 -
A Refresher on Software Vulnerabilities
Reviewing the 2021 CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses
December 29, 2021 -
The Humane Representation of Programs
Better tools for learning and communicating
December 20, 2021 -
25 Days of Advent
Every December since 2015, as a countdown to Christmas Day, thousands of software programmers around the world participate in a daily programming challenge call...
December 12, 2021 -
Recent Reads: The Outsider and Before the Law
One of the frequent themes of Lex Fridman’s podcast, of which I’m a long-time listener, is his love of the existentialist/absurdist literature of Dostoevsky and...
November 28, 2021 -
Fooled by Complexity
I enjoy writing software best when I fully appreciate why it exists. When I’m writing software for myself, this why could be “to learn how to use a ...
November 21, 2021 -
Text Search with Tries
In the previous post in the Data Structures and Algorithms in the Wild series, we discussed the quadtree, a tree data structure used to index locations in two-d...
November 13, 2021 -
Introductions, Math Games, and UI Optimizations
Once a month or so, since May 2020, I write an article about a programming topic on my blog. So far, I’ve written about the spam filter that inspired Bitc...
October 26, 2021 -
Redraw Only The Diff
To illustrate the concepts in some of the posts on this blog, I sometimes make small, interactive JavaScript programs (see Conway’s Game of Life, Quadtree...
October 23, 2021 -
The Game Called Life
On the history and implementation of John Conway's Game of Life
October 22, 2021 -
Quadtrees in the Wild
Quadtrees are tree structures used to efficiently store data in two-dimensional space. They are useful in spatial indexing and image compression.
September 21, 2021 -
The Tradeoffs We Make
Building software is as much about making tradeoffs as it is about writing code. It involves making decisions about what tools and techniques to use. In a trade...
August 6, 2021 -
Why Chrome Runs So Many Processes
(Originally published on Twitter) If you’ve ever tried force quitting Chrome and wondered why there were so many different Google Chromes to close, here&r...
July 4, 2021 -
The Proof-of-Work Spam Filter
Notes on an early proof-of-work system called Hashcash
May 19, 2021 -
Gifts and Games
There’s something I have to confess: I don’t quite keep up with all the latest trends in technology. I haven’t tried out all the new note-taking app...
May 3, 2021 -
GOTO Reconsidered
Before I learned to program, I had used computers to play games like Solitaire and Road Rash and explore Microsoft Encarta. I had also taken a few computer clas...
April 18, 2021 -
Building an Expression Evaluator (continued)
In my previous post, we explored how expression evaluation works and built a program, evaluate, that returns the result of an arithmetic expression. Here, we&rs...
March 17, 2021 -
Building an Expression Evaluator
In a spreadsheet application, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you can enter an expression like =3 + 5 * 3 - 8 into a cell and calculate the result by pre...
February 22, 2021 -
2020: Year in Review
I’ve spent the past few days reflecting on the past year. 2020 has been an eventful year in many different ways, and I thought it was important to review ...
December 30, 2020 -
Inside a Go Slice
Two weeks ago, a friend of mine, who is learning to write Go, asked me to explain the output of this snippet. func main() { nums := []int{1, 2, 3} loopNums(nums...
November 19, 2020 -
Building Ayòayò: An Unbeatable Player
Minimax is a simple and effective decision rule used in game theory and artificial intelligence. In this post, we'll implement an unbeatable AI player for Ayòayò using minimax.
July 5, 2020 -
Building Ayòayò: Web Application
In the previous posts in this series, we wrote the game logic for Ayòayò and built a CLI application. In this post, we’ll build an interactive web application for the game with JavaScript.
June 27, 2020 -
Building Ayòayò: CLI Application
In this post, I implement a CLI for Ayòayò with Node's Readline module.
June 20, 2020 -
Building Ayòayò: Implementation
This is the first post in the Building Ayòayò series. I explore the history and rules of the game and implement the game logic with JavaScript.
June 14, 2020 -
Partially Updating an Embedded Mongo Document in Go
Let’s consider a Go application that stores a user’s name and address information in MongoDB. We can represent the database model with the following...
May 21, 2020 -
Writing Cleaner Go Web Servers
Writing clean, high-quality code makes programs easier to understand, maintain, improve, and test. In this post, I share some tips for writing clean, effective Go web servers.
May 1, 2020