Francis Stokes :: Githublog I'm sick of complex blogging solutions, so markdown files in a git repo it is. https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog 2024 Francis Stokes - All rights reserved Fri, 10 May 2024 21:46:46 GMT Fri, 10 May 2024 21:46:46 GMT 1440 Doing more than one thing at a time How do computers run multiple independent programs at once? Maybe words like "multi-core" or "hardware threads" pop into your mind. These are some of the solutions of the modern age, which essentially just throw more hardware at the problem in order to achieve p... https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog/blob/main/2021/12/14/doing-more-than-one-thing.md Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT Notes on a lateral career move I changed jobs recently. That's not all that uncommon for devs - in fact it's accepted wisdom that your best course of action is to switch every 2 years or so in order to maximise your salary. That may or may not be true, but it's not really the route I've taken. What was perhaps a little more unusual about my change was that I made a somewhat lateral move between fields of software engineering, from mostly web-based... https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog/blob/main/2022/4/29/notes-on-a-lateral-career-move.md Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT Rolling your own crypto: Everything you need to build AES from scratch (and then never use it for anything of consequence) You often hear the phrase "Don't roll your own crypto". I think this sentence is missing an important qualifier: "...and then use it for anything of consequence". If you are building a product or service, or are trying to communicate privately, then you should absolutely pick a vetted, open source, off-the-shelf implementation and use it. If, however, your goal is to learn, then there is honestly no better wa... https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog/blob/main/2022/6/15/rolling-your-own-crypto-aes.md Wed, 15 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT Building A Jank UART to USB Cable From Scavenged Parts My home "lab" is, unfortunately, a manifestation of the unwinnable, uphill battle against entropy. The latest victim to the sprawl of boards, prototypes, and other miscellanea was my little Adafruit CP2104 USB to serial converter. As far as I can tell, it has literally dropped off the face of the earth. This is particularly irritating as I'm in the middle of another project for an upcoming video on the \[channel]\(http... https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog/blob/main/2023/3/1/building-a-jank-uart-cable-from-scavenged-parts.md Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT Why the CORDIC algorithm lives rent-free in my head This post is an adaptation of a twitter thread I put together a few days ago. CORDIC is an algorithm for computing trig functions like sin, cos, tan etc on low powered hardware, without an FPU (i.e. no floating point) or expensive lookup tables. In fact, it reduces these complex functions to simple addit... https://github.com/francisrstokes/githublog/blob/main/2024/5/10/cordic.md Fri, 10 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT