Programming

It should come as no big surprise if you've been reading this blog that a big passion in my life is programming. It has been a hobby of mine since sometime in the nineties (probably 1994, 95 or sometime around this - my oldest "proof" of something I wrote is the small BBS intro flower.com which is dated September 1996) and my primary way to make my living since 1999, with very few exceptions.

During these years, I've produced a number of different projects on my spare time, of various size and grade of "seriosity". Here is a list of some of these projects. I'm hoping to add more links to this list over time, adding binaries and sometimes the source code (in the cases where it hasn't gotten lost over the years.) Many have been solo projects, others have been cooperative projects with my brother Johannes Ridderstedt, who has been an invaluable source of help and inspiration when learning about computer hardware, software and programming. This list wouldn't be what it is without him - thanks bro, I owe you a lot!

• 1996: flower.com (BBS intro, written in x86 assembly for MS-DOS.)
• 1997: Gameland intro (original probably in C, for MS-DOS. See further down for intro about the later rewrite.
• 1998: rot13 TSR (x86 assembly for MS-DOS)
• 1999: Cybermario, an unfinished Mario-spinoff game (C++ for MS-DOS)
• 1999: Tribes, an unfinished Civilization clone (C, targetting GTK/Linux)
• 1999: chaos, an operating system (C & x86 assembly)
• 2004: iZ, a CMS written using PHP & MySQL
• 2008: cocos, a simple operating system-like toy for x86-64. (C & x86 assembly)
• 2013: Billigaste Matkassen, a shopping price analyzing helper. Web app written using JavaScript & jQuery with backend in Ruby, using Redis as data store.
• 2013: Imported the chaos source code to GitHub and started looking into making it compile & run again on modern gcc versions. A lot of the existing functionality is now working again as of 2018.
• 2018: Gameland rewrite, this time in Rust, targetting WebAssembly.)

Books that I would like to read

(Unsurprisingly, this is my personal "wishlist" of books so I remember what to ask from others/buy for myself. :-)

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. This book was recommended to me by a good friend named Andreas Finne. He praised it greatly, saying that "if you understand what is written in it, you will become a better programmer". I want to grow and learn more, so this is definitely one of the books I would like to read at some point.

  The book is available for reading online here

• The Art of Multiprocessor Programming - Maurice Herlihy, Nir Shavit. Parallel programming is something I find fascinating, and even though I've been doing it a bit in the past, I know that there is _a lot_ to learn, particularly in areas like lock-free concurrency and the general theory behind implementing traditional (locking-based) concurrency primitives. Since I've never studied CS, I feel there are a lot of areas here where I could improve.

  (After writing the above, I have purchased the book and started looking into it but it's really not a very easy book to read; it's quite demanding on the reader. I anticipate it will take a year or two before I'm through this. It's definitely not something that's easy to just pick up and read during your lunch break or similar.)

• Cyrille Artho: Finding faults in multi-threaded programs. Master's thesis, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, March 15, 2001