The remaining cluster of early repositories, after the ones worth their own page moved out. These are coursework and first attempts, and they read like it.
Networking and cryptography
CryptoEchoClient and CryptoMultiEchoServer — an encrypted client-server pair built on raw
TCP sockets, with a multi-threaded server handling concurrent clients. Alongside them,
Encrypt, Decrypt and CreateRandomSecret: the primitives implemented by hand.
Writing a multi-threaded socket server from scratch is still the single most useful thing I did in university. Almost everything I have worked on since is a distributed system wearing a nicer interface, and having once managed the accept loop, the per-client threads and the stream framing myself means none of it is magic.
The cryptography, to be clear, is the educational kind. Hand-rolled ciphers are for understanding how they work, not for protecting anything.
Games and chat
Battleship_Game and Battleship_Assignment — the assignment, and then the version I kept
working on afterwards. AndyChat, an early messaging client.
First web and first cloud
twitchSite and alfdan2000.github.io — hand-written HTML and CSS, no framework, no build
step.
Playlistify (2018) in JavaScript, and ecsSimplePhp — an early run at containerized PHP on
AWS ECS, from June 2018. That last one is the marker worth noting: it is the first time cloud
infrastructure appears anywhere in my work, and everything I have built since runs
on top of it.
Why any of it stays up
Most people quietly delete this stuff. Keeping it costs nothing and means the record is complete — including the parts I would write entirely differently now.