Alexander Nicholi

Computer Scientist in Singapore & beyond

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Welcome to the machine.

My name is Alexander Nicholi. I am a software engineer residing in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, where I spent a good part of my upbringing. As of 2017 I am happily married, and since 2016 I have led a software development company known as Arqadium. At the dawn of 2019, I began working on my biggest passion project Halo, and I also serve tables at an insignificant pizza parlour. When I’m not slaving away, my pastimes include dining out, cycling, and peoplewatching. Beyond that, the rest are a conversation away! You can find me on Twitter directly, or you can find me on Discord by joining Arqadium’s Discord guild. In the case those services have bit the dust, you can also find me on Arqadium’s Mastodon instance, Freenode IRC with handle nicholatian (channel #arqadium), and over (encrypted) mail by sending to ‘me’ at my personal domain. ;-)

Pages of note:

• I Polarize the World Around Me
• Zoomers: Understanding Generation Z
• RE: How blockchain is revolutionising videogaming
• The Field of Reeds
• Benchmark: GZip v. BZip2 v. LZMA v. LZ4 v. LZO
• An imaginary struggle for power
• Two software engineers
• ÔÇô & Continuous Delivery
• Six Tiers of Reasoning in Programming
• Resentment for UNIX and C

Miscellaneous links (Ctrl-click them):

• Dierk’s Law
• LinkedIn
• Resumé

Here is a snowflake generator, written in JavaScript:

'use strict'
let count = 0
module.exports = () => {
    count = count >= 4095 ? 0 : count + 1
    return (((
        Date.now() - 1513728000000) // subtract 48 years for Arqadium epoch
        & 0x3FFFFFFFFFF) // Make sure it fits into 42 bits
        << 22) | count // shift over 22 bits and mask in the counter
}