Alexander Nicholi’s personal website

A rantin’ and ravin’ Nicholatian FURY

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. 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.

Pages of note:

• 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:

• LinkedIn
• Weblog
• PGP key (raw)
• 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
}