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I See Myself⭐

📅Dec 24, 2023 🏷featured

I look in the mirror and I do not see myself. I put on makeup and I do not see myself. I look at old pictures and I do not see myself. I look at devices I’ve made and I see myself. I lose myself in code and I am myself. I search my files and I find myself. My neural pathways mirror the shape of the runtime environment. My intentions externalized as silicon.

Dressember 2023 - Stop Human Trafficking⭐

📅Dec 1, 2023 🏷featured dressember

Dressember is an organization that raises awareness and money to end human trafficking by encouraging people to wear a dress (or tie) every day in December and spread the word. When I started doing Dressember a few years ago, I was afraid of what people would think if I wore a dress, so I opted to wear a tie every day in December instead, and used it as a conversation starter to raise awareness and money to stop human trafficking.

Encoding Text in Boot Laces as Binary Data⭐

📅Sep 1, 2023 🏷featured

TL;DR I found a way to encode text as binary data in boot laces, based on which lace crosses over the other. Read the image below, starting on the bottom left, going up the boot on the left, then back down the boot on the right, and decode it with this tool. What?? Here I am, with a pair of boots on my desk, Ian’s Shoelace Site open in one tab, and ASCII to Binary Converter open in another tab.

How I Created johanv.net: Personal Website with Seamless Livestream⭐

📅Aug 20, 2022 🏷featured

The Backstory Ever since I moved my site to johanv.xyz, some things have been slightly off. When I texted someone a link, they didn’t get it. When I visited it at work, it was blocked (and so I couldn’t link to it on my “about me” page). It turns out, .xyz domains, due to their low price, are heavily involved in scam texts and such. So, I made a short-term solution: pointing johan.

The Assembly Instruction that Saved Christmas⭐

📅Dec 25, 2021 🏷featured

Christmas Eve, 5pm-ish. The gifts I’m making for my family are still not done. I’m hunched over my laptop, desperately code-golfing to try and shave 20 bytes off my assembly code to fit within the 1kB of program memory on the ATTiny9. How did we get here? About 5 years ago (I had just graduated high school (I’m done with college now)), I started a project that I thought would be fun: buying a 25 cent computer and some LEDs, and creating handheld games for less than a dollar each.

Beginners Guide to Online Data Privacy⭐

📅Apr 26, 2020 🏷featured

Why? Why should we care about privacy? Most importantly, privacy fosters freedom of thought and speech, which greatly strengthens democracy. It does this by allowing us to hold unpopular opinions without fear of being punished or even killed by those in power, something which has happened many times throughout history and continues today. Being free to express discontent with the current elected officials is necessary to keep their power in check.

How To Win Hackathons and Influence Prizes by Andrew Carnegie⭐

📅Feb 4, 2020 🏷featured

I just got back from Hoya Hacks, a hackathon a Georgetown this past weekend. Someone asked me by email what tips I had to win hackathons (since I have won multiple prizes heh heh :), and I responded: Incorporate some hardware, such as Raspberry Pi or Arduino. Hoya Hacks didn’t have a prize for best hardware, but some do and either way, hardware usually makes your project stand out. I like to bring my own hardware because the MLH hardware lab sometimes doesn’t have a great selection, or they run out.

Bridge DC (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Neighbor)⭐

📅Aug 3, 2019 🏷featured

tl;dr (short version) Bridge is a 7-week immersive justice program including an internship (I taught tech classes at Year Up). I learned that serving people can also mean using the gifts God gave me, and doesn’t have to be measured in a certain way. I identified some areas where I am self-righteous and became more conscious of what it means to truly love people and not just love part of them.

Linux! (or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNUbody cares about saying the full name)⭐

📅Apr 10, 2018 🏷featured

Linux is an operating system, comparable to Windows or MacOS. You can use it to browse the web, run applications, edit files, and all the normal tasks you use computers for. But Linux is fundamentally different from Windows and MacOS in several ways that I find very appealing. This article covers my reasons for using the Linux, and some cool things you can do with it (such as a keyboard shortcut for an airhorn sound).

My Story by Johan Vandegriff (told through limericks (as if that wasn't obvious))⭐

📅Oct 6, 2017 🏷featured

Here are some limericks that I wrote for an assignment to tell my story. Johan is one quarter Lebanese, And three quarters white as swiss cheese. He’s spent so long in MoCo, That he’s started to go loco, And he plans to take a trip overseas. In 5th grade he became a Boy Scout, And liked to make fires and camp out. He advanced up in rank, Supportive family to thank, And got Eagle before the time ran out.

Log.e() - Tales from the electron Volts⭐

📅Oct 6, 2017 🏷featured

(This is a robotics team meeting log for the electron Volts team’s 2016-2017 season.) Coder's Log.e() An account follows of a myriad of tales recounting the sundry misadventures and swashbuckling excursions as a member of a high (school) society for the construction of automatons and advancement through treacherous tournaments to victory of glory and splendor most dazzling, indeed. My aim is that the narrative shall be as accurate as possible and will serve useful in reference during future events.