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Thorne Wolfenbarger

Thorne Wolfenbarger

My 2022 In Review

2022 lasted about 12 months. During those months, I learned a lot, formed many opinions, and hopefully make some things that are built to last. January Coming off the sheer relaxation instilled by the Christmas - New Years period, I dont remember much from January. I had my birthday. More

Using SvelteKit to build a Community Ranking Ladder

To make products people use, one needs some frontend skills. Historically, frontend is a weakness of mine and I've been constrained to clunky CLIs and APIs to get what I want to do done. No longer! Last week I sat myself down and read the Svelte and SvelteKit

Heroku and Heroku Alternatives

Recently, I've been doing some shopping around for a new way to host my toy projects. I've used a variety of solution but always had a soft spot for Heroku. Heroku is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that has been receiving a lot of negative

Pricing Options with the Black-Scholes Model [Short]

Recently, I have been learning about optimal options pricing under various sets of assumptions. The introduction to risk-neutral options pricing is the Black-Scholes model, which assumes you have an arbitrage free market with at least one risk-free asset and one risky asset. Additionally you assume that the log-price of the

Unconventional Statistics With Dice – Expected Minimum Roll from 3 dice

In a previous post I discussed the potential benefits for using Monte Carlo simulations in place of traditional statistical modeling. Here, I would like to consider an interesting stats puzzle that I found to be non-trivial (read hard), which has a relatively tidy solution. First, we will investigate the solution

Prebuilt Blogging Solution & Paying For Hosting as a Software Engineer - Why?

One characteristic that almost every engineer is the innate desire to create. These feelings of creativity can manifest differently from one engineer to another, be it web-dev, algorithm design, manufacturing projects, raspberry pi, etc.. This desire to build something is universal. So when I decided (for maybe the 100th time)

Algorithm Breakdown – Container With Most Water

Container With Most Water (Problem #11) on the popular competitive programming site LeetCode [leetcode.com] is called “Container With Most Water.” The question prompt is as follows: “Given n non-negative integers a1, a2, …, an , where each represents a point at coordinate (i, ai). n vertical lines are drawn such that

What Does System Design Actually Look Like? - Creating a WhenIsGood Clone From Scratch

System design is a complicated skill that takes engineers of all disciplines years to become proficient in, yet alone master. In order to practice my low-level system design skills and tackle an inconvenience I often have, I decided to recreate the popular meeting scheduling website WhenIsGood [whenisgood.net] and make

Monte Carlo Simulations: For When Math Is Just Too Hard

“Monte Carlo simulations are used to model the probability of different outcomes in a process that cannot easily be predicted due to the intervention of random variables.“ (Investopedia, 2019) For me, ease of prediction is completely relative. If doing the math on a process proves itself too cumbersome or boring,

Binary Search: An Algorithms and Data Structures Website for leveling up your skills

Recently released for beta, Binary Search [binarysearch.com] renovates the traditional online coding examination and practice environment. At its core, Binary Search is one of many websites that offers an online code editor where developers of all skill levels can compete to solve algorithmic questions. The primary differentiator between Binary