Hello world!

Hello, Dear Reader.  On this WordPress site I’m going to be learning programming using a number of languages and frameworks, and I’m going to post what I learn here in the hopes that it is useful to those of you following the same path (or to me, if I forget what I did).  I come from a C/C++/C# background, but have really fallen in love with Python and Node.js, and am getting very excited about Kotlin and WebAssembly.  As you have probably just guessed, I have trouble staying focused.  For the immediate future, I will be focusing on Node.js.

I believe it’s important to have a goal in order to motivate yourself to learn, and so my goal is to build a website that serves as a login portal to play browser games.  It is a simple goal in terms of functionality.  I want users to be able to register, choose a screen name, change their password, start a game (using their screen name), and chat.

I would like the chats to be encrypted because I am a firm believer in personal privacy, and eventually any networked multiplayer game data should be obscured in some way as well, to make cheating harder, so it will require learning about databases, RESTful services, encryption, and probably TLS, a newer incarnation of SSL, the security used for things like online logins or buying things online with a credit card.  Thankfully, my delightful hosts at Southwest Cyberport have recently given me some leads in that direction by pointing out Let’s Encrypt.