Looking for a first project to play with, I remembered CryptoPals. I did some of it several years ago, and it was fun, so I thought it could be a good way to get familiar with Common Lisp, at least the first set. With that in mind, I had a look, and hear we are!

The very first challenge is about hex and base64 encoding. The first time around I just used available libraries for both (I used Rust at the time), but the point of this was to open some black boxes, so I decided to implement everything from scratch!

During the past few years my work as a software engineer has involved less low level, algorithmic coding, and more high level strategy, architecture, dependency and team interactions. While that makes sense as careen progresion (I have more impact that way), the truth is that I miss coding things from scratch.

Also, with the coming of our AI overlords, I keep on hearing that these skills, that I’ve spent years improving, are going to, if not disappear, become less relevant. In the not so far future, we will be able to pay a fee to one of the remaining AI providers, and ask an agent to generate our app, and set up a new business from scratch. In that world nobody will need to look at code anymore!