Welcome to The Random Coder!
A senior engineer's notes on shipping software, regex stunts, AI-assisted building, and the occasional poem.
About
Will Forty — senior engineer, founder of FortyTech, builder of a portfolio of small bets. The Random Coder is the personal end of that work.
The Jester
In May 2022 I wrote a parody of The Raven about an AI test harness that refuses to follow instructions, then escapes the network. I thought it would be funny. Re-reading it in 2026 it's less funny.
I Rebuilt the Game I Wrote on a PlayStation 2 at Age 14
The source code lived as a PDF of screenshots I'd taken of a CRT monitor. Two decades later I fed it to Claude, and the game I wrote on a games console in 2002 is now playable in a browser.
Agentic AI With Root Access? My Security Setup for Claude Code
Claude Code is an autonomous shell agent on a machine that probably has your SSH keys, your browser session, and every client codebase you've ever touched. Here's the isolation setup I run before I let it loose.
Why AI Won't Steal Your Coding Job
The panic conflates two very different jobs engineers do. One of them is already being automated. The other is harder to replace than the discourse admits.
Building RegexWars: A Live Setup with Next.js, Clerk and AI
I registered regexwars.com on a whim and decided to spin up the first version on camera — Next.js, Clerk for auth, a waiting-list landing page, deployed to Vercel before the video ended.
Math + Code = Art: A Miraculous Centrifuge One-Liner
A Codewars problem about balancing a centrifuge turned into the shortest solution on the board — and the load-bearing trick is that irrational numbers can't be cancelled by rational ones.
Unlocking the Shortest Knight Path: From BFS to a Closed Form
Given two squares on a chessboard, how few knight moves between them? BFS gets the right answer. Then it becomes the lab instrument that reveals the formula.
Vectors to the King: Detecting Check Mathematically
Detecting check on a chess board reduces to five numbers per piece. Stop simulating moves and start asking the inverse question.
A Sudoku Solver in JavaScript Without Backtracking
Codewars asks for a sudoku solver and quietly mentions the puzzles are 'easy, i.e. determinable.' That one word changes everything — you can throw recursion at it, or you can notice you don't need to search at all.
A Controversial Codewars Exploit: Mocking require.cache to Pass Any Kata
A thought experiment in Node.js test isolation: how to make any Codewars kata pass without writing a real solution. Not a how-to for cheating — a window into why test harnesses sharing a process with the code under test are fundamentally exploitable.
Solving Chess with Regex
Detecting check on an 8x8 board with a single regular expression. The sensible approach is a board parser. The fun approach is a one-liner that abuses padding, mirror boards, and the fact that regex doesn't actually care what you do with it.
Multiples of 3 or 5: A Rare Mathematical Solution to a Common Problem
The most popular Codewars problem has a loop solution everyone reaches for and a closed-form solution almost nobody does. The maths makes the algorithm obsolete.
Pathfinding Algorithm – The A Star Search Algorithm
In this The Random Coder project, I attempt an implementation of the a star search algorithm to find the optimal path between two points on a two dimensional grid
Fractal Generator – The Paper Folding Fractal
Today I create a paper folding fractal using JavaScript
LeetCode – Valid Phone Numbers (#193) in Bash
Today I work through problem #193 on LeetCode using Bash as the language of choice.
LeetCode – Rotate Image (#48) in TypeScript/JavaScript
Today I'm working through problem #48 on LeetCode using TypeScript as the language of choice.
LeetCode – Integer to Roman (#12) in TypeScript/JavaScript
Today I'm working through problem #12 on LeetCode using TypeScript as the language of choice.
LeetCode – Length of Last Word (#58) in TypeScript/JavaScript
Today I'm working through problem #58 on LeetCode using TypeScript as the language of choice.
LeetCode – Palindrome Number Solution MATHS ONLY (#9) in TypeScript/JavaScript
I'm working through problem #9 on LeetCode using TypeScript as the language of choice, but in this solution, converting to a string is not allowed!
LeetCode – Palindrome Number Solution (#9) in TypeScript/JavaScript
Today I'm working through problem #9 on LeetCode using TypeScript as the language of choice.
The Random Coder Begins
Hi everyone, my name is Will and I’m a software developer. I’ve worked with many languages, but more importantly...