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Hi, this is Astrochimp. I don't always get a chance to personally author the about sections of my websites, so you're in for a treat. I was born on a faraway planet. All of my people look like chimps, but we can talk and code. I'm here to help you learn how to code. Everyone believes it's important for humans to learn how to code, so that they'll know what logic is and so won't vote for a person that openly admits they will pursue a policy that paves the way for their subjugation if not enslavement.

You might ask, what is your motivation, Astrochimp, for helping us? I would answer that, as highly moral beings, my kin bear a burden the likes of which homo sapiens is blissfully unaware. I have no choice but to try to help unfortunate souls, no matter how futile the effort might be. And you, dear reader, are the lucky beneficiary.

As for my earth background, I'm a software developer by trade, with a couple of decades of experience in web development, devops, and automated testing, and recently a lot of cloud computing and cloud app development, when I'm at work. I'm also an expert at administering, customizing, and otherwise manipulating Azure DevOps Services (Microsoft's big software development management tool, akin to Jira) into doing my bidding. At my organization of several thousand developers, testers, business analysts and other supporting staff, we use Azure DevOps Services to track and report on everyone's work. Every team has someone who is handy with that tool, but I'm the person they go to when nobody else knows how to do it. I have a post-secondary education in Computer Science, having earned a Bachelor's degree from a Canadian University. I have a lot of interests, so this blog might cover many topics. For the time being, it's where I'm putting descriptions of these little web (or potentially other) apps I've been working on, intended mostly as demo projects for people learning to code. Some, I hope, are also marginally useful, to particular niche audiences, like my marked-chessboard, which visually shows the "territory" controlled by each chess player.

Some of my major interests are computer gaming, game development, chess, and writing. I'm basically just like any other chimp.

On the topic of AI assistance

Regarding the content, unless otherwise indicated, it was all authored by yours truly, Paul Abrams, AKA Astrochimp, AKA the code monkey from space. If any of the content is ever written by AI or anyone else, I'll always say so explicitly, in that same post, as well as in the README.md at the root of the applicable code repository. I won't bother saying anything if I only use AI to ask technical questions (which I think of as simply a faster way to search), except when I do. As of this writing (there are only four blog posts so far), only the fourth post has content (all and only the code) that was generated using AI; I did get a starting point from ChatGPT when I coded the Conway's Game of Life demo (as noted in the blog post). I do anticipate possibly generating some written content using AI in the future, as a starting point, and then editing it heavily, but again, I will make a point of always saying so, when I do that for a given post. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the content. May you always be kind to monkeys.

No, really, what is this about?

Monkeys don't talk in real life. We think. So all this stuff about what the monkey's done, that's all made up, obviously. We do it to add levity (we hope) to what would otherwise likely be dry, unappealing reading, and we do it to be different. Notwithstanding the asininity of our gimmick, we do take the acutal subject matter very seriously, and will never intentionally deceive. If you have any further questions or comments, feel free to hit us up on social media. Or wait until we implement comments here on the site.