Nothing beats learning by doing. My advice to others with any desire to learn programming, or really anything in general, has always been to find some problem or project that interests you and go try to solve or build it. You will learn best along the way, it will keep you interested, and the end result is something you can showcase to others such as potential employers. There’s no downside and only upside.

Born of this need for myself, I started a hobby project over a decade ago which I eventually named Project Zenith. It was a purposeful reason to learn new technologies while working towards a meaningful goal. The goal in this case was to solve the Zodiac ciphers, being that at least until December 2020, the Zodiac 340 cipher had not yet been solved. So it was a moonshot project that kept me interested while implementing new approaches and technologies. Over time, I replaced obsolescing tech with fancy new tech, many times just because I could.

The project got dropped for a few years, as the Zodiac 340 cipher did in fact get solved in December 2020, so the main inspiration for me had fallen off a cliff. It did not get solved by me but by a much more deserving group of folks. During this time my kids were also very young, and I could barely find time to sleep, so hobby projects were not even an afterthought. I had a major surgery in 2023, and then projects at work kept me working late nights for quite a long stretch.

However, this project did reach the point of being able to solve both of the popular Zodiac ciphers, so either way I had attained my primary goal. It’s something I’m proud of. It can solve the ciphers in as little as 50ms depending on hardware and hyperparameters. It can also do so using multiple types of optimization approaches, both simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. The core was built prior to modern AI approaches, and to this day (Jan 2026) it still beats any modern AI both in terms of speed and solution quality.

I recently left a successful career and decided I need something once again to keep me interested while building new skills. Thus I have at least temporarily revived this project. My goal now is to solve the Hampton ciphers. Success would be icing on the cake, but the journey itself has enormous utility as proven out over more than a decade so far. It will never earn me a penny but has paid off by keeping me sharp throughout my software engineering career. I’m now going to need to implement some computer vision solutions and also some transformer based optimization methods, which I am excited to already be diving head first into.

I’ve made many recent updates which I will put into an official release very shortly, as I both pick up where I left off, modernize some things, and prepare it for the newest adventure.

I’ll either make some progress worth sharing, land a fulfilling role at a great company, or AI will exceed my means of doing both. We’ll see how it all plays out.

Photo by Alessandro Erbetta on Unsplash