// havox.org - v4

John Gatward

Software Engineer

Backend engineerby trade Developer enthusiastby curiosity Unofficial family cloud engineerby necessity

about

Havox & me

Havox started in 2017 as a place to dump whatever projects I had written. Four redesigns and several dead domains later, it's still going. Less a portfolio, more a scrapbook.

day job

Backend engineer at Sainsbury's Supply Chain & Logistics. It's good fun.

dev

Fascinated with new languages, frameworks, and shiny tech I probably don’t need. Constantly learning just enough to build something slightly cooler next time.

linux

Long-time Linux user and distro-hopper. Self-hosted server running 24/7 for friends and family who didn't ask for it but ~~probably~~ definitely appreciate it.

version history

Havox V4 current

2026 → present

Catppuccin Mocha. Single page. Professional.

Havox V3 ↗

2022 → 2025

Borrowed a professional template and tried to make it suit my needs. Wasn't very 'me'.

Umbra.cyou ↗

2019 → 2022

Built from the ground up focusing on a minimal clean design. Stole my code VS Code theme for a colour palette.

Havox.org ↗

2016 → 2019

Wrote the entire site in one php file. Hosted on a £1/year VPS.

skills

What I know

Backend

Professional experience designing, building and deploying services. Using a modern tech stack in the Supply Chain & Logistics industry.

Java Spring Boot AWS Kafka MongoDB

Frontend & Creative

Comfortable with React and CSS. I've always enjoyed visualising algorithms interactively - it's way more fun than a console output.

React TypeScript HTML/CSS

Systems & Infra

Long-term Linux & Vim user. Self-hosted web & media servers. Using industry practices when it comes to networks & security.

Linux Docker Self-Hosting Wireguard

Academic Breadth

C, C++, x86_64 assembly, Haskell, R & MatLab from uni. Modules in Advanced networking, algorithms, compilers, graphics, cryptography, malware analysis & many more.

C / C++ Haskell Algorithms Security Low Level OS

projects

Things I built

A timeline of my projects and an overview of my journey as a developer. Often inspired by something cool I saw and set out to recreate.

Featured projects

9 Feb 2025 Active development Wordle Solver Built after one too many missed 3-guess games. Now it plays marginally better than me. Uses information theory to recommend the next best guess. Source code: API · Frontend Rust React TypeScript

13 Apr 2024 Active development Crack the Quote A substitution-cipher puzzle game with a daily challenge. Built for me and my family to play after getting bored with NYT games. Source code: API Rust React JavaScript

All projects

03 Apr 2025 Pub Quiz Dashboard A Python dashboard to track our local pub quiz performances. Python

14 Nov 2024 Thin Ice A small browser tile game inspired by one I played growing up. C++ WebAssembly Raylib

20 Mar 2024 Travelling Salesman Problem A nearest-neighbor + 2-opt visualiser. Wanted to revisit one of my first projects with an optimised tech stack and algorithm. Zig WebGL WebAssembly

31 Jan 2024 Flocking Rewrote the project from Go to Rust, compiling it to WebAssembly. Was fun being able to use DOM controls to affect the simulation. Rust Raylib

1 Nov 2023 Active development samstoreymusic.com A website design and build for a friend working in music. Saving him the hosting fees :) HTML/CSS JavaScript

21 Jul 2023 Game of Life After building Conway's Game of Life in p5.js as one of my first projects, I expanded it into a generic automata simulator. React JavaScript

5 Feb 2022 Percolation Watched a brilliant video by Spectral Collective and just had to recreate it. C Raylib WebAssembly

1 Oct 2021 Drawing Bézier curves An interactive animation for how cubic Bézier curves are constructed. Inspired by this beautiful video by Fraya Holmér JavaScript p5.js

17 Sep 2021 2D Marching Squares I saw the 3D version of this algorithm in a game dev log and was inspired to create this 2D land-and-sea map generator. JavaScript p5.js

2 Apr 2020 Müller-Lyer illusion JavaScript visualisation of the Müller-Lyer optical illusion. JavaScript p5.js

27 Feb 2019 Fourier series Builds a square wave from sine components to show Fourier series in motion. JavaScript p5.js

23 Feb 2019 Constructing an ellipse A geometric construction demo inspired by 3Blue1Brown's video on Feynman's lost lecture. JavaScript p5.js

18 Mar 2018 Calculating Pi A Monte Carlo approximation of pi using random sampling. JavaScript p5.js

17 Dec 2017 Oscillations in 3D A JavaScript recreation of a Bees and Bombs animation. JavaScript p5.js

13 Nov 2017 Maze generator Discovered the Coding Train's channel and learnt coding through following along. JavaScript p5.js

contact

Let's talk

I am currently employed and open to the right software engineering opportunity, particularly backend or full-stack roles with friendly, close-knit teams.

For professional enquiries, connect with me on LinkedIn.

GitHub jayo60013 LinkedIn jaygatward