// havox.org - v4

John Gatward

Software Engineer

Backend engineerby trade Developer enthusiastby curiosity Unofficial family cloud engineerby necessity

View projects Contact me

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 times getting inspired and trying to recreate something cool I saw.

Featured projects
9 Feb 2025 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. Rust React TypeScript → 13 Apr 2024 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. 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 but with a super optimised tech-stack & algorithm. Zig WebGL WebAssembly →
31 Jan 2024 Flocking Rewrote the entire project in Rust from GoLang to compile to wasm. Was fun being able to use DOM controls to affect the simulation. Rust Raylib →
1 Nov 2023 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. Inspirated 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/sea map generator thing. 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, please contact me on LinkedIn.

GitHub jayo60013 LinkedIn jaygatward