The Compression Project

I always wanted to implement a File Compression algorithm, inspired by Silicon Valley, obviously. I started this project with that in mind. Well, you know how it went. Didn’t go according to plan.

I had no idea how it would turn out. And how to work with UTF-8 encodings, and processing bytestreams in Java. You know, the usual confusion everyone faces. It became much more clear, after this one video by computerphile on YouTube. I made a lot of progress after watching this video about 10 times. I didn’t even come close to file compression. I had no idea how to do it.

Once I understood how to work with UTF-8 and get each character precisely, I came up with my own Encryption-Decryption algorithm, a simple character-by-character encryption algorithm.

The message I get from this is, you don’t start out with what you want to do. You do a bunch of stuff, and find what you want to do.