Weekend hacking after @topher1kenobe pointed me at “Ottendorf Cyphers”.
I’ve heard about these, though I didn’t remember the name.
It’s a cypher/code where two people have the same book and the code is page/word/letter.
Topher tried to do this with web pages once. I made my own version with bookmarklets.
https://page-cypher.veryuseful.app/
(My original attempt at building something failed because CORS!!!! 😬)
I have discovered a new physical force.
It is a force of strong attraction.
And it seems to exist only between the toes of young children and solid objects at ground level.
Very curious. Physicists should investigate. There’s a PhD thesis in here somewhere!
I have to say, co-pilot is pretty dang good at giving me simple algorithms for game rules.
It’s written quite a lot of my static scrabble game for me. Simple loops with variations that, yes, I could write myself. But it already did the boring grunt work.
It wrote a better version of “maybeScoreVerticalWord” than I did!
Scrabble scoring logic is more complicated than I thought! 😅
Updated my serverless Scrabble clone this weekend to fix the scoring logic and make some other improvements.
Still not quite perfect. But better!!
Feel free to start a game with me (in DMs) or a friend.
Games are passed between the two players as URLs. Play. Grab the new URL. Send!
I've had so little “free time" of late. But…
Hacked on my static scrabble game today.
Scoring is better (perpendicular words are scored), but extending an existing word still doesn't work right.
Still, this is progress.
And because scores are calculated from the move history, this is all backwards compatible and existing games will be re-scored! Yay!
Very impressed with my kids ingenuity (despite his cheek).
He used default apps on his phone to turn the Edulink school app logo upside down.
Screengrabs
Crop tools
Freeform
Colour pickers
Shortcuts
The kids these days… 😃🙌😂🤯
I’m currently playing this Backgammon game app with a computer opponent and I swear that the harder levels just fix the dice. It’s really annoying.
I don’t normally blow my own trumpet a lot, but dang I’m good at this coding stuff sometimes. This week:
1) My team did extensive testing of a big piece of work I’d done involving payment processing and UI changes. The only issues were minor UI issues. The functionally was 💯!
2) This morning I spent 50 minutes updating an API integration. 5 minutes with xdebug found 1 simple line I’d forgotten to add. Other than that it ran FIRST TIME! (OK, that’s actually second time but…)
Feeling 🙌💪
I swear someone posted a link me to a cool sounding free book the other day. Possibly about engineering management or software development. I'm sure it was written by a woman. And I'm sure it was @chriscoyier who linked it. But can I find? NO, I can not!!!!
Anyone know what I'm talking about?
I’ve just had it today. Started OK but turns out my resilience to annoying things that are out of my control is on the floor right now.
Need a week off in the woods or something.
Hmm. So Aldi seem to think that you can't have a cold beyond mid-April and so stop selling medicine for colds? 🧐
Has anyone else got this stupid virus that won’t go away for many weeks? I get a little flare up every 1.5-2 days. Mostly just a sore/swollen throat. But had been headaches too.
I know folks who’ve had a cough for 6 weeks now.
What is this thing?
Phase 1 of maybe-get-a-garden-office.
Does anyone have recommendations for UK-based garden office suppliers?
I have one lined up but want to make some comparisons.
I want delivered and built for under 20k.
Who is good?
Thanks!
When I finally leave WordPress development (which seems both inevitable and yet perpetually-unattainable) I can see me becoming some kind of expert consultant in slow, careful, deliberate, elegant software development.
Actually… not slow. I truly believe that if you are careful early on you can remove friction and increase velocity.
See “Rocket Turtle”/“Interrogator”/“Simplifier” archetypes here:
This, and the article it links, are great.
I regular-boosted this but I want to quote it too.
The last 2 episodes of @aurooba’s little daily podcast go together and are deeply impactful. I’ve listened several times.
They remind me of many important things.
And alongside “default to kindness” is “assume good intent”.
Why?
Because you know a mere tiny fraction of the other person. Their day. Their situation. Their life.
Kindness is critical. We ALL need it. So be the one who pours it out.
https://mastodon.aurooba.com/@aurooba/112301264035429062
There’s something very T-1000 about the new Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. 😬
Only 2,300 words in the end. But here's a deep dive on using JavaScript BigInt's to do efficient binary representation of Scrabble game data.
I can't believe anyone will read this. But if you're curious about how binary works, how it can be used to efficiently encode and transmit data, and how you can do this using JavaScript, then maybe you'll learn something.
For me, it was SO good to take on a nerdy challenge like this and revisit some of my computer science roots.