Month: April 2024

Today I read a passage from a Brandon Sanderson book on a standup.

I _think_ my team appreciated it.

Felt quite weird. But sometimes a story has the right words and ideas.

Worst case then, we encode the board square by square for simplicity.

We’ll probably end up using base64 which gets 6 bits per char.

So our 5-bit representation of spaces/tiles over 225 spaces, 86 bag tiles and the 14 in racks gives us 1625 bits. Which is 271 base64 chars.

Bigger than I hoped.

Hmm.

More tomorrow.

Stream of consciousness on efficient URL encoding of a Scrabble game…

The board is 15×15, so 225 spaces. We’ll need the “bag”, so 100 tiles but only actually 86 once game starts. 2 “racks” of 7 letters. And the score.

Each space can be empty, letter, blank tile with associated letter.

So all tiles/spaces can fit in 5 bits (up to 32 combos).

It would be good to represent plays as row/col/tile. But I THINK that’s harder to decode. Though row+col fits in 8 bits. Hmm…

I had this thought about static turn-by-turn game applications that exchange game data in URL parameter strings.

So you'd take your turn, and then share the new URL with the other player.

I guess tic-tac-toe is the obvious starting point. But I was wondering how efficiently you can encode Scrabble-like game data in a URL string.

I have been thinking about this FAR too much. It's a really interesting little problem.

I endorse this message:

Clean Code: The Art of Clean Naming – by Eric Roby
https://codingwithroby.substack.com/p/clean-code-the-art-of-clean-naming

@bw Was really cool hearing you on @shoptalkshow. Your home-cooked apps are great. Such a good principle. And I found out about how tech helps your SMA. You’re a very inspiring person to listen to. Keep up all the great stuff you are doing, and thanks for sharing your creativity with the world.

Wow. The Verge printer thing is blowing up.

My history of reading The Verge is that I first went there for trusted reviews. Then I went there for tech news. Their live coverage of Apple Events is excellent. And they have an RSS feed with full content. Which I actually feel mean about consuming because I want them to be paid for their content.

Sometimes it’s too much. Populist tech content. I get that it has to be.

But their editor in chief seems really smart. Listen: https://www.theverge.com/24087834/hank-green-decoder-podcast-google-youtube-web-media-platforms-distribution-future

🫣 Oh no! It’s the school holidays. I’m on DadOps duty. And I’m down to my last two coffee filters!! What do I do? Eat the beans whole and raw? Use a tea strainer or muslin cloth?!Grind them and spread it on toast?!! SEND HELP!!!!!

The Verge article on the best printer in 2024 is just completely brilliant in so many ways.

And also kinda sad.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

… But now, not only do you not really know what a is, you don’t know what x is either.

And so you shove a ? on the type of x (or things x can become) and off you go again!

Catch errors and absences early. Don’t half-ass your type system… USE IT!

Coding thoughts:

The combination of optional/nullable types and optional chaining gives you so much temptation to write bad code.

It’s become so easy to just add a little ? here and a “| null” there to quickly fix some error you saw.

But it’s a trap!!

Once you start they breed like crazy through your codebase.

It’s weird for me to see:

x = a?.b?.c

Because if you have an a then you should know that you have a b and a c! (I know this is not the case with TypeScript)

…

I’ve been working with it for a while now and I still think that the React eco system is a series of complex and fragile kludges that only exist because everyone wanted to use React. Bundlers. Transpilers. CSS-in-JS. HTML-in-JS. CSS-in-HTML-in-JS. SSR. ISR.

My opinion, of course. I just don’t get it. Maybe I had a bad introduction to it or something. But that spark of understanding simply hasn’t come despite months of open minded exploration.

Haha. WordPress Block Editor in Minecraft. Very good.

https://wpbiz.dev/news/wordpress-for-minecraft-leaked/

Oh wow! TIL from @briancoords that you can get to all the useful links (dev notes, field guide, release schedule) for a #WordPress major release by going to:

https://make.wordpress.org/core/<version>

e.g.

https://make.wordpress.org/core/6.5

SO useful! Thanks, Brian!