Author: Ross Wintle

TIL what the most dangerous animal (measured by how many people are killed by them) in the UK is.

VERY interesting!

Lol. Pop quiz for web dev nerds:

Why might you suddenly start seeing Stripe test card failures today?

Excellent video from @briancoords on #WordPress dot-com (!) Studio that clarifies what it is and debunks what it is not.

https://youtu.be/QEP3H17BkVI

Opens work Slack to check for alerts.

Not really any alerts. But oh my, someone let off a Slack bomb and I can see my whole morning draining away before my eyes.

People with publicly visible tattoos… how do you feel about people asking about them? Is it annoying? Or do you like it … is that the point?

Thinking that, at some point, when I have some more time. I'd like to revive my Beyond WP newsletter/blog.

In some ways it makes sense that the WordPress news is all about WordPress. But there's SO much going on elsewhere in tech that's cool and I think more WP developers should developers should be looking outside the WordPress ecosystem and there doesn’t seem to be anything that caters for this.

Have been playing my little Scrabble-like game with some play testers.

It’s a static, serverless, single-page app. And the absolute beauty of not having to log in is just brilliant.

I can click a game link in any browser on any computer and Just Play.

I want to make more stuff like this.

Backgammon next? That's gotta be super easy to encode.

Game: https://words.pico.games/

Write-up: https://rosswintle.uk/2024/04/static-not-scrabble/

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.

https://words.pico.games/

Games are passed between the two players as URLs. Play. Grab the new URL. Send!

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?