Category: Uncategorized

👆 @emd @alifeee !! ?

OK. Yay. I did it! I made a server-less 2-player Scrabble clone where you pass game data around in encoded URLs.

https://words.pico.games/

This is basic and simple (more rules to implement) but works and proves the principle.

Anyone want to test a game with me?

This, that I just wrote, is mostly what I think about the web these days:

“Yay look at this exciting thing that fixes a bunch of issues we made by implementing other exciting things, and creates a bunch more issues that will have to be fixed by future exciting things!!”

I really hoped the two week Easter school holiday here in the UK would be productive. Clocks went forwards. We have evening daylight. I have time off with kids. I would wash the car, start work in the garden, fix some stuff up around the house. Enjoy some outside time.

But no. Everything conspired against me and I’ve just bounced from fighting through days at work, fighting through days at home and using every spare minute to rest and try to get well after another sodding virus got me. 😫

This is a great article on using the #WordPress playground and its APIs.

Leveraging the WordPress Playground’s Versatile API Suite
https://deliciousbrains.com/wordpress-playgrounds-api-suite/

What was the thing a while ago that enhanced your existing terminal/shell with pop-up commands and stuff. It was around the same time as the Warp terminal was getting good, but it wasn't actually a terminal.

Anyone remember what I mean?

EDIT: It was https://fig.io/, and, surprise surprise, it's being sunset.

Makes me fear for Warp, Zed, etc. Are these tools going anywhere financially?

My friend @tnash very kindly shared some content of mine today. And I realised I've not yet promoted his EXCELLENT security tales video that he released recently.

It's SO good and has some great lessons in. It's technical – it's about internet security – but has lessons for us all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMKcK93tNjA

cc: @emd @alifeee …

Progress!! It works!!! 👆

It's really going to take quite a lot of effort to actually turn this into something playable. 😬

Apologies for Instagram link.

Something to learn for work teams too?

Alt: Video of tennis player Andy Murray being asked why he gave a towel to a specific member of the crowd.

He says:

“It was just constant cheering the whole match. But more than that… it wasn’t just saying ‘Come on’, he was saying to me ‘This is the best I’ve ever seen you serve man’, ‘You’re moving great considering all your problems’. And I was like ‘Yeah, thanks, I needed a little bit of that’s

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4MXZ3NPFEG/

And as a reminder… my web dev team at WP Engine are recruiting. So if you’d like “Storytime with Ross” as part
of your working week let me know!

– Only senior developers with WordPress AND React skills need apply
– Job is remote-first, needs overlap with US hours.
– We are a busy web dev team in a marketing department. Excellent communication skills required.
– No freelancers/agencies/contractors
https://fosstodon.org/@ross/112220812037660185

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.