A few months ago, I noticed my app was having CPU spikes. Read on to see how I diagnosed the issue on a running production server.

I have found that in the literature about games and AI (artificial intelligence) that Scrabble is invariably referred to as something of a “solved” game, in the same way that Chess, Go, etc are “solved” by AI —in these latter games, there exist AIs that have superhuman performance and can basically beat any person.

How we built the Woogles backend messaging system using NATS and Websockets.

Based and gopher-pilled.

Our site is looking prettier now. My friend Conrad is doing the design for the site; the above is a very early version of what he’s already designed, and we have a team working to bring it to life. I’m mostly in charge of the backend, but doing a little front end work on the API. We finally got a full game timer working; I based the code mostly on lichess’s. Why not use a fully functional thing for inspiration?

A small team of us have been working very hard on a project that I internally call “liwords”. The inspiration is obviously lichess.org. Why not do for crossword board games what lichess did for chess?

This has been a dream of mine for a few years since I first saw that wonderful site. Although we are very far from being done, I hit a minor milestone recently on Twitch (I sometimes stream coding on Twitch).

I’m going to log more of my progress on the apps that I wrote about in an earlier post, in an attempt to:

1. make myself more likely to work on these apps
2. write a log for me and others and drum up some excitement! ;)

Monte Carlo simulation is basically working on Macondo. I expect that since I just got it working, that I’ll discover some bugs and special cases, and there’s so much more I want to do with it, but for now I’m excited that I got it working. As a nod to Scrabble expert Ron Tiekert, who might have been the first person to invent Scrabble simulations back in the 1980s, I plugged in the rack that he used to explain this concept, AAADERW.

I have a lot of ideas for improving the state of tournament and recreational Scrabble, mostly revolving around the technological aspect of things. I am aware that there are many other ways in which it is lacking, but my expertise is in technology, and that’s probably the best way I can make an impact

Around April of 2017 I wrote this article about moving my side project to a single-node Kubernetes cluster: https://hackernoon.com/lessons-learned-from-moving-my-side-project-to-kubernetes-c28161a16c69

As of today, the infrastructure is still running strong, although I’ve run into a few issues I will talk about later in this article. I initially set up my node as a $10/month node but it was barely not powerful enough. Since then, Digital Ocean seems to have roughly doubled the CPU/memory for each of its instances, so $10 might work out. The Kubernetes docs mention that your nodes should have at least 2 GB of RAM, which means a decent 3-node cluster would only run you about $30 a month. I am still on the $20/month node, but I’ve redeployed it a couple of times and resized it since the initial setup, for various reasons that I’ll go into here.