Blog · page 15
Notes on engineering, design, and everything in between.
2048: collapsing four directions into one operation
Sliding, merging and scoring only need to be written once; the other three directions reuse it through transpose and reverse. The hard part is that each tile may merge at most once per move.
Minesweeper: deferring mine placement until the first click
A minesweeper where the first click can lose is an unfinished minesweeper. Deferring placement and excluding the surrounding 3 by 3 is the single most important design decision here.
Turning screen-printing limits into design tokens
This site's visual direction is Riso screen printing. What I actually built was the printing constraints as tokens, so retheming touched two files and no component changed.
Base and unit conversion: temperature is the only non-linear one
Converting between bases 2 and 36 needs BigInt to avoid silent precision loss. Across ten unit categories nine are linear ratios, while temperature is affine, and a single multiplier is always wrong.
Color and contrast: relative luminance is not an average
Converting between notations is just the entry point. The real trap is WCAG contrast, which needs gamma decoding before weighting, and deciding between black and white text, which is not a brightness threshold.
Full-text search on a static site: index at build time, no backend at runtime
A static site does not need Algolia to have search. Generate the index during the build, run the query entirely in the browser, and pay a few seconds of build time.