Why tho

What and why?

First, the what: Dawn of the Dad is basically the 2 solvers: one for sudoku, and another for building crosswords. The first is largely complete, so most of my time now is dedicated to beefing up the crossword builder.

Now the why: why build the site and why ramble in this blog?

• The site is my excuse to write some code, both to stay sharp and because I like doing it, solve some algorithmically interesting problems, and revisit some of the neat things I’ve learned about back in grad school. Originally, this spun off as a yet-another-rewrite of a general-purpose CSP solver, which then led to adding fairly ad hoc visualization, which led to building a web server, hacking up a websocket protocol, glueing it all together and finally hosting it on Google Cloud.

• The blog is largely meant to capture some of the interesting things I’ve learned along the way, like tuning / optimizing the solver and dealing with the hug of death I got from that one time my site briefly hit the front page of Hacker News.

Post frequency

I’ll probably end up writing a bunch of posts relatively quickly at first, as I’m catching up on a year’s worth of potentially interesting things to write down, before I forget them. Once I do, I expect things to slow down a fair bit.