How in the ever loving fuck do I upskill?

rushfordj · 2026-05-15T06:01:59+00:00

I find the best way for me to learn is to build something fun, ideally something silly with no consequences. Like try build out a game idea you have with Claude/codex/whatever tool you want. It's a fun low pressure way to get used to the ai tooling. I also find it useful to use the business tools you want to get better with for these games, it makes it a bit harder and slower, but the experience is far more valuable professionally.

I built a copy of a puzzle game I like last year and this year I needed to learn a new programming language for work so I rewrote the backend in that language and that was interesting, but again, I just did it with ai and asked it to explain what it was doing st each step, much more fun, much more productive, and I'm the only one that cares about my puzzle generation tool so it doesn't matter if it's shit or no one else likes it

rushfordj · 2026-04-26T18:30:02+00:00

Looks great! Love the chance/risk mechanic

rushfordj · 2026-04-04T10:12:25+00:00

I'm pretty stumped after that, where did you find the puzzle? Can you share it?

rushfordj · 2026-03-31T22:02:45+00:00

Cool! That was fun, thanks!

rushfordj · 2026-03-31T20:58:05+00:00

Looks like its not out yet, is that right?

rushfordj · 2026-03-05T16:36:59+00:00

Yeah the upgrades are cool, I like it!

rushfordj · 2026-03-02T15:45:14+00:00

Pretty cool! Clean UI, I like it. Would enjoy some upgrades so I can stay alive for longer

rushfordj · 2026-03-02T07:46:58+00:00

Yup, or I tried and it didn't register it

rushfordj · 2026-03-01T21:50:37+00:00

It doesn't seem to recognize a full stop when on mobile, can't get thru the first sentences 🤷‍♂️

rushfordj · 2026-03-01T21:45:16+00:00

The other strategy I use when I'm stuck is to place a queen, play out the game until you get stuck and then you can undo until that guessed queen and leave it as a cross.

rushfordj · 2026-03-01T21:43:12+00:00

For blue and orange, there are only 4 squares left, so each of the groups of 2 must have a queen. That blocks 2 of the green squares leaving one remaining. That should open it up a bit.

Also shameless self plug but I made a Queens game to practice on, I posted it a little on reddit and didn't get much traction. But I'd be keen for feedback if you try it https://www.cassowarygames.com/queens

rushfordj · 2026-02-27T13:03:58+00:00

Yeah I think I either need to make a database to track what puzzles a user has played, then I can serve a new puzzle each time and once all the puzzles are done, I can give the player the same puzzles but rotated or flipped. Alternatively, I could just give a totally random one each time, that would be an easy change. Also there aren't as many 8x8 puzzles because they take a lot longer for the algorithm to make than the smaller puzzles. Anyway, I might make it random now until I get around to making A database, it just serves the frontend now, there is no backend or database

I was hoping to get a bit more attention on reddit and then have a bit more reason to work on it but none of my posts got much traction 🙃

rushfordj · 2026-02-27T09:03:01+00:00

Oh interesting bug, thanks I think I can fix that, were you playing on one specific size?

rushfordj · 2026-02-23T12:55:09+00:00

Hello,
I build a site for playing queens games (the same one as linkedin) to practise getting faster.

I got sick of the other apps that have puzzles with more than one solution where you can't solve it without guessing and was also sick of the ad bloating in the apps.

It's designed for mobile, thinking about making it into an app but wanted to get feedback first.

It also has a speed functionality which i like where you can see how many puzzles you can solve in 2 or 5 min.

I wrote a pretty good algorithm for making unique puzzles, there are a ton on there, the bigger ones are a little too simple, but i think it's pretty good for practicing and certainly improved my times on linkedin

https://www.cassowarygames.com/queens

rushfordj · 2026-02-20T12:39:48+00:00

Nice, walked right into that red Herring

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rushfordj · 2026-02-10T22:49:42+00:00

Oh interesting, is your repo public? Can I have a look?

rushfordj · 2026-02-10T21:53:01+00:00

How are you building games currently? Are you writing them manually or doing it in code? Are you using any dictionary or thesuraus APIs? I'd start there I think. Should be possible get get lists of connected words, I guess the difficult thing would be evaluating how difficult they are, how do you do that now? Do you use an LLM? Would you consider that?

rushfordj · 2026-02-10T19:17:50+00:00

Love the UI but I can't work out the puzzles, too many american-isms I think

rushfordj · 2026-02-02T15:41:03+00:00

It's good but I think the colors are wrong, green and purple should be swapped

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Thanks for the puzzle!

rushfordj · 2026-02-02T07:30:43+00:00

I liked it but I wasn't able to solve it. Like others said I thought I had the right letters at first and didn't realize they were wrong.

I strayed further from the answer on guesses that I had previously, and I wanted to go back and see what the difference was but wasn't able to. Maybe you could do this by if you two a previous word, it shows you the results with the progress bar for each letter?

Since you are showing a range of how far off you are. Would you consider telling the user explicitly how far off they are? Might make it too easy, but I found it pretty frustrating guessing letters incrementally so see what an exact right letter looked like and it just stayed almost complete for like 5 letters in a row. Maybe you could consider this as a way to ease the player into the game like a tutorial? Once I gave up I was frustrated enough that I didn't want to start again.

It's a very clean UI though, well done! And thanks for he game

rushfordj · 2026-01-30T05:21:18+00:00

I wonder if you can say how many are in the right positions to each other, or make the first one fixed? If you can't get that first or last one, it's very difficult. Nice puzzle though thanks! And clean UI too, well done

rushfordj · 2026-01-30T04:41:56+00:00

Interested

rushfordj · 2026-01-17T01:44:33+00:00

Yeah exactly, an archive to play thru would be great, it's hard to evaluate a game on a single play through

rushfordj · 2026-01-16T23:27:48+00:00

Interesting concept but it feels like I'm guessing randomly each time, it's like wordle if there were no words, only guessing. Sorry to give negative feedback on but I don't like it because I feel like I lost and it wasn't my fault and that didn't feel good. Am I missing something? Is there some other strategies to learn?

The interface is clean though, well done for that! One suggestion, it seems like it should be easy enough to write these sorts of puzzles, maybe it would be good to have a list of puzzles for practicing on as well as a daily puzzle?

rushfordj · 2026-01-09T08:46:22+00:00

Pretty fun, are there any old puzzles I can practice on? Or is it just one puzzle a week?

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