Minesweeper feels intricate — numbers, cascading reveals, flags. Build it and you find it's a grid, a neighbour count, and one recursive function . This is Day 6 of my GameFromZero series. Each cell holds four facts const cell = { mine : false , open : false , flag : false , n : 0 }; n = how many of the 8 neighbours are mines. That number is all the player gets to reason about. Count neighbours once After scattering mines randomly, precompute every non-mine cell's n : let n = 0 ; neighbours ( r , c , ( rr , cc ) => { if ( cells [ rr ][ cc ]. mine ) n ++ ; }); cell . n = n ; Flood-fill is the whole trick When you open a cell with zero neighbouring mines, there's nothing dangerous nearby — so auto-open all 8 neighbours, and if any of those are also zero, they cascade. That's why one click can clear half the board. It's recursion: function open ( r , c ) { const cell = cells [ r ][ c ]; if ( cell . open || cell . flag ) return ; // base case cell . open = true ; if ( cell . n === 0 ) neighbours ( r , c , ( rr , cc ) => open ( rr , cc )); // recurse } This is the same algorithm behind the paint-bucket tool and maze region-filling. Flags + win/lose Right-click toggles a flag (and blocks accidental opens). Click a mine → lose. Win when opened cells = total − mines: if ( cell . mine ) gameOver (); if ( opened === R * C - M ) win (); That's the entire game. Master the state-step-draw loop once and every classic — Snake, Pong, Tetris, 2048, Minesweeper — is an evening each. ▶️ Play it + read the step-by-step breakdown: https://dev48v.infy.uk/game/day6-minesweeper.html Day 6 of GameFromZero.

For a long time I found myself checking different European stores to see where products were cheapest. It was slow and annoying. I had to open lots of tabs, change countries, check delivery costs and compare prices myself. I used other comparison websites, but I wanted something simpler. So I decided to build Haggl.eu. Haggl lets you compare prices across Europe from one search, helping you find better deals and save money. This is my first public project and I am learning a lot while building it. The site is still a work in progress, but I have plenty of ideas for the future. I want to add more stores, more countries, price history tracking and better delivery comparisons. My goal is to make it as easy as possible to find the best deal without spending ages clicking through different pages. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions. Thank you everyone :) https://haggl.eu

I Built a 4-Sided Plot Area Calculator with 2D & 3D Visualization Most online plot calculators only work for simple rectangular plots. However, many real-world properties have four sides with different measurements, making area estimation much more difficult. That's why I built a 4-Sided Plot Area Calculator that allows users to enter the North, South, East, and West dimensions and instantly calculate the approximate plot area. 🔗 https://www.premiumconverters.com/plot-area-calculator Features 📐 Supports irregular 4-sided plots 🏠 Calculates area in Marla, Kanal, Acres, and more 🖼️ Interactive 2D top-down visualization 🏗️ Isometric 3D plot rendering 📏 Feet & inches input support 📱 Mobile-friendly experience Why I Built It In many countries, especially in South Asia, property dimensions are often recorded as side measurements rather than perfect geometric shapes. Existing tools rarely address this use case properly. I wanted to create a simple solution that homeowners, buyers, real estate professionals, and developers could use without needing complex surveying software. The Result The calculator transforms four side lengths into a practical estimate while providing visual feedback that helps users better understand their property's shape. Building tools that solve real-world problems is one of the most rewarding parts of software engineering. Have you ever built a niche tool that unexpectedly helped thousands of users?

"Chat with your PDF / your notes / your docs" is everywhere. Today we build it from scratch and you'll see it's just three moves : retrieve, then generate — with one prompt trick that stops the hallucinations. This is Day 46 of TechFromZero. Yesterday (Day 45) we built the retrieval half with pgvector. Today we add the answer half and host it on Supabase. RAG in one line Find the relevant chunks of your documents, paste them into the prompt, and tell the model to answer using only those. That's Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The "augmented" part is just stuffing real context into the prompt so the model isn't guessing from memory. 1. Storage: Supabase is Postgres, so pgvector is one click Supabase is hosted Postgres with an auto-generated API. Because it's just Postgres , vector search needs no separate database: create extension if not exists vector ; create table documents ( id bigserial primary key , content text , embedding vector ( 384 ) ); -- one RPC the app calls to get the closest chunks create function match_documents ( query_embedding vector ( 384 ), match_count int ) returns table ( id bigint , content text , similarity float ) language sql stable as $$ select id , content , 1 - ( embedding <=> query_embedding ) as similarity from documents order by embedding <=> query_embedding limit match_count ; $$ ; 2. Ingest: chunk → embed → store Split your docs into paragraph-sized chunks, embed each with a free local model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2 via Transformers.js — no key, nothing leaves your machine), and insert the row + vector: const embedding = await embed ( chunk ); // 384 numbers await supabase . from ( " documents " ). insert ({ content : chunk , embedding }); Chunk size matters: too big buries the answer in noise, too small loses meaning. A few hundred characters is a good start. 3. Retrieve + Generate (the payoff) Embed the question with the same model, ask Supabase for the closest chunks, then hand them to the LLM: const query_embedding = await embed ( que

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The test passed. The restore completed inside the window. The workload came online. The team signed off, closed the ticket, and filed the results. DR test: successful. And then, somewhere between the test environment and the next real incident, the recovery plan drifted out of alignment with the infrastructure it was written to protect. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Gradually — through a cloud migration, an IdP consolidation, a new SaaS dependency, a network redesign that didn't make it into the runbook. DR plan failure rarely happens where you tested. It happens at the assumptions the exercise never reached. The Test Has a Boundary. The Incident Doesn't. A DR exercise begins with a defined scope. A specific workload. A known starting state. A target environment that has been prepared in advance. The team is available, credentialed, and not managing anything else. The blast radius is controlled before the test starts. A real incident does none of that. Scope expands from the first alert. Authentication problems surface because the IdP that wasn't in exercise scope is now unreachable. Networking issues appear because the failover path assumes a routing table that was updated three months ago. A vendor the plan never named is unavailable, and the recovery sequence stalls waiting for a dependency that was never documented as a dependency. The plan was written for the conditions of the test. The incident arrives in conditions the plan never anticipated. That gap is where DR plan failure actually lives — not in the restore mechanism, but in everything the restore mechanism was assumed to be able to reach. Most DR Plans Depend on Things They Never Recover The recovery exercise validates a workload. What it rarely validates is the recovery infrastructure itself. Consider what a typical enterprise DR plan silently depends on: Assumed — Not Tested: Identity provider, backup management console, cloud account access, ticketing and incident management systems, third-party

I've been going through Jim Kurose's networking lectures lately, and I kept finding myself pausing to re-read the same sections. Not because they were confusing - because things I'd been using for years were finally clicking into place. This post is me writing down what I learned, in the order it started making sense. Before HTTP, there's a webpage A webpage isn't one file. When you open a URL, your browser fetches a base HTML file - and that file references other objects. Images. Scripts. Stylesheets. Each one lives at its own URL. Each one has to be fetched separately. So loading a single "page" might mean firing off 20+ individual requests. This detail matters because the entire evolution of HTTP - from 1.0 to 3 - is basically the story of making those 20 fetches faster. HTTP runs on TCP. That has consequences. HTTP doesn't manage its own connections. It hands that job to TCP. When your browser wants something, it first opens a TCP connection to the server (port 80 for HTTP, 443 for HTTPS), and then asks for the object. Opening a TCP connection isn't free. It takes a round-trip - your machine says "hello," the server says "hello back," and then you can actually talk. That's one RTT(Round Trip Time) just to shake hands, before a single byte of your webpage arrives. So every HTTP request carries at least 2 RTTs of overhead: 1 to open the TCP connection, 1 for the actual request/response. Do that 20 times and you've spent 40 RTTs before the page renders. HTTP/1.0 vs HTTP/1.1: one change that mattered a lot HTTP/1.0 (non-persistent): open a TCP connection, fetch one object, close the connection. Repeat for every object. HTTP/1.1 (persistent): open a TCP connection, fetch as many objects as you need, then close. The server leaves the connection open after each response. That one change cuts subsequent fetches from 2 RTTs to 1 RTT each. For a page with 20 objects, that's real time saved - not microseconds, but hundreds of milliseconds that users actually feel. What an

I was trying to tell someone something real in her first language — not "I missed you" from a dropdown, but the version that sounds like a person said it. Google Translate gave me one answer. No indication whether it was what you'd text at midnight or what you'd write in a letter to someone's grandmother. That's the failure mode of literal translators: one output, no register, no sense of what you're actually choosing between. konid returns 3 options per query, ordered casual to formal, with the register explained and a cultural note on the difference between them. For Mandarin or Japanese, audio plays through your speakers via node-edge-tts — no API key, no browser tab — because reading a pinyin romanization and actually hearing the tone contour are two different things. The vowel length in Korean, the pitch drop in Japanese, the stress pattern in Arabic: you don't internalize those from text. You internalize them from hearing them repeated back while you're still in the context of trying to say something. The setup for Claude Code is one line: claude mcp add konid-ai -- npx -y konid-ai It runs as an MCP server, so it works in Cursor, VS Code Copilot, Windsurf, Zed, JetBrains, and Claude Cowork. Also installs as a ChatGPT app via Developer mode using the endpoint https://konid.fly.dev/mcp . Supports 13+ languages: Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, and more. The name is Farsi — konid (کنید) means "do." MIT licensed. https://github.com/robertnowell/konid-language-learning

The earlier posts in this series were about what the gateway lets you call (cache-aware spawning across five providers, the Codex review gate, the CLI-versus-API argument) and the one before this was about the parts that do not show up as a tool, the upstream-tracking and the website that became the project's front door. This one is about a different kind of front door: the gateway can now listen over HTTP, behind real authentication, and serve more than one caller without those callers being able to read each other's work. That sounds like a small toggle. It is not. Moving an MCP server off a local pipe and onto a network port changes the trust boundary completely, and 2.9.0 is the release where I sat down and remediated all seventeen findings from a multi-LLM red-team of exactly that surface before telling anyone the remote path was ready. Short version: llm-cli-gateway is one Model Context Protocol server that wraps five vendor CLIs (Claude Code 2.1.177, Codex 0.139.0, Google's Antigravity agy 1.0.8, Grok 0.2.51, and Mistral Vibe 2.14.1) behind a single, uniform tool surface, so one orchestrating agent can fan a task out to several models, collect independent opinions, run a red-team or a consensus check, and keep durable session and job state across all of it. Until recently that only made sense on localhost over stdio. As of 2.9.0 the same server runs over HTTP with a static bearer token or a built-in OAuth 2.0 authorisation server (PKCE on by default, an opt-in human-consent gate, and a trusted-principal-header seam for when you front it with your own identity-aware proxy), every session and job and stored request is stamped with an owner principal and access is enforced per principal, remote provider calls are refused unless a workspace is registered, and the whole thing fails closed rather than open when the configuration is dangerous. Long version is below, same shape as always: what it enables, what the remote options actually are, a stack of worked scenar

Weekly Challenge 377 Each week Mohammad S. Anwar sends out The Weekly Challenge , a chance for all of us to come up with solutions to two weekly tasks. My solutions are written in Python first, and then converted to Perl. Unless otherwise stated, Copilot (and other AI tools) have NOT been used to generate the solution. It's a great way for us all to practice some coding. Challenge , My solutions Task 1: Reverse Existence Task You are given a string. Write a script to find whether any substring of length 2 is also present in the reverse of the given string. My solution This is relatively straight forward. I create a variable reversed_string which is the string reversed. I then have a loop called start_pos that goes from 0 to 2 less than the length of the string. At each position, I check if the two letters at that position are in the original string. def reverse_existence ( input_string : str ) -> bool : reversed_string = input_string [:: - 1 ] for start_pos in range ( len ( input_string ) - 1 ): if reversed_string [ start_pos : start_pos + 2 ] in input_string : return True return False The Perl solution follows the same logic. sub main ($input_string) { my $reversed_string = reverse ( $input_string ); foreach my $start_pos ( 0 .. length ( $input_string ) - 2 ) { if ( index ( $input_string , substr ( $reversed_string , $start_pos , 2 ) ) != - 1 ) { say " true "; return ; } } say " false "; } Examples $ ./ch-1.py abcba true $ ./ch-1.py racecar true $ ./ch-1.py abcd false $ ./ch-1.py banana true $ ./ch-1.py hello true Task 2: Prefix Suffix Task You are given an array of strings. Write a script to find if the two strings ( str1 , str2 ) in the given array such that str1 is prefix and suffix of str2. Return the total count of such pairs. My solution In Python, this is a one line solution. I use the combinations function from the itertools module to produce all combinations of pairs of str1 and str2 . For each pair, I use the startwith and endswith function on the strings

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on e-bikes, power stations, and how to work anywhere, follow Thomas Ricker. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere as we […]

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