Week of 8 April
- Late one this week on account of a busy weekend!
- I was in Sydney on Wednesday this week to attend the first ever Ruby in Common! Ruby conf is one of my favourite times of year, and I missed out on attending this year βΒ but this made up for it massively. The day was structured in an un-conference fashion, with each attendee writing their suggestions or thoughts for topics of discussion on actual index cards (which we could then actually vote on in person!). Once we had some discussion points, we spent the rest of the day talking through them as a group. Admittedly, I made the super smart move of taking a bus to Sydney at 5am, so wasn't incredibly in the right mindset to contribute, but thankfully many more of the attendees were, so it was quite nice being able to listen to the great discussion happening around the room. After a break for lunch, we resumed the chats with a quick demo of how to Hanami from Tim, followed by a few more group chats. By the end of the day, it was clear we all had Ruby in common, and a lot more too!
- I've been back on Final Fantasy VII Remake this week β it's great! The set pieces continue to be gorgeous and the characters and scenarios completely out of this world. I've hit a bit of a wall fighting a literal house, but the challenge is super welcome and enjoyable. I much rather struggling for a bit trying to overcome some puzzle, rather than breezing through something mindlessly. I did run in to one fun glitch with Barret melding with a table briefly (see the video below).
- I've been working on an implementation of the Nurikabe puzzle over the last few days, with the goal of adding a daily puzzle to this site. It's been a challenge re-familiarising myself with the various graph search algorithms to check the board state for a successful completion of the puzzle. For those unfamiliar, the puzzle is usually on a square grid (though rectangular and line variations also exist). Some cells of the grid are pre-filled with a number, and its your job to create "islands" surrounded by water from the numbers in the grid. Each number is a clue as to how big the island needs to be, and thus how many island tiles need to be adjacent to it. With "1" being the exception. The water tiles that surround the island tiles must be part of a continuous run, and there cannot be any pools (water tiles in a grid of more than 2 x 2). It's a super simple and fun game and can be played on an easy grid of ~5x5 squares with more and more rows and columns being added to increase complexity. So far, I have the puzzle implementation working with a hard-coded starting board of any size (below are some examples). Next, I want to try and generate some puzzle boards, but I think I'll need to be able to solve them programatically to be able to prove the generation is working βΒ if I don't want to write a super complicated generator.
Movies watched for the first time this week
This week, years ago
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