cheeaunblog

Honestly looking at this list, I think some folks might think that this is AI-generated 😅 – I always use emojis for this list in most, if not all, my previous year-in-review posts.

Phanpy

It's been another year of developing Phanpy, my 3rd-party web client for Mastodon, so total up to 3 years now. It's still an enjoyable journey so far, as I continue implementing new ideas while keeping feature parity with official Mastodon.

Few of the interesting implementations:

Math (LaTeX) rendering – converts LaTeX markup to MathML.
"X months/years later" indicator – an idea borrowed from Discourse.
Edit History Snapshots – visualise edit history of a post.
Reply/Reply All – email-like reply buttons for posts.
Decal patterns – accessible patterns for charts.
QR code generator and scanner – for profiles and settings backup.
Image metadata reader – to be used for alt text.
Year in Posts – experimental visualisation of posts in a year.

Phanpy also got mentioned so many times that it's getting hard to keep track.

Thus, listing them down here:

Feb 4 — "Potencia tu experiencia en Mastodon con Phanpy #Apps" (podcast) – translated to English as "Boost your Mastodon experience with Phanpy"

Mar 5 — "Leaving the City of Big Social, with Fediverse Enthusiast Chris Trottier" (podcast) – transcribed from Mike McCue:

I mean, I'm incredibly excited to see, you know, there's a fantastic front end called FanP. That's a fantastic user experience.

Apr 8 — "Trunk & Tidbits, March 2025" (article):

There was a big update to Phanpy, a progressive web app client for Mastodon.

Apr 24 — "【(ﾟ∀ﾟ)!!】マストドン界の黒船？！噂のミニマルWebクライアント「ファンピー(Phanpy,social)」を丸裸にしちゃうぞ！☆彡　#四24" (article) – honestly the most hilarious "review" I've ever read 🤣

Jun 26 — "423: Operation Endgame, deepfakes, and dead slugs" (podcast) – recommended as part of "Pick of the week"

Jul 24 — "Comfort Zone, Episode 59: I am Full-on Bananza" (podcast) – on a 15-minute chapter called "We're phans of Phanpy"

Aug 9 — "We Distribute Live — Sean Tilley — FediCon 2025" (video) – Anuj Ahooja gave a quick call-out on Phanpy.

Aug 17 — "Taking a Fresh Look at the Fediverse" (video) – a talk at FrOSCon by David Roetzel, backend developer at Mastodon:

I have a screenshot here which is from a very nice one called Phanpy. Phanpy is doing a lot of innovation on the user interface side and actually when we develop new features today, we always look at hmm… how does Phanpy solve it because they have some very cool ideas.

Aug 20 — "Introduction to AT Protocol" (article) – small mention under "Client Apps" section:

All browsing is done through a separate client, and the client always does everything through the public API – kind of like when you run a custom web client for Mastodon like Elk or Phanpy, you connect it to your instance, and you view your timeline on elk.zone.

Sep 26 — "WTN #8: The New Rock Stars of Web Development" (article)

🦣 Meanwhile, Mastodon app developers are coming to grips with the new quote posts. I use Phanpy for my Mastodon browser app (it's awesome)…

Oct — "#fediday2025 Elena Rossini - The Future is federated" (video)

Nov 3 — "Time to Migrate" (article)

But iOS people should check out Ivory, Androiders should look at Tusky, and everyone should try Phanpy. I live in Phanpy on both my Mac and my Pixel — it’s a Web thing but installable as a PWA on both Android and iOS.

Nov 8 — "Mastodon 4.5" (article)

The first is support for quote posts. This had already become an unofficial feature in the client apps I was using (phanpy.social on the web and Ivory on iOS) but now it's officially part of Mastodon's core platform.

Nov 13 — "Comfort Zone, Episode 75: Klack to the Extreme" (podcast)

Nov 14 — "Kendzior Case-Study" (article)

I use Phanpy, which has a hilarious little animation with an animated rubber stamp that leaves a red-ink “Spam” or whatever on the post you’re reporting.

Nov 26 — Flock of Cats made a quick video about Phanpy (video).

Dec 10 — "Useful patterns for building HTML tools" (article)

Mastodon has generous CORS policies too, as used by applications like phanpy.social

And that's… pretty much all the coverage, I think.

It's always great to see folks enjoying the app I've built, and somehow my UI experiments kind of worked well for others besides myself.

Side quests

Being unemployed for so long, I do feel like I'm just casually cruising along this uncertain path with everyone else struggling to keep their jobs, trying to pave through high rents and increasing prices. Layoffs were still happening like it's a normal thing now.

Unbounded by dominating working hours, I manage to do quite a number of "side quests", which are pretty much the little things that I enjoy doing.

Like… taking photos of buildings.

The iconic People's Park Complex in Chinatown, before repainted red. Past sunrise. Shadows from tall skyscrapers of the CBD.

A random orange-and-white HDB block numbered 123. Construction noise barriers behind the bus stop at bottom right.

One of the top floors of Sim Lim Square, overlooking the roads through towering glass panels.

Marina Bay Sands and Esplanade Bridge, viewed from the seats of Queen Elizabeth Walk. Almost sunset.

Christmas decorations at Geneo.

Projection light show on UOB Plaza's skyscraper.

I've also visited The Hidden Green, a 6×12m artwork and data storytelling project about Singapore’s urban trees, at the Singapore Art Museum (Tanjong Pagar Distripark). I got to know this project from Kontinentalist folks who worked on them and informed me that they've referenced one of my side projects 😉

At the bottom right edge of the Singapore map, there's a section that says "Map legend".

There's a small print below "Map legend" section. Zoom in…

Here's the small "Data references" section. One of the references is my ExploreTrees.SG side project 🤩.

It's pretty cool to see a physical data visualisation work instead of digital ones, though I always wonder if the work will be preserved digitally when the wall gets repainted for other works, or when Singapore Art Museum moves back to its previous location in Bras Basah.

Anyway, I also got to explore random food places in Singapore, mostly ticking off to-go/to-try places in my list bookmarked on Google Maps. And also, on a quest to try new places before… they potentially close down 🥲

Yes, it's in the news:

The 2025 F&B roller coaster – so far, so dizzying
Commentary: As more restaurants shut, is it time to rethink Singapore’s F&B rules?
Of F&B closures in 2025, 82% of those registered for up to 5 years had never made a profit: MTI
Majority of F&B outlets here that closed in 2025 did not last over five years: MTI

It's pretty obvious when I check my bookmarks, a few of them unexpectedly show "Permanently closed" after a year or even within less than a year 😥

Despite having a lot of bookmarks, it's technically impossible for any one person to go to all places in Singapore. It's because a few months ago, Singapore citizens received cash vouchers of up to S$800 each to mark the country's 60th birthday. It's called the SG60 Vouchers which works the same way as CDC Vouchers. Only specific places accept these vouchers, so I built a much better alternative UI than the official one. There are over 24,000 places that accept these vouchers, while not all of them are hawker stalls or restaurants, they are still way too many. The list of places is also updated almost daily, so I built a tracker which shows a changelog for places added, removed or edited 🙈.

If let's say there are 20,000 F&B outlets, and a person visits two every day, it would take more than 27 years to visit them all! Take note that SG60 Vouchers will expire on 31 December 2026 🤣.

In conclusion, supporting local businesses ultimately depends on the collective effort of everyone in the country 😇.

All I can do is just best-effort support, despite still unemployed, and trying my best to treat it as a mini-adventure.

In no particular order, and not an exhaustive list…

Smashed burgers, which I randomly ordered as takeaway after I saw the place while walking around Kampong Glam. Not sponsored, by the way.

Chive Pork Dumpling Noodle from A9 Noodle Dumpling at Fortune Center.

Maggi goreng putih. Yes, "Putih" is the keyword.

Shio pan (salt bread) was trending for a while, so I tried a few from Shio and Sato. As expected, the bread was… salty 😆, though it has that extra crispy texture which I find interesting 🤔

Around August, I stumbled upon a site called Acuppa, a directory listing of home-based businesses in Singapore. They were quite trending for some time, deemed viable alternatives to traditional F&Bs, while also having their own fair share of criticism.

Being curious, I tried a few of them.

Straw-Beary Pawcha Latte from KōBear Matcha.

Bandung Matcha from Bendemeer Coffee.

Blushing Matcha Hug from amoRe brew.

Strawberry Bandung Cold Foam Matcha from Waterloo Coffee, originally a home-based business and eventually opened a physical shop.

At this point, it's pretty obvious that matcha is quite trending to a point where many other drink stalls also start to offer matcha. Even 7-eleven stores sell matcha-flavoured oat milk cartons by Oatside 😅.

This trend feels weird because many years ago, I used to be a little obsessed with matcha.

Looking back

This might sound weird, but my first quarter of the year was carried by Solo Leveling Season 2. The intense adrenaline rush with diabolical cliffhangers truly kept me tensed with anticipation every week, to such a high boiling point that everyone starts to hate those feet 🤣

Next few quarters, not much from anime unfortunately, tho' maybe a little from Dr. Stone: Science Future Part 2 and eventual ending of Boku no Hero Academia: Final Season.

Bon Appétit, Your Majesty (k-drama) surprisingly brought a small spark of joy that awakened my appetite 😋

Apart from all of these, things generally stayed the same.

Rather I'm glad that things stayed the same instead of getting worse.

I mean, we still can't ignore all the crazy things that are happening around us, though it's been sort of consistently like that since… the pandemic?

Nevertheless, I'm grateful that some folks have reached out to me. Some have supported my work via thank-you's and donations.

All the little things matter.

2024 in review

2025-01-12T00:00:00Z

This is pretty late, but really, no hurry. This would probably feel like a repeat of my 2023 review.

January

😔 Got disappointed by recent events.
📢 Made a statement that it’s impossible for an app to make everyone happy.

February

😮 Gathered quite a lot of attention from an experimental UI that I did for catching up on posts on Mastodon.
🤩 My web app got mentioned on The Verge Installer.
🧑‍✈️ Experienced using Copilot on error logs in Edge browser’s DevTools console.
🏷️ Had fun CSS-ing a rubber stamp effect.
🤩 My web app also got mentioned by @gruber
🚌 BusRouter.SG got "featured" on Vulcan Post.

March

👨‍🎨 Did a mockup of how a “social address” look like.
🗺️ Discovered a cool change (small green arrows) on Google Maps.
📰 Phanpy got featured on the Fediverse Report.

April

🚏 Discovered a new bus stop.
📢 Phanpy got mentioned on an article by Anuj Ahooja.
📰 Also got featured on Hacker News front page.
☕ Attended 59th KopiJS meetup.

May

🌅 My side project, Phanpy, featured on Stefan’s article about the impact of clients on the use of alt text.
🕵️ Discovered some interesting trends with Alt text badge UI’s.
📣 Phanpy got mentioned by creator of Metafilter.

June

☕ Attended Kopi.JS #60
🩸 Glad to know that my project reduced someone’s frequency of blood pressure rise 😂
📰 My project got mentioned on The Verge Installer again.
📰 My project also mentioned on Elena Rossini’s article.
🎨 Simon mentioned my project and even dug back my old artwork from 21 years ago 🫣
🧵 Played with Threads API and built a bot account.
👴 Got older.
💸 Shared a little about my Chrome extension 13 years ago.
🌦️ Showed off my phone Lock Screen when it rains.

July

🥞 Ranted about the lack of SQLite in the browser.
☑️ Learnt about border-start-start-radius.

August

💬 Huge i18n change on Phanpy, complete with pseudo-localization and RTL support.
🤔 Wondered about "Invalid Date"
👨‍🎨 Rant about designers naming things.
😮 Surprised that phones caught up to 16GB RAM.
🔐 Learnt about PKCE in OAuth.

September

✨ Phanpy finally reached 1K stars after almost 2 years.

October

🤔 Had some thoughts on Markdown parser.
🎙️ Phanpy got mentioned on the FLOSS Weekly podcast.
🤔 Had some thoughts about Arc browser.
👴 Reminiscing on my Boosts Carousel invention.
☕ Attended Kopi.JS #61

November

🤔 Wondered about the dynamics of how job interviews are conducted.
🚛 Migrated my CheckWeatherSG bot.
🎉 11th anniversary of Kopi.JS.

December

🎁 Got my #Wrapstodon.
🎙️ Phanpy got reviewed in a podcast again.
🚀 Started working on an experimental web client for Bluesky.

Right after June, I quietly stopped posting my newsletter. The last issue was the 34th, with the subject "2 years of (f)unemployment". I was kind of surprised that it's been two years, and my fun little newsletter ran for almost 3 years, since 2021.

I think a combination of events sort of made me stop. This newsletter thing starts to become like a chore. There's not enough dopamine release that social media posts give via likes, reposts or replies. Newsletters only show clicks and views, which may not be accurate. I've seen how other (tech and non-tech) newsletters thrive by increasing subscriptions or getting sponsorships, so maybe that's how they could sustain that long.

There are also some issues with Substack around that timing and there's no easy (and free, depending on number of subscribers) way to migrate out of it.

Honestly, the only parts I miss from writing my newsletter are the "Interesting discoveries" and "Neat bookmarks" sections. I mentioned this before:

This also reminds me of the times when I always share cool stuff to whoever sitting beside me at work, in the office, which is impossible now due to work-from-home setting.

If I'm going to revive my newsletter, I'll probably just focus on these but again, I'm not sure if anyone would want that. When I stopped posting, I didn't really get any feedback or questions from my subscribers, which is probably just the nature of how e-mails work? If you don't get the e-mails one day, it's hard to notice them or probably they accidentally end up in the spam folder. There's already so many e-mails that you need to sift through every day, so missing one doesn't matter much anyway.

Thinking about it, above points might apply to blog posts too. Though I guess blog posts "live" on the web so it has a permanent and timeless place, while e-mails drop in your inbox where it's ephemeral. Substack does give a "web presence" to the e-mails but it's kinda "closed" and too Substack-specific. When I moved from Revue to Substack in 2022 (Revue was shutting down), a lot of the older issues are now 404-ed and there's no way to redirect them.

So, if I want this to be more long-lived, might as well convert my "newsletter" into a blog? There probably won't be any easy and free newsletter platforms in near future because sending e-mails are not free. Converting every e-mail subscriber to RSS/Atom feed subscriber seems to make more sense.

One approach that I've been keeping my eyes on is Simon's "Link blog".

I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I’ve found.

That’s the purpose of my link blog: it’s an ongoing log of things I’ve found—effectively a combination of public bookmarks and my own thoughts and commentary on why those things are interesting.

Imagine a list of links, with commentary – duh, that's what I did in my newsletter.

I'm not sure how I would start this yet, considering the tech used in my blog, the demands from anyone who want to read my link blog, and the amount of effort to make this work and not succumb to it feeling like "chore" again.

Keeping this in mind for now.

Very extended unemployment

Time passes by really fast.

I'm passively, not actively, looking for jobs but the overall job market vibe is not the same as pre-pandemic days. The same job posts from the same companies appearing over and over again for the past 2 years. Companies seem to have lost interest in hiring front-end developers, but more into generic "software engineers". There's no new exciting startups that catch my eyes. Some companies are on hiring freeze. My LinkedIn and Twitter DMs are filled with messages from people telling me to upvote their Product Hunt submissions. Layoffs are still very happening unfortunately.

Things look pretty bleak. I keep telling myself that if I graduated from university around this timing, it would be even worse. Which makes me wonder, how are the folks from coding bootcamps doing now?

It feels like a privilege that I even have the capacity to worry about others while being jobless for more than 2 years.

I've been joking to people that I'm "retired", but honestly in the current economic state, that's impossible.

Two years of not working does weird things to the brain. Side projects keep me sane. Watching anime series keep me sane. Walking, with light exercises, keeps me sane. Exploring new places like a tourist, keeps me sane. Taking random scenic photos keeps me sane. Randomly meeting up with people keeps me sane. Taking a long bus ride under the rain keeps me sane.

But there's a limit. Time slows down. Things start to get boring from time to time. My brain starts to hallucinate and I keep asking myself, why do I go to work in the first place? What did I want to do? "Change the world" as what startups used to say? What's my origin story (My Hero Academia reference)? Am I just working because everyone else is working? Do I want go back to being a code monkey or try more executive roles? Are my skillsets still relevant? Should I still do glue work and get overlooked?

I'm starting to understand why some older folks don't want to retire. Jobs took most of the time in our lives, morning till night, 5 days a week, they keep the brain occupied with things that seem important, they provide financial income to improve our lifestyles, and the whole process repeats for many, many, many years.

But…

Where's the "fire"?

I realised that I say this in every job interview: "I just want to build cool things that help people." It's the very thing that keeps me "alive" but years of work, intertwined with the pandemic and various events, has manage to put it off.

One day, a soundtrack (Yuujin a-Kun Wo Watashi No Bansousha Ni Ninmei Shimasu) suddenly started playing in my head. It's one of my favourites, from an anime that I watched few years ago, called "Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso" (Your Lie in April).

Fourteen-year-old piano prodigy Kōsei Arima becomes famous after winning several music competitions. When his mother Saki dies, Kōsei has a mental breakdown while performing at a piano recital; this results in him becoming unable to hear the sound of his piano, even though his hearing is otherwise unaffected.

Two years later, Kōsei has not touched the piano and views the world in monochrome.

Obviously, I'm not a prodigy and my "story" is not that dramatic. But "unable to hear the sound of his piano" and "views the world in monochrome" part sounds very similar.

My work is also not like music that could transcend words and connect people in ways that words alone can't.

Though, I really wished that it could.

Looking back

I'm not a professional photographer, but I really like taking these random photos, despite not travelling anywhere outside of Singapore.

Taking long walks and capturing these moments give me time to pause and think.

Everything around me has changed so much, and I'm constantly yearning for pre-pandemic days. I realised that I've inevitably downgraded from a mice to one of those "littlepeople" in Who Moved My Cheese?, a book I read many years ago.

Again, I don't know what's going to happen.

Hopefully there's still a spark somewhere out there.

2023 in review

2023-12-31T00:00:00Z

This is probably going to be short as this year is perhaps the most unproductive year I've ever had.

As usual, I start this off with a compilation of monthly "highlights" that I've already listed in my monthly newsletter.

January

⌨️ Got my first wireless mechanical keyboard.
👨‍🎨 Made a diagram with Excalidraw.
📹 Made a nice video.
🎮 Played around with some pretty cool UI (1) (2).

February

💉 4th jab.
🫴 My Tumblr account got restored.
💸 Started paying for make.com because it rained so much.
🙉 One of my apps got reviewed in a podcast.

March

🎨 Did a simple 3D thing.
✨ Made some shiny progress.
📥 Dropped my token.
💿 Upgraded to Ventura 13.3 and iOS 16.4.

April

🙈 Found a way to redact text with pure CSS.
📊 Did some pretty cool multi-column UI designs.
✋ One of my Twitter app got suspended.
🐛 Found a really weird bug with <datalist>
📖 Visited a new regional library.

May

😩 My old Yahoo! Mail account entered inactive state for 1+ year. All contents were deleted. Really miss my chain mails 🙈
🗺️ Made a cool demo for Google Maps’ Photorealistic 3D tiles and got featured on Maps Mania.

June

📲 Trying out iOS 17 beta, as always (every year).
🦊 Worried about Firefox.
🤩 Learned a life hack on how to eat yoghurt without a spoon.
👴 Got older.

July

🥳 My web app finally got listed.
👖 Somehow got really impressed by a K-pop group called NewJeans.

August

🌳 Did a little 3D trees tinkering.
☕ Attended the 55th KopiJS hangout.

September

🤔 Learned something about less and jQuery thanks to GitHub’s new newsfeed
😢 My iCloud backup has been failing since updating to iOS 17 stable (from beta)
🚀 Made some interesting changes on Phanpy (my web app project).

October

🫣 Tried to use iOS 17’s new “Screen Distance” feature. Gave up after a week, too annoying.
😩 Got annoyed by YouTube’s anti-adblocker attempts.

November

📜 Did some cool CSS scroll-driven animations.
🥂 Fediversary
📦 Tried the Wayback Machine tweets archive tool.
🥳 10th anniversary of KopiJS.

December

👀 Looked for alternatives to GitHub Copilot.
🎁 Did my #GitHubUnwrapped.
🎉 It’s been one year of building Phanpy.
😎 First time trying out GPT-4 with Vision.

Extended unemployment

I was expecting at most 1-year of unemployment before I get bored and wanting to start work again.

But somehow I don't feel like working yet. Feels like a gut feeling thing or I'm still feeling fatigued. There's a sense of guilt building up but I decided to just do what I want and not get pressured or stressed by it.

Roughly one year after my unemployment, tech layoffs were still happening, so it doesn't feel like things are going to be smooth-sailing yet. It's quite and not quite post-pandemic at the same time, as most folks are still working from home on some days of the week as part of the "new normal" working arrangements. Not a lot of tech meetups too, compared to pre-pandemic days.

Projects

I should say, just one project, not projects.

I've spent the whole year working on Phanpy, a 3rd-party web client for Mastodon-compatible social networks. It's been surprisingly enjoyable and challenging, as I use all my front-end chops, design skills, usability knowledge and years of experience on creating my ideal social media client.

I've added so many cool features since the first inception last December.

Thread count indicator – automatic marking of "1/X" on threaded posts so that authors don't have to type it themselves.
Boosts Carousel – group all reposted posts from the timeline into separate horizontal-scrolling carousels to prevent them from hogging the timeline.
Multi-column mode – Tweetdeck-like UI for multiple configurable columns of timelines.
Post translation – full-fledged translation UI with auto-detection of source text, configurable source language and even includes pronunciation text.
(Non-native) Quote posts – links to other Mastodon/Fediverse posts will be expanded to look like quote posts.
Web Push notifications – push notifications on the web, a feature that's more widely available now since the release of iOS 16.4.
Profile posting stats – quick visualisation of an account's posting habits showing percentage of original posts, reposts and replies within the last specific number of days.
"ALT" badge & inline captions – Instead of just showing ALT badges, they're also conditionally inlined like image captions.
Experimental image description generator – using GPT-4 with Vision to generate description for images when posting images.
And… a whole bunch of small UI tweaks and bug fixes.

I'm quite proud of this. It's pretty hard to explain or describe in words, thus I feel that folks should really try the web app to "get it".

I find myself surprised that I'm able to focus on one project as I usually get distracted easily to start another new project or shift focus to one of my existing projects.

It feels good to focus on building a product, not during your "free time" or after-work hours, and really just laser-focus on delivering the best user experience without tight deadlines, the need to chase numbers, or reach certain KPI's.

Thanks to Phanpy, my sponsorship grew quite significantly on Buy Me a Coffee and GitHub Sponsors. I really appreciate all the donations! 🙇‍♂️.

Looking back

Despite having more than a year to think about my next steps, I didn't really put much thought in the end. After 1.5 years of unemployment, I started to get used to this, which is something that I never thought that I could. Time passed by so fast while everyone else continue working, meeting friends, and travelling.

I'm grateful that I have the luxury to be jobless for this long. I'm still able to spend on things that I want. I could go to places like art museums during weekdays while everyone else is working.

There's still a lot of things in my mind. A lot of to-dos and future planning.

But, I'm just too lazy to think.

And I want to convince myself that it's fine to be lazy.

2022 in review

2022-12-31T00:00:00Z

Wow, another year has passed. And now another review.

It's time for the list, that I usually compile monthly for my newsletter.

January

Scraped a bunch of taxi stands 🚕
Ordered & printed misbrands stickers 👾
Experimented with a 3D globe 🌏
Made a repo that scrapes what's happening in SG 🇸🇬
Got another free mask from vending machine 😷
Revived one of my (very) old projects 🏔️
Light to night festival 🌝
Did a CSS Speedrun™️ 🏃‍♂️
Launched my own variant of Wordle! 🚀

February

Made a 3D model of Wordle results with Spline 📦
Blogged: Chengyu Wordle Is Not a Love Story 📝
Had a night walk 🚶
2️⃣2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣
Built a Cloudflare worker 👷‍♀️

March

Reported a bug to MDN and it got fixed. 🌓
Another night walk 🚶
Tested iOS 15.4's Face ID unlock with a mask 😷
Showed a sneak peek of my new map web app designed for walking. 🗺️
Got interviewed. 🗣️
My blog post got linked from Slate.

April

🚶 Night walk.
🚶 Afternoon walk.
🔗 Got another link-in-bio page.
✌️ Made 2 big changes to checkweather.sg.
💬 Started a new Telegram chat group.
©️ Found a cool font.
🤢 Gastric week.
🪜 Ranted about ladders.
🚶 Night walk again.
👾 Bought MRT/LRT stickers from a Redditor!
🍎 Ranted about Apple Store on different maps.
💰 Sponsored devs on GitHub Sponsors.
💸 Subscribed to MDN Plus 5.

May

🆒 Made pretty cool updates to my HackerWeb iOS app.
🔎 Discovered that SEO for Chengyu Wordle became really weird
☕ Received 5 coffees.
🃏 Made a joke.
🔊 Got mentioned in /r/programmerhumor
🌏 Finally using globe projection on my cheeaun.earth
💅 Spruced up my projects page
➕ Tough week(s)
🍛 First time saw Uncle Roger mentioned on HN
🆓 Got a free .dev domain and made a Cloudflare worker

June

📲 Trying out iOS 16 beta.
🤔 Made a Spiral Emoji Wallpaper Generator ← this went viral!
🚀 Released Hackerweb for iOS v2.1.0.
🏨 Had 1-week staycation.

July

🗣 Mentioned some realities of front-end.
💻 Ordered Macbook Air M2. Got it.
👾 Restocked stickers.
📲 Tested some cool wallpapers on iOS 16 beta.
👯 Attended an in-person conference.
🥘 Co-organized Geek Brunch SG.

August

📹 Made a viral TikTok.
🗺️ Made a new map viz for Singapore Night Festival.
👾 Got new stickers!

September

👀 Saw Uncle Raymond, a TikTok sensation.
💸 Bought a lot of stickers.
🤑 Sold my Macbook Air (M1) because I got the new M2 now.
💰 Almost got scammed.
🎧 Got my new Airpods Pro 2nd generation.
🥺 Finally 3 meetups in one day (like pre-covid times).

October

📦 Made a few 3D logos… 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
📱 Started using a new pretty nice Lock Screen wallpaper.
🎟️ Attended ViteConf online.
🦦 Designed another 3D mascot.
🎨 Designed yet another 3D mascot.
🆙 Upgraded to macOS Ventura and iOS 16.1.
🌞 Got a free TEL3 sunshade pouch.
🤩 Tested the new iOS16 Live Activities from CityMapper.
⛰️ Remade 3D models from Monument Valley level 1.
🎟️ Attended Geekcamp.
🤚 Designed a 3D hand.

November

📺 Got a new YouTube handle.
😀 Designed a 3D emoji.
🍰 Designed UIlicious's logo in 3D.
⛳ Made a 3D golf game.
🐘 Start using Mastodon again.
✨ Played with Spline's Conditional Logic.
🚄 Visited all 11 new stations in Thomson-East Coast line.
🚶 Had a walk.
🚂 Updated RailRouter.SG.
🚏 Made some UI updates for bus stop 66271.
🗺️ Played a little with Mapbox Tiling Service.
🏗️ Started building something.

December

💯 Hit 100-day streak on Product Hunt.
🚀 Soft-launched an alpha version of my Mastodon web client.
🌧️ Set up a Mastodon bot account for checkweather.sg.
🎁 GitHub Unwrapped.
🦾 Got access to Notion AI.

Work and unemployment

After working for almost 3 years with work-from-home and sometimes-work-from-office arrangement, it gets pretty tiring. The first year (2020) was cool as everyone starts to learn how to juggle things around. The second year became pretty distressing for me, especially when I got hospitalised (not due to that disease).

This year is supposedly better in many ways as it's almost "post-pandemic" with lesser restrictions, but the tiredness start to kick in for me. A lot of things happen, a lot of problems to be solved, a lot of uncertainties. Despite seeing other folks moving on with new plans ahead, I felt like I'm stuck. In this pandemic or post-pandemic sense, I feel like I'm still in 2020. In the career side of things, I feel like I've been stuck for more than 10 years.

On April, I tweeted:

Been working for 16 years (first web dev job, excluding my part-time freelance work while schooling) Seems like my career ladder has been flat for the past 10 years. Maybe my approach has been wrong all the while.

There's a few good replies, though sadly some were like "me too" answers 😢.

On July, I posted this on Hacker News, answering the question for "Ask HN: Where are all the senior front end engineers?":

I'm a senior FE engineer in Singapore, been doing FE since 2000, here's what I think:

Job descriptions and interviews now are skewed towards "full-stack" or backend. Most interviews are lacking or outdated due to the fast and volatile nature of FE.

Literally no career progression if you're specialised in FE. Most BE or "full-stack" devs will be given a chance to become principal engineers, tech leads, engineering managers, CTOs, etc. I've seen folks with "FE Team Lead" titles but never goes beyond that.

FE is a subconsciously looked-down field. Neither a designer nor an engineer. Product/design team won't involve you in meetings (but will treat you like a code monkey). BE/"full-stack"/API engineers will think your job is easy and keep throwing business logic stuff to FE.

This got reposted on LinkedIn and gained quite a few reactions.

Overall, I'm not really looking for an answer. These are just rants. It may not apply to all other companies and of course, there are many other factors besides these areas. I can complain all day long but life goes on and I'll still need to do what I need to do. These feelings probably have escalated due to anxiety and recent incidents all over the world.

I needed a break.

So I quit my job and became unemployed since July. It took quite a long while for this feeling of unemployment to kick in, after all these years of working from home. When I have a job, I work from home. Now that I don't have a job, I'm still… at home 😂. I guess it became very obvious that my work and personal life are not properly separated.

I've talked with a few people and there are two kinds:

People who also felt like quitting and asking me how I manage to quit without any plans, regarding my career and my budget to sustain 😅.
People who told me they've done it before, and it was liberating for them 😇.

This isn't the first time I have a career break. My first time was in 2015. I personally describe it as "school holidays for working adults". At that time, I travelled to Tokyo and San Francisco. This time, I chose not to travel anywhere. I get asked why a lot of times and I mention that travelling is actually more tiring. I mean, it's tiring in a good and enjoyable way, but I don't need that now.

Being unemployed is a double-edge sword. It feels great not to think about work, but at the same time, it feels bad because everything needs money and it gets worse with the recent wake of mass tech layoffs. I personally know how this feels, not very affected by them, and have learned to prioritise my own mental health. I don't have the capacity to save others if I don't save myself first.

It's been 6 months of unemployment. I don't have plans yet but I'll just do what I can do.

Projects

This year started great for my side projects.

On January, Wordle became popular, so I made my own variant of Wordle called Chengyu Wordle and it got mentioned by the Prime Minister 😱!

I was thinking of printing this screenshot and hang it on the wall or something 😂.

On June, I made a Spiral Emoji Wallpaper Generator. It got quote-tweeted by @hrdbacot, a Twitter user account with 800K+ followers 😱.

This was super fun and hilarious, as I could see how others were playing around with the wallpaper generator.

On December, I soft-launched a new Mastodon web client called Phanpy. It was also mentioned by Tobias Bernard which gave it a lot more attention. 😱

I spent quite a good chunk of time on this, typically enjoying the process as it reminded me of the time when I was building my own Twitter client 13 years ago.

As always, I learn a lot whenever I work on new side projects. Many more to come.

3D Designs

Last year, I made quite a bunch of 3D-based maps. I'm especially proud of my Apple-Maps-like 3D trees work 🤩.

This year, I went all in 🏋️‍♂️, using a cool 3D design tool called Spline.

Geekcamp logo

I designed the Geekcamp logo back in 2017 and has been wondering if it would look cool in 3D. So, here goes…

At this point, I thought to myself, why not a 3D Pac-Man? 🙈

TraceTogether otter

I wanted to draw a 3D model of a cute animal and somehow TraceTogether's oTTer mascot came into mind 🦦. It's a conversion of 2D art to 3D art.

It's also animated! 🤩

This sort of "went viral" on Reddit /r/singapore (2K+ upvotes), my TikTok video (34K+ plays) and my LinkedIn post (600+ reactions, 43K+ impressions) 😱.

Bun's mascot

After designing the otter, I wanted to try another simple mascot to further spruce up my skills. Bun is a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime and this is the mascot:

Cute.

Monument Valley level 1

I wanted to try something isometrical, especially ever since my attempt at designing the artwork for RedDotRubyConf in 2016. Monument Valley (game) is definitely something I really, really, really want to try replicating 🤤.

This is a tad more challenging but I manage to re-draw the whole Level 1 of Monument Valley game 🤩.

Okay, these probably look like screenshots from the game, right? Wrong. The cross handle is clickable to rotate the path!

Rotatable too.

I've uploaded a full 5-min time-lapse video of remaking the 3D models from Monument Valley on YouTube, to prove that I actually made them from scratch. 📹

My hand

Okay, this is not a logo or a mascot. Just my hand because I wanted to draw something more complicated. I didn't quite finish this one because there's just too many details 😩. I got pretty close though. 🤚

Look ma, one hand!

Microsoft Windows' 3D Fluent Emoji

I reverse-engineered (reverse-designed?) Microsoft's open-source 3D Fluent Emoji. They designed it in 3D but didn't really share the actual 3D files, possibly made in Maxon's Cinema 4D.

I took up the challenge to recreate them in 3D, by referencing the 2D artwork, starting with the most basic "😀" emoji.

The shadows look like freckles there. Subtle yet refined 🧐.

I made a 11-minute time-lapse tutorial video on YouTube.

UI-licious logo

Back to another logo and this time it's UI-licious, a local startup working on a low-code tool for automating UI testing for your websites across browsers (This is not sponsored 😆).

Their logo looks easy for me to test other things out, so why not?

Shiny! 💅✨

Again, I made a 6-minute time-lapse video.

Golf game

On September, Spline added physics and I really got to try it out! I made an interactive golf game with a weird slope to prevent the golf ball from falling off the edge.

I accidentally learned how to name parts of a golf club like shaft, clubhead and grip. Even the thing that holds the the golf ball is called a tee.

Yes, I name my layers properly 😉.

Conditional Logic

On October, Spline introduced Conditional Logic, which feels like programming but for 3D objects! 🤩 I played around with it and made some sort of disk trying to make sure the ball doesn't fall over.

I made a 6-min time-lapse video, basically just trying to keep the ball from falling over 😆.

I probably should've written another blog post dedicated to my 3D designs, but I had so much fun that I don't even feel like writing anything. 🤣

Looking back

Instead of just this year, I start to look back further. I've been thinking about my whole career, my personal life, relationships, friendships and my passions.

I'll be hitting the big four-oh in 3 years (well, actually 2).

It feels kind of scary.

As others have moved on, getting promoted, trying out new roles, gained more responsibilities, moved out from their parents' house, got married, had kids, migrated to other countries, bought a new house, joined another company or found a new one, I feel… stuck.

It's hard to resist the urge to compare with other people's lives, even though I've always been doing things at my own pace.

It was quite timely when I saw this post on Hacker News: "Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?". Some responses mentioned that we're not alone as everyone else are also having same thoughts in varying difficult situations. Some people had worse, managed to turn things around and having a better life now in their 50s.

This career break is like pressing the pause button for me to think about what to do now and what I want to do in the future. Honestly speaking, nothing comes into mind, as I'm slowly re-adapting and maybe undoing all the things that has changed in my life thanks to the pandemic. They are not really big changes, but small ones add up.

I do know that no matter what happens, I need to do something. Nothing will change if I don't take any actions. In fact, things around me are constantly changing while I'm doing nothing, and these things will ultimately force or influence me to do something.

Oh well, looking forward to more uncertainties ahead.

Chengyu Wordle Is Not a Love Story

2022-02-14T00:00:00Z

From The New York Times article “Wordle Is a Love Story”, it began as a sweet love story of Josh Wardle building a game for his partner. It became super popular and now has its own Wikipedia page.

I first saw it on my Twitter timeline when people keep posting their Wordle results. I was honestly annoyed because they were just bragging and the results didn’t really tell much. At that time, I didn’t play Wordle yet, so I pretty much ignored them. They kind of pollute the social media timelines, but at least they're better than ads. 🤷‍♂️

Due to peer pressure, I started playing it.

I also came across a few “forks” of Wordle:

Primel, by David Lawrence - guess a 5 digit prime number.
Katla, by Fatih Kalifa - Wordle, in Indonesian language.
Thwordle, by Manassarn Manoonchai - Wordle, in Thai language.
Katapat, by Eugene Low - Wordle, in Bahasa Malaysia.

I'm like, “Hey, that's pretty cool, but maybe I could try something else?”.

On 21 January 2022, I tweeted:

Wordle, but for Chinese idioms.

#idea

This was timely, because Chinese New Year was coming up.

I looked up some data from a few Google searches and realised that this is kind of doable.

Finding the dataset

For Wordle, one of the rules of the game is that each guess must be a valid 5-letter word. So Wordle needs a huge list of valid 5-letter words in its database.

For Chinese idioms, I would need the same thing and I found a huge list of idioms from pwxcoo/chinese-xinhua repository. They are the Chinese Xinhua Dictionary Database (中华新华字典数据库) with a total of 31,648 idioms, where roughly 29,502 of them are 4-letter idioms.

That’s a lot.

I don’t think anyone will be able to remember that many idioms. I probably can filter out some common or well-known ones but I don’t really know how to do that.

A little googling lead me to another dataset from thunlp/THUOCL repository. It’s THUOCL which stands for THU (Tsinghua University) Open Chinese Lexicon (清华大学开放中文词库).

It has roughly 8000+ idioms and contains word frequency statistics DF value (Document Frequency).

To be honest, I don’t know exactly how the frequency statistics are done. This is really not my domain expertise so I think I’ll just use whatever dataset available and focus on the game coding side of things instead 😂.

Building the game

Generally speaking, the idea is not new.

There’s already the very popular 拼音猜成语 (Pīnyīn cāi chéngyǔ) made by Li Zhong, which uses pinyin input to guess Chinese idioms. It’s using the same QWERTY keyboard as Wordle, but with more than five letter tiles. It validates the words individually, generally the pinyin spelling per Chinese character, so you can’t just randomly type invalid pinyin and throw in all the vowels 😂.

I had a different idea.

Instead of constructing the pinyin to form an idiom, I feel that it would be better if there’s more focus on the Chinese characters themselves instead of alphabets.

JinGen joked that the hypothetical keyboard would be massive 🤣:

Of course, Chinese keyboards don’t really look like that. On iOS, there are two kinds; pinyin keyboard and handwriting recognition.

I don’t know, I find them too much work, just to play a game.

In Wordle, a player tap 5 keys to get a 5-letter word. For Chinese characters, a player need to tap quite a lot of keys just to form one character. For example, the word “pinyin” consists of 6 alphabetical letters to form 2 Chinese characters (拼音).

So I want one tap = one character. But JinGen’s mockup above is ridiculous.

I thought about this. 🤔

Instead of showing all characters like JinGen’s mockup, why not a subset of them? Maybe roughly 20 characters? (QWERTY keyboard has 26)

Instead of the full keyboard, why not emulate the suggestions a.k.a. Predictive Text at the top of the keyboard?

So for every idiom, I could generate a list of 20 characters. It’ll be minimum 20 characters and they could form a minimum of 6 idioms, because there are 6 chances. And it’s not just minimum 6 possible idioms, it’s minimum 6 possible “high-frequency” idioms, which could later form a few more “low-frequency” idioms.

At this point, I have no idea if this would work at all.

I coded it anyway 🤷‍♂️.

The first prototype looks like this:

Not bad.

I use the HTML ruby annotation element to display the pinyin above the Chinese characters. The specifications may have changed slightly but Hui Jing has explained them in depth.

Later on, I found that I’m not the first person who came up with this idea. There’s another Android-based game that shows a list of characters as the keyboard:

It has 24 keys and even has an image illustration as hints 🤯.

That’s quite impressive if the game really has illustrations for every idiom. I mean, imagine hiring an artist drawing hints for all thousands of idioms 🤯.

Anyway, I wasn’t deterred from this and decided to keep going with my implementation.

Adapting to the viewports

Wordle is actually responsive for different viewport dimensions.

The letter tiles will shrink in smaller viewports.
The letter tiles will grow in larger viewports, but there’s a maximum width and height, so that the letters won’t be too big.
The keyboard will not shrink in smaller viewports because it’s where people type. No one likes small keypads.
The keyboard will grow in larger viewports but there’s a maximum width and height too.
In larger viewports, the keyboard will always stick to the bottom and there’ll be blank spaces around the letters board.

Wordle uses a combination of CSS Flexbox and JavaScript code for this magic.

I manage to re-implement this, with pure CSS.

Few tricks were used such as the aspect-ratio CSS property combined with max-height on the tile rows.

Unlike Wordle, the keyboard doesn’t need to be exactly 3 rows or match how a software keyboard looks like on mobile operating systems. In even smaller viewports, with smaller heights, the keyboard becomes a one-liner and horizontally scrollable!

Crazily enough, it even works on Apple Watch! 🤯

Keyboard shortcuts

Despite showing a software keyboard, Wordle also works with the hardware keyboard, which is usually meant for desktop players.

I think there are some Chinese (hardware) keyboards out there but I’ve never used them. I always use my Macbook’s QWERTY keyboard.

I added some basic keyboard shortcuts.

Pressing a letter will match the first letter of the pinyin. For example, pressing ‘Q’ will choose ‘qián’.

If the letter has many matches, pressing right or left arrow will cycle through them. For example, for ‘J’, the arrow keys will cycle through ‘jiàn’ ‘jìn’ and ‘jīng’.

Pretty neat.

Beta testing

Since I have no idea if this would work at all, I asked around for people to help beta test the game.

Surprisingly feedback has been quite interesting. Somehow the game becomes either too easy or too difficult for the players. There’s hardly a middle ground here 😅. So it’s either the players knows a large vocabulary of idioms or just one or two of them 😂.

Along the testing period, there were some small issues.

Pinyin

Pinyin for some characters were wrong. My initial attempt was quite hacky, so I solved it by using the whole pinyin library, currently maintained by hotoo (闲耘™).

I was honestly surprised that pinyin mapping doesn’t work one-to-one, but one-to-many. 🤔

However, more than a week later, someone reported a bug to me:

I was quite surprised to see this and turns out, this is heteronym.

Some Chinese characters are spelled and written the same way, but pronounced differently based on certain context.

I looked again at the documentation for pinyin package and realised that it serves a different dictionary for the web version compared to its Node version. The web version is simpler and smaller in file size. The author encourages that this pinyin conversion should be done in the back-end instead of front-end 🤔.

Hmm, for this game, I don’t plan to do this on the server-side though.

So I tried a few ways to somehow force the library to use the Node version but to no avail. I ended up using a different library called pinyin-pro, currently maintained by Zhou Li Xiang. It seems to have the whole dictionary and able to handle heteronyms too!

After some testing and a bug fix, I manage to implement a pretty good implementation of a multiple-pinyin interface.

The pinyin shown on the keyboard will be based on the whole idiom context instead of per-character.

Technically, pinyin('缪') returns mù (from pinyin-pro library) or liáo (from the previous pinyin library). But pinyin('未雨绸缪') should correctly return wèi yǔ chóu móu (notice that it’s móu now). So the pinyin on the keyboard should show móu.

But for some games, it’s possible that one character exhibits different pronunciations for different idioms. An example would be the character ‘恶‘ in the idioms 恶性循环 (è xìng xún huán) and 痛深恶绝 (tòng shēn wù jué). In this special case, the keyboard will show both pinyins.

Then what happens to the pinyin on the game tiles? Well, they’ll dynamically change based on the whole constructed idiom as-you-type! 🤯

Idiom definitions

I added an extra link that points to the definition or explanation of the hidden idiom. They will be shown in the results dialog when a player won or lost the game.

The first candidate was CC-CEDICT. It’s a project to create an online, downloadable public-domain Chinese-English dictionary.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have all the idiom entries, and mostly return not-found results 😢.

Then, one of the testers found Baidu Hanyu (百度汉语).

Seems better, but some idiom entries were missing too 😅.

Then, I found ZDIC from Li Zhong’s tweet, as he’s also adding idiom definitions on pinyincaichengyu.com.

In the end, I use both Baidu and ZDIC links for the sake of completeness.

I’ve even included the definitions into the game itself.

Chinese font

During the beta test period, the game uses the Ma Shan Zheng font from Google Fonts. It looks pretty nice.

One of the testers found a bug:

The character “丼” is rendered as “弗”?!?

This is really weird. It’s probably due to the font not supporting all glyphs, so I researched a little and found that it’s really difficult to find a good custom (and free) Chinese font. Even when I found one, the web font file sizes are seriously huge! 😅

There are some very detailed articles on this:

Chinese Standard Web Fonts: A Guide to CSS Font Family Declarations for Web Design in Simplified Chinese
The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Chinese Fonts
5 High Quality Chinese Webfont services for your next Chinese web project

As a quick fix, I removed the font. Will probably revisit this later.

Start date for daily idioms

On the original Wordle, a new word is available every day. It’s not timezone-specific and actually relies on the user’s device timezone (local timezone).

This is an interesting thought. Timezone specificity is not important here for this game, unlike an app or a web product. All players can start playing the next new word around the clock instead of everyone around the globe waiting for that specific hour in the day, which could be 4AM or something. It might seem “unfair” for some players that some could play a new word earlier than players in the other timezone, but it doesn’t really matter as long as players only post the results without spoilers. For the more technical folks, they could actually skip to next day or any days by changing their operating system’s clock 😆.

From the implementation side, it could be a list of words and every word is assigned to specific dates. The question is how are they assigned? Off the top of my head, I think that the first day of the year could be the first word, 2nd day is the 2nd word and so on, but that means it’s limited to 365 words (year 2022)? Should it overflow to next year, so 1st January 2023 will serve the 366th word?

During the time when I build Chengyu Wordle, it’s already a few days after 1st January 2022, so setting the first idiom to day 1 would mean no one will be able to play it 😅.

My curiosity lead to digging in the code in Wordle.

Aha! The variable Ha is a hard-coded start date! It’s 19 June 2021! (Months are zero-indexed in JavaScript)

function Na(e, a) {
  var s = new Date(e)
    , t = newDate(a).setHours(0, 0, 0, 0) - s.setHours(0, 0, 0, 0);
  return Math.round(t / 864e5)
}

There’s another function Na that accepts two date values, which are supposedly the start date and today’s date, and returns the index. So if today’s date is 19 June 2021, it returns 0 (first word). 20 June 2021 returns 1 (second word) and so on.

function Da(e) {
  var a, s = Ga(e);
  return a = s % La.length,
  La[a]
}

The next function Da is a surprising find for me. It will cycle back to 0 once the index reaches the last word of the list. For example, if the game has a list of 100 words, what happens on the 101st day? Well, this logic will serve back the first word!

I think this is a pretty neat solution. It solves the problem of what if you’ve missed the last few days of words and thought that you can’t play them anymore. Once the list of words is exhausted, you’ll go back to the beginning of the list again ♻️.

For Chengyu Wordle, it started without this daily game feature. To compensate, I added a button that allows players to play a random idiom. Few days after testing, I added this daily game feature and set day 1 to 27 January 2022.

Mathematically speaking, with 8000+ idioms in Chengyu Wordle, if a player plays one idiom per day, it’ll take more than 21 years to finish all the idioms. 🤯

Evaluation rules

Guessing words on Wordle will show the letters in coloured tiles.

Green = The letter is in the word and in the correct spot.
Yellow = The letter is in the word but in the wrong spot.
Gray = The letter is not in the word in any spot.

They might look simple at first, but oh boy, almost everyone fell into this trap.

It’s explained in this page written by Alex Selby: The best strategies for Wordle:

I think the colour scoring rules work like this, but would be happy to be corrected.

Let's refer to your guess as testword, and the secret word as hiddenword. Then I believe the scoring rules are these:

First determine all greens, and cross out these letters in testword and hiddenword.

Then from left to right in testword see which letters correspond to a letter in hiddenword. If you find one, then it's a yellow, but you need to cross it off in hiddenword.

Remaining positions are scored as black.

The second point means that you can't reuse letters in hiddenword, so for example the total number of green 'T's and yellow 'T's in testword can't exceed the number of 'T's in hiddenword.

So if hiddenword is HOTEL then the testword SILLY would score BBYBB: the second 'L' does not score because only one 'L' can, and the earlier one takes precendence.

But if hiddenword were DAILY then the same testword SILLY would score BYBGG. This time it's the first 'L' that doesn't score, because even though it is earlier than the 'L' in fourth position, greens take priority over yellows.

The trap lies in repeated letters in a word.

Instead of just a single loop to mark which letter is green or yellow, the logic needs to keep track of repeated letters, loop through again and either mark some letters yellow or not.

Initially my code handled the above cases and I was quite proud. Until someone reported another bug:

On the second row, both of the character “楚” (chǔ) should be in yellow because the hidden idiom is 清清楚楚 (qīng qīng chǔ chǔ)!

I was quite dumbfounded, got fed up and started writing tests.

My logic fails when there are repeated letters in both the testword and hiddenword. And now with this tests, this will finally be fixed once and for all!

Finishing touches

It’s almost done, and I added a little sprinkle of finishing touches to the game:

Metacrap: All the titles, descriptions, icons and social media preview images.
Idiom IDs: Besides allowing players to play a random idiom, each idiom is also assigned its own unique ID that’s shareable. So if someone shares the results, a link below the results will include the ID that goes to this exact idiom instead of the idiom of the day.
Hints: I added a “I’m stuck” button at the bottom of the keyboard, after seeing some folks struggled hard at the game. Every time it’s tapped, it’ll show a different hint. Technically, the hints should be good enough to be unstuck. 😉
Hard mode: While some players are having a hard time playing the game, some actually think that it’s too easy. So, I introduced “Hard mode”, which works a bit differently than Wordle’s. In Wordle’s “Hard mode”, any revealed hints must be used in subsequent guesses. In Chengyu Wordle, the number of keys increase from minimum 20 to 40, thus increasing the number of possible idiom guesses in a game.
Localisation: The game is available in both English and Simplified Chinese. The strings for Simplified Chinese were hastily translated via Google Translate, so help is pretty much needed. 🙏
Old browsers support: I use Vite to bundle the code and needed to use @vitejs/plugin-legacy to create production builds for legacy browsers. For some reason, there are a lot of folks using really old Android phones with old browsers, as the errors are tracked via Bugsnag.
Analytics: I took this chance to try a few privacy-friendly analytics like Panelbear, Pirsch and Plausible. In the end, I end up using Plausible for its better user interface and features.

The launch

I officially launched Chengyu Wordle on 27 January 2022, just one week after my first tweet and 4 days before Chinese New Year! 🚀

It’s open-sourced on GitHub, with complete documentation on the dataset, technical setup and localisation files.

I’ve also made sure to attribute to other similar attempts by other talented folks!

猜成语 (Cāi chéngyǔ) by @nurupo_dev
拼成语 | Chinese Wordle by Allan Chain
拼音猜成语 (Pīnyīn cāi chéngyǔ) by Li Zhong
汉兜 (Hàn dōu) by Anthony & Inès (Another popular one!)
Telegram @unofficial_wordle_bot by Oh Chin Yang

Few days later, I made a pull request for Chengyu Wordle to be added to Wordles of the World, the most comprehensive list of Wordle-like games and resources online.

Later on, I added dark mode and made this pretty cool 3D-looking mock with Morflax Things.

Chengyu Wordle got a quite few media coverage too! Some are very small mentions while some are quite prominent 😎.

30 Jan 2022: 6種英文和中文的 Wordle 猜字遊戲打發時間真好用
30 Jan 2022: Sixth Tone - Wordle-Like Games Slowly Gain Traction on Chinese Social Media
2 Feb 2022: Kotaku - A Sensational Wordle Clone Without Any Actual Words
4 Feb 2022: 8world Entertainment Lifestyle - 全世界都在Wordle！快试试数字版Nerdle
4 Feb 2022: Mothership - PM Lee says Wordle a fun way to keep the mind engaged, recommends Chinese & Malay versions
6 Feb 2022: 新加坡眼 这款小游戏风靡全球，让李显龙总理都“玩上瘾了”
10 Feb 2022: AsiaOne - Want more Wordle? Here are 13 spin-offs to try, including a Singlish version
11 Feb 2022: 红蚂蚁 连总理都推荐的爆红猜字游戏Wordle　为何在全球疯狂吸粉？

Honestly I haven't felt so excited in a long while!

The craziest ever mention has got to be this:

On 3 February 2022, The Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, made a post on Facebook, talked about how Singaporeans have joined in the fun of playing Wordle, linked to BBC’s article, and mentioned the original Wordle, the Chinese version (mine) and the Malay version! 🤯🤯🤯

When this happened, I was just finishing up my dinner and got quite a bunch of notifications from friends tagging me and congratulating me 😅.

Traffic shot up, from 7,000 visitors to 15,000 on the day itself and grew to 25,000 on the next day! 📈

Learnings

I have a lot of fun building this game.

From trying to reverse engineer the mechanics of Wordle, to listening to how Josh Wardle made a prototype back in 2013. Instead of rebuilding the exact same clone, somehow I tried to build a different variant of it, with its own set of challenges that I didn’t know much about. I spent a lot of time polishing every single detail while trying to preserve the whole unobtrusive nature of Wordle. Perhaps similar to the original author, I did not expect this to become huge at all, though mine is still smaller scale compared to the original Wordle.

By building a variant of Wordle, I felt like I’m part of a whole family of developers who have done the same thing and experienced the same thing as I do. The author of Subwaydle mentioned that he came across Chengyu Wordle and Nerdle which made him wanting to make his own.

I see a lot of people posting their Chengyu Wordle results on Twitter and Facebook, together with their Wordle results. On Facebook, I saw a woman posting about playing Chengyu Wordle and it took her 3 kids on dictionaries, 4 clues, 45 minutes and a translation to traditional Chinese to solve their first play. Even a teacher replied to me that the game is very popular among teachers, very well received and shared among their Facebook groups.

This is not the first time I create a web game. Chengyu Wordle is the third one after my first web game, Pentagoo and second game, Bubble Wrap. Both didn’t get popular but were very fun to build too. They gave me some good foundation on how to build games, though the funny thing is I’m actually not very good in playing them. 🤣

Yeah, I built Chengyu Wordle, but I can’t play it because I can't actually read or write Chinese 😅. I can speak Mandarin though, and the pinyin was actually to help me, which in turn help others too. 🤷‍♂️

But heck, who cares, building a game is fun!

All of this happens within just two weeks.

Wow, what a ride.