Ben Wendt's blog

Since late 2012, I’ve been a parent. My oldest is an absolutely avid coder. He loves the scratch programming language, and has made an incredibly bevy of spectacular games, originally by following griffpatch tutorials, and then moving on to his own stuff.

As a way of sharing time with him, I do some scratch of my own. It’s a fun way of spending time together and encouraging his interest. Of course, as a professional software developer I like to explore what I can accomplish in a given environment. So I thought I would implement the esoteric langage BrainFrig in scratch.

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Since 2007 I’ve been keeping up my own personal word of the day blog. I started it back in the heyday of google reader. In those days I was subscribed to several word of the day blogs and wanted to do one of my own. I’ve gone through phases of posting more and less. Some years I posted every day, and toward the late teens I had single digits of posts for several years running.

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Happy 2s Day.

I was chatting with my brother the other day, and he opined that I may live in Canada’s largest municipality that doesn’t have a municipal bus transit system. Of course I was interested to find out which is the biggest Canadian city without buses, so here we go.

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One of the paper handouts my child used to do at school was the “word ladder.” The exercise is a starting word and a series of instructions, with a hint/definition of the word that will be created.

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I had access to udemy courses back when I was working at Deloitte Digital. One interesting course I did was the introduction to deep q learning from Pieran Data. Deep Q learning is a way to use neural nets to do reinforcement learning. It was an interesting course and I learned a lot, so I’ll give a recap here.

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My old work (TWG) had a 3D printer for employees to play with and use. In the summer of 2019 my son was getting into model rocket launching, but we kept losing them in trees. So I decided to try 3d printing some rockets. It never really worked out, but in my new spirit of blogging failures, I’m posting about it. My goal was to make my own easily produced reusable rocket.

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Wordle is a popular word deduction game. The aim is to guess a word given six guesses. You can only guess valid English words that are in wordle’s dictionary. Each wrong guess will yield hints. A letter highlighted in yellow indicates it matches the target word somewhere. A letter marked in green indicates the correct letter in the correct position. I feel like a branching strategy (preferably choosing from common letters) is the best. But what word should you start with? And what is the worst word to start with?

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