Ben Wendt's blog

I’ve blogged several times about wordle before. It’s a great game for someone like me who loves words. I don’t think I’m a great wordle player, but I love thinking about the intricacies of the game. One bugaboo in wordle, which I’ll call “diabolical answers” is when you reach a point where you have four letters correct and there are many possible answers. The worst of these would have more than six possible words, meaning you aren’t guaranteed a win even though you’re almost done.

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Apache Beam is a distributed programming framework, mostly designed as a counterpart to the DataFlow service in Google Cloud Platform. In the past I’ve done a fair bit of work on pipelines in Spark and with a service architecture, but I’ll be needing Beam for my new job, so Ive been playing around a bit with that.

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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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