if you are bored
games
A few tiny browser games I built between bigger things. No install, no leaderboard, no ads, no telemetry. They open in a sandboxed iframe and that is the whole stack.
Stuck on a Zoom call? Hit play.
Architect Pick
Lambda, Kappa, or Hybrid? 8 quick scenarios, pick the right streaming-data architecture for each. Reinforces that the choice is context-bound.
Chunk It Right
RAG chunking strategy quiz. Read the document type and a sample, pick the chunking strategy that preserves semantic boundaries best. 6 rounds covering technical docs, prose, code, transcripts.
Context Cargo
Pilot a retrieval ship through a field of plausible-looking chunks and deliver a context window worth reading. Every chunk you grab adds mass and burns tokens; overfill the window and the oldest one gets silently truncated. You're competing against your own urge to collect everything.
Flappy Rerouter
Your nav app lost GPS. The traffic-jam walls are not waiting. Tap to flap, dodge the jams, see how far you get before you stack on Manhattan.
Gravity Courier
Fling a data packet across a gravity field and let a black hole do your routing. Close approaches multiply the score; slightly closer approaches end the delivery. Same inverse-square pull as this site's space mode — physics doesn't care about your deadline.
Hot Key Horizon
Data skew as gravity: records rain into partition planets, and the hot key's planet accretes mass until it collapses into a black hole — which is roughly what your Spark stage does at 99%. You get two salts. Spend them well.
MERGE Match
Card-pairing game: match each Delta Lake scenario (late events, soft delete, dedup, SCD-2, idempotent upsert) with the right MERGE pattern.
Place Twins
Memory match where each pair is two cities that share a structural fingerprint somewhere else in the world. MIT to Heidelberg. Park Slope to Utrecht. Lyon to Boston Back Bay.
Schema Defender
Tetris-style data quality. Rows fall from the top. Send valid rows to silver (←), invalid rows to the DLQ (→). Three mistakes and you lose.
Semantic Gravity
Embedding space as a gravity field: topic planets pull a query packet with force equal to cosine similarity — but their SIZE shows keyword overlap. Predict where the query lands. The big planet sharing your keyword pulls like it skipped leg day.
Skew Hunter
Diagnose 8 slow Spark jobs. Pick the right fix: salt-and-aggregate, broadcast, AQE skew-join, repartition, coalesce, or 'leave it'. The patterns that catch 90% of real-world skew.
Spot the Block
Click the line that freezes the asyncio event loop. 6 puzzles of increasing subtlety, each a real anti-pattern from production async Python.
Syntax Asteroids
Real Python snippets fall toward main and roughly half of them are famous gotchas. Blast the bugs, merge the clean code, and find out whether your code-review reflexes survive a rising deploy velocity. Three bugs in prod and the pipeline is yours to explain.
The Ranker
Drag eight cities into the order an embedding model would rank them. Then see the true cosine ranking. If you score well, you have the same priors as a 256-d vector trained on OpenStreetMap features. Suspect.
Tool Picker
Play the LLM. Each round shows a user message; pick the right MCP tool from a panel of four. 8 questions covering search, geocoding, routing, traffic, and analytics.
Wormhole Router
Route a data packet across the galaxy by picking which wormholes it rides — then watch Dijkstra grade your flight plan. The cheap first hop is usually a trap, the direct link is usually overpriced, and you are competing against an algorithm that checks every route before breakfast.
More games when something annoys me enough to procrastinate on. Suggestions welcome.