Kieran Brown

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Week Notes #6 - Wordle Is the Word

13/02/2022

🗓 Instructions
a
b
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h
i
j
k
l
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p
q
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Enter
Not in word list That is correct!

How to play

This is exactly nothing like the original in every way.

  • Hit play, start typing words (using either your physical keyboard or the virtual one below) and hit enter when you think you've got it.
  • If the word does not exist, you will be informed.
  • If that word does not exist, use backspace to remove letters and try again.
TLDR:

Wordle has taken over! A look into the fantastic story of how it came to fruition, how it's been built and the rip-off I created for the week notes header.

This weeks theme is all about Wordle. The 5 letter word game that seems to be taking the world by storm. Created by Josh Wardle, it's a story that shows that even the smallest of projects can get big.

I first saw the grid emojis on Twitter with a few tech people tweeting how they'd done. I saw one and didn't think anything of it. But after seeing the emoji grid and people saying 'Wordle in 4' or 'World in 2' prompted a bit of Googling. I played it and like everyone else, was hooked. I think it's the sheer simplicity, lack of ads, no interuptions some interuptions in the form of a cookie notice 🤦‍♂️(now it's owned by the NY Times) and sharability it keeps you coming back day after day.

After playing it I saw this tweet from Wes Bos, bascially saying they were having the chap that built it (Josh Wardle) on their podcast. This is a pretty big deal as I'd seen other tweets suggesting that it was such a simple app, using local storage, no database and built with web components. For a developer that uses frameworks on the daily such as React and React Native it seems like a breath of fresh air when someone builds a little side project and it blows up to the scale that it has.

Interestingly in the interview, we learn that Josh started out in the front-end by world jumping straight into React. From then on in seems he went back to older/underlying tech, which lead him eventually onto writing this game for his partner in his spare time using vanilla JS and web components.

I've not took the time to properly look into web components but Wordle has definitely made me want to.

The Wordle Rip-Off

If you've not already you can try my completly worse, single row version of Wordle in the header of this page. When you start to plan out how to actually make something like Wordle it quickly becomes clear how long it must have taken to build. Mine is obviously a very rough go at mimicking the functionality but it does sort of work. It doesn't use web components but it does use vanilla JS and a few forEach loops.

Miscellaneous