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qrush

2,473 karma · joined February 5, 2009

A short, sturdy creature fond of drink and industry. Director of Platform Engineering @ Wistia. Started Rubygems.org a while back. Still writing Ruby today!

https://quaran.to

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qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
One fun thing I learned here is that advertisers won’t even consider a site or game that’s not launched yet…not even Google AdSense would approve me. I am tracking this though and obviously want to make number go up.
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
Thanks! And yeah I’m definitely going to work on more polish and animations, this all needs a big pass on fidelity. Really appreciate this feedback.
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
Good callout. My idea here was that you commonly get a garbage hand to start the game, and this helps you build a better first word.
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
It's the ? button on each game, and on the new game screen. I'll make it more obvious. Also here: http://wordtrak.com/manual

I punted on dragging tiles since it felt janky...considering revisiting though.

qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
My main limiting factor was dealing with two app store submissions. I'm already using expo.dev as a cross-platform solution.
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
Fixed (it's a Dwarf Fortress reference)! And yes colors aren't my strong suit...will think about it!
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
Wrong on all 3 fronts, sorry! It's Rails with vanilla JS/CSS for web. Expo.dev on the native side.
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
I've been using my real human hands and brain to respond to this thread. Woof.

Maybe look at it this way: With a full time job and 3 kids at home, I was able to learn a ton about shipping apps with new tools available over the last few months on the side, and also have some fun with my family and friends. I struggle to call that "lazy" or a "waste".

qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
I kept (some of) the profanity in, kind of on purpose...because it's hilarious! I did remove some extreme slurs though.
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
Great questions, thanks - there is a tutorial!

There's a "bag" just like Scrabble and you're both drawing tiles from it. You can see the bag too, definitely should be visible during swapping, great call.

CPU players have heuristics and different word difficulties they play - I want to do a new post on that soon.

There's no time component... we tried that initially but felt too rushed.

qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
Yeah sometimes the draws are tough, and especially without a shared board. I've addressed this by adding more tiles than scrabble to the bag (I'll be doing a followup post about dictionaries, tile distributions, point testing, and more), but definitely not done tuning this yet. Would welcome ideas on how to smooth this out!
qrush··on Show HN: I built a new word game, Wordtrak
Oops - my son's face is large though! I'm not seeing it on my devices or Chrome/Safari...
qrush··on How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale
Am I reading this right that OpenAI is not using Livekit for WebRTC/audio anymore?
qrush··on Playdate’s handheld changed how Duke University teaches game design
My playdate has been collecting dust since I got it and the initial few games I tried didn't stick. Any suggestions on good games for it?
qrush··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
I'm working on a new 1v1 scrabble/wordle style game - iOS and Android versions are cooking as well, thanks to Expo.dev. A friend described it as "scrabble that doesn't drag", and I've had a few friends and family members playing hundreds of games (and especially the daily game) over the last few weeks, which has been really encouraging. Play here:

https://wordtrak.com/

If you're enjoying it, please leave me some feedback: https://discord.gg/pFjEcbQsv

qrush··on Artemis II safely splashes down
Apparently there's more work than just clicking "Recover Vessel" after splashdown!
qrush··on GitHub's Historic Uptime
hot take: I would accept ads under every PR comment in GitHub if we could get back to 3 or 4 nines of reliability.
qrush··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
I’m working on a new word game, called Wordtrak:

https://wordtrak.com

(Sign up and I’ll send out beta codes tomorrow!)

I’ve had a few friends call it “fun”, and one said it’s “Scrabble that doesn’t drag”.

Working on some social media shareable replays you can post after matches tonight, thanks to Remotion:

https://x.com/qrush/status/2030849966105559104?s=20

qrush··on [dead]
This is a pretty painful AI read, also thanks for reminding me about all the trauma this past year.
qrush··on Eddie Bauer declares bankruptcy
Where else will finance bros get quarter zips from??
qrush··on Shipmap.org
One of my favorite youtube channels right now is What's Going On With Shipping, hosted by a former merchant mariner. Here's a 101 primer if you are learning too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5FR6_6kpG8

qrush··on Mr TIFF
RIP Mr. TIFF. Hoping we continue to document these incredible engineers and their work before it's lost to the sands of time/pits of LLM muck.
qrush··on Summary of the Amazon DynamoDB Service Disruption in US-East-1 Region
Sounds like DynamoDB is going to continue to be a hard dependency for EC2, etc. I at least appreciate the transparency and hearing about their internal systems names.
qrush··on The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
I grew up close to Niagara Falls and my dad was a firefighter there for ~30 years who had to practice rappelling down the gorge to save people (which sadly happens too frequently).

His favorite story from the last time they "shut the falls off" was that they found tons of loose change in the rocks around the rapids - people were racing to get it and bringing back buckets of money. (Of course, they also found a few bodies as well...)

qrush··on AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1
AWS's own management console sign-in isn't even working. This is a huge one. :(
qrush··on A board member's perspective of the RubyGems controversy
I'm truly hoping for a reasonable resolution on all sides for this situation. IMO Ruby is too small, and shrinking compared to Python and JS/TS especially in the AI era, to be able to afford any splintering of efforts.
qrush··on Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available
I thought this was about my favorite sparkling water brand at first glance.
qrush··on CVE-2025-43300: "an sophisticated attack against specific individuals"
PoC / more info about this bug:

https://github.com/b1n4r1b01/n-days/blob/main/CVE-2025-43300... https://github.com/h4xnz/CVE-2025-43300-Exploit

qrush··on This is my brain on leeches
Leeches are very much in use today in the US, in operating rooms especially!
qrush··on Optimizing our way through Metroid
Curious - what OS? (I work at Wistia!)
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