/ Recent content on Puzzmo Blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:00:22 +0000 /posts/2025/12/14/six-months-of-claude/ Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:00:22 +0000 /posts/2025/12/14/six-months-of-claude/ I try to commit to things. My relationship with the craft of programming is significantly more intense than most of people I have worked with in my career. This isn’t a slight to others, a more diverse set of interests makes for more well-rounded people and there’s a lot of things to do as a human in a lifetime! My commitment to the craft comes with a cost - I am extremely wary of adding dependents and taking on responsibilies which do not give me maximal time and space to further the work on my craft. /posts/2025/12/9/tech-2025/ Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:11:39 +0000 /posts/2025/12/9/tech-2025/ It’s just over two years since Puzzmo’s launch, which means its time to continue my tradition of talking through the technical changes under the hood! I was a very early GitHub user, signing up in the first 50k users in 2009, and for the first few years the interface and platform was changing very drastically as a user. Then in 2012, GitHub took venture capital and changes to the daily experience of being a GitHub user effectively stopped. /posts/2025/10/01/minis/ Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:00:00 -0400 /posts/2025/10/01/minis/ Today is the first day of a series of 30 mini crosswords designed to help you become a better crossword solver. They’re free for all players. Solve the first one here, and follow along on our Bluesky thread for every day’s new puzzle. In college, I accidentally majored in German by walking into the wrong classroom. It was my freshman year, and the departments were having open houses for the new students. /posts/2025/09/08/the-making-of-circuits-royale/ Mon, 08 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0700 /posts/2025/09/08/the-making-of-circuits-royale/ We’ve been tossing around ideas for a fast-paced multiplayer variant of a Puzzmo game for a while, and decided the Circuits launch would be a great chance to have a go at it. Circuits Royale, released to celebrate the launch of Circuits on Puzzmo, is a game you can drop into, instantly understand, and play with a ton of people at once. Notes on LLMs LLMs unlocked the gameplay by serving as word judge. /posts/2025/07/30/six-weeks-of-claude-code/ Wed, 30 Jul 2025 00:53:23 +0100 /posts/2025/07/30/six-weeks-of-claude-code/ It is wild to think that it has been only a handful of weeks. Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful. /posts/2025/07/11/on-pre-solving/ Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:38 -0400 /posts/2025/07/11/on-pre-solving/ One of the unique features of Puzzmo as a platform is that we show you a visual representation of the puzzle you are about to solve before you play it. This preview of each puzzle is a core part of what we think makes Puzzmo special. For some games, this preview is enough of the puzzle that you can actually solve the whole puzzle without actually clicking into the puzzle at all. /posts/2025/07/04/missing-link/ Thu, 03 Jul 2025 00:00:38 -0400 /posts/2025/07/04/missing-link/ Every day when I wake up and play Puzzmo, after I enjoy some of the classics, I play several games that aren’t out yet. Lately, as we have more and more games at all stages of development, I’ve found my personal Puzzmo page is looking less and less like all of yours. So we’re trying something new — we’re releasing one of those half-baked games as a very experimental limited run. /posts/2025/06/08/offline-wip/ Sun, 08 Jun 2025 01:13:00 +0100 /posts/2025/06/08/offline-wip/ For both Zach and I, working offline was one of the core tenets of “being an app”. So, perhaps the majority of the four months I worked on the app was within this space. There is no such thing as just “add offline mode” though, its like a tonne of small systems that all together interlock to get you a tight experience when you’re on the subway and/or off wifi. It’s really something that needs to be thought of from the get-go and constantly kept up to date. /posts/2025/06/07/orta-on-claude/ Sat, 07 Jun 2025 06:26:14 +0100 /posts/2025/06/07/orta-on-claude/ Alright, that’s a very straight faced title. Might force more folks to read the contents. When I was planning on leaving working on TypeScript full-time, I looked around for a few interesting places to work in Microsoft/GitHub instead of founding Puzzmo with Zach. One of the teams I had interacted with a bit during my time at Microsoft was the GitHub Copilot team, they had just finished up LiveShare and were really starting to see some interesting results in the auto-complete space. /posts/2025/06/01/ios-app-architecture/ Sun, 01 Jun 2025 10:00:38 +0100 /posts/2025/06/01/ios-app-architecture/ Well, “finally” we got a Puzzmo iOS App. From day 1, I had been anticipating needing to build a native app for Puzzmo eventually, in part because of Zach’s rich history of shipping iOS games but also when you tell someone you make games one of the first questions they ask is “do you have an app?”. My theory on blogging has always been write what I wish I had read at the start of a project. /posts/2025/05/24/clue-glossaries/ Sat, 24 May 2025 16:16:03 +0100 /posts/2025/05/24/clue-glossaries/ This is kinda an off year for working on the parts of puzzmo.com which users see for me, followers of Puzzmo in the discord might note that Saman and Lilith have been the vanguard on the big, now shipped, re-design effort focusing on the navigation, today page and the play game page. Me? I was working on the iOS app, which is mostly invisible work but my main focus is ole’ bizdev. /posts/2025/02/06/digging-into-perf/ Thu, 06 Feb 2025 02:29:23 +0000 /posts/2025/02/06/digging-into-perf/ Like many companies, we schedule by quarters. So far, we’ve had a tick-tock strategy of a game launch with a lot of application and API infrastructure and one with less, this gives us a chance to release some big changes and then refine and try apply it to the back catalogue. For 2025, we broke this pattern for Q1 because of three major factors: I agreed to focus almost solely on writing an iOS app for Puzzmo Saman, who normally heads up our game efforts felt like it was time to take a serious look at design of puzzmo. /posts/2025/02/06/redesign/ Thu, 06 Feb 2025 01:38:22 +0000 /posts/2025/02/06/redesign/ Every game we launched last year came with at least one big new feature: Bongo circles, Pile Up Poker Series, Weather Memoku’s weather widget. We launched game variants, customizable group leaderboards, time series sparklines on completion screens, game replays, and even a year-end recap. I could keep going. We’ve been busy since launch. Along the way, we gathered tons of valuable feedback from players about what they love and what they can’t stand about Puzzmo. /posts/2025/02/03/january-games-changelog/ Mon, 03 Feb 2025 08:00:00 -0700 /posts/2025/02/03/january-games-changelog/ Happy new year! This changelog covers all changes since November 2024’s changelog. Here’s what’s new: Cross|word Added text formatting support to clues (italics, bold, links, and more). Adjusted the column layout on narrow desktop and tablet screens so clue lists are always wide enough to read. Adjusted the initial scale of the grid on mobile so the entire grid is always in view. Increase contrast on circle square highlights. Improved the feel of zoom and pan gestures. /posts/2025/01/22/turborepo/ Wed, 22 Jan 2025 12:58:51 +0000 /posts/2025/01/22/turborepo/ One of my goals with blogging for the last decade has been to write the blog post I wish I had had. So, with Puzzmo now migrated to two monorepos (“app” and “games”) I’d like to go through the process of setting up a monorepo and a few of the interesting trade-offs we’ve made now it’s fully settled. This post includes all the config files which makes our monorepo work and a bit of a narrative about how they came together. /posts/2025/01/06/today-grid-two/ Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:47 +0000 /posts/2025/01/06/today-grid-two/ Hey folks, we’ve been thinking a bit about the number of games on the homepage of Puzzmo. We started Puzzmo with 5 games, some inline ads and a couple of items which would show here or there. In the last year, the number of potential games or items which we show has really multiplied! The main grid for puzzmo currently shows info for: Games: we have 11 public games, we managed to allow for more puzzles to exist on the same space via tabs but it’s still a lot Your Updates: we show info about friend requests, club invites, gift invites News: social news, yesterday news, current news, changelog updates Puzzmo needs: we post job offers, showcase why Puzzmo Plus is cool, and show ads to folks who are not subscribed Over time we organically grew the algorithm the today page to handle the scale of usage but it’s feeling stretched! /posts/2024/12/06/rm-chat/ Fri, 06 Dec 2024 07:50:36 -0500 /posts/2024/12/06/rm-chat/ Hey folks, we’ve just deployed a change which removes the chat section from Puzzmo. I thought it’d be better that I also pour one out for the chat and give a sense of what we’re thinking in that space and what’s happening a bit behind the scenes on the site. At the core of the problem: Chat was not pulling its weight, we have tens of thousands of logged in users, but usually have under ten chat messages posted across friends and groups per day. /posts/2024/12/27/november-games-changelog/ Wed, 27 Nov 2024 08:00:00 -0700 /posts/2024/12/27/november-games-changelog/ Here’s what’s new in games since the last changelog. Bongo Released a new game, Bongo. Play it now! Memoku Fixed a bug where sometimes the time displayed on the end screen could be incorrect. Spelltower Added additional 3, 4, and 5 letter words to the word list. Cubeclear Added additional 3, 4, and 5 letter words to the word list. If you have any feedback or just want to talk about these changes, join our Discord! /posts/2024/10/30/tech-stack/ Wed, 30 Oct 2024 11:01:48 +0000 /posts/2024/10/30/tech-stack/ We’re just over a year since Puzzmo was launched to the public, and it’s time to pull out an old Artsy tradition: writing up some of our technical choices for the year. This builds on the prior “what did we launch” blog post, but with a significant slant towards the tech powering instead of user-facing features. Team wise, today, we have two engineers solely focused on the games (and occasionally touching the front-end of the app), an engineer focused on the API and then me, who will do a bit of everything. /posts/2024/10/29/october-games-changelog/ Tue, 29 Oct 2024 08:00:00 -0700 /posts/2024/10/29/october-games-changelog/ Here’s what’s new in games since the last changelog. Weather Memoku Released a new game, Weather Memoku. Play it for free on Weather Channel’s Puzzmo page, or anywhere if you are a Puzzmo subscriber. Cross|word Added a new user profile statistic for plonks. Fixed bug that could cause plonks to be miscounted if the player exited and revisited the game. Fixed a bug where the color of letters could be incorrect after the completion animation completes. /posts/2024/10/25/book-announcement/ Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:20 -0400 /posts/2024/10/25/book-announcement/ Today, we announced Puzzmo’s first crossword book. It contains 30 crossword reruns from 2024, 10 book-exclusive crosswords, more than 10 pages of paper remixes of Flipart and Really Bad Chess by Zach and Jack, and a few quick essays from the three of us. You can place an order here! The book is very Puzzmo-coded! We’ve included word separation boundaries in the grids, and have a QR code that’ll let you access all the hints. /posts/2024/09/19/plugins-are-back-in-style/ Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:56:14 +0100 /posts/2024/09/19/plugins-are-back-in-style/ Aspects of the launch When we were spec’ing out what the Pile-Up Poker launch would look like, it was a pretty overwhelming list: A new, fully polished, game A “pro” version of the game A “series” infrastructure for games to account for many plays of one game per day A “go to next game” recommendation system A system for each player having a unique puzzle An early-access system for press A new system for marking games the next day as being “Fantasyland” Custom event hooks into the completion screen Custom event “secret leaderboards” Custom event leaderboards (“most contributions to pot” for example) The winnings being based on multipliers (which we can control and use to tweak timings) A community “pool” of winnings A set of unlockables based on the pool of winnings A new tutorial system for games A new side-quest system Revised club infrastructure Free 2 week trials The ability for a lifetime account to bought The Shopify integration for product discounts covered in this post A game early-unlock system based on a notable Avatar sets unlocked based on notables App / Game unlockables based on the community pool Then we shipped it, roughly two months after launch (June 10th) and only a few things from our original list were cut, and a few were added (club leaderboards, side quests, tutorials. /posts/2024/09/17/feature-flags-and-new-urls/ Tue, 17 Sep 2024 01:00:11 +0100 /posts/2024/09/17/feature-flags-and-new-urls/ Hey folks, we’ve been reflecting on the Pile-Up Poker launch and one of the things we’ve come to understand is that we can have a difference in how we approach secrecy between the games and the rest of Puzzmo. Games as a medium is a pretty high stakes, “winner gets mindshare” ecosystem where a good idea is copied and replicated very quickly. Replicating the app and infrastructure for Puzzmo however, is a much trickier game for others to pull off. /posts/2024/09/03/september-games-changelog/ Tue, 03 Sep 2024 15:01:37 -0700 /posts/2024/09/03/september-games-changelog/ Here’s what changed in our games over the last month. Crossword Added a new crossword social share image that visualizes plonks. Added the “Wall clock time” leaderboard, which tracks the duration between the moment the daily crossword puzzle is published, and the moment it’s completed. Typeshift Fixed a bug where, if the “confirm word submission” option was turned on, the game could not be completed in some specific cases. Pile-up Poker Added Pile Up Poker Pro 🃏. /posts/2024/09/02/more-puzzles-now-in-card-form/ Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0500 /posts/2024/09/02/more-puzzles-now-in-card-form/ Today, we’re excited to announce that there will be more puzzles on the Today page each day, along with a new way to organize those puzzles. We wanted to come up with a way to provide same-difficulty puzzles each day, while also catering to our players who enjoy the difficulty scaling throughout the week. To accomplish this we’re going to be adding more daily puzzles for some of our games. /posts/2024/08/23/goodbye-to-legacy-game-recaps-and-leaderboards/ Fri, 23 Aug 2024 00:01:00 -0700 /posts/2024/08/23/goodbye-to-legacy-game-recaps-and-leaderboards/ Hey folks, this week we’ve had a think about how we can ensure some of the long-term systems running in Puzzmo keep running smoothly. We concluded that there are two things we should probably do to keep site speed up, and keep costs down. We are removing the stats displays on games completed before April 1st, 2024. The version of Puzzmo which launched, and the Puzzmo we all use today may visually look very similar, but under-the-hood things are quite different. /posts/2024/08/07/august-games-changelog/ Wed, 07 Aug 2024 10:23:52 +0100 /posts/2024/08/07/august-games-changelog/ Hi, Saman here! This is the first of what I hope will be many monthly changelog posts. Note that our team relies on a continuous release process, so while these changelogs will only come once the month, the changes themselves will roll out as they’re completed. The changelogs are therefore always a summary of changes that are already live. Here’s what changed in our games over the last month. Crossword Removed the hint time penalty, and added a cooldown period for hints (Read Hints v2: Moving from a time penalty to a cooldown period for more details). /posts/2024/07/31/puzzmo-constructors/ Fri, 02 Aug 2024 05:00:00 -0400 /posts/2024/07/31/puzzmo-constructors/ Hi all! Madison (Puzzmo’s Cross|word intern) here! For the past eight weeks, I have been working closely with Brooke on various Cross|word tasks. I have had the opportunity to observe and take part in all the work that goes into publishing Puzzmo Cross|words, and even try my hand at constructing! You can read more about my thoughts on reviewing submissions, editing, co-constructing my first puzzle, writing hints, test solving and fact checking, and end-of-internship reflections in more detail in my past newsletters. /posts/2024/07/24/groups-to-clubs/ Wed, 24 Jul 2024 10:23:52 +0100 /posts/2024/07/24/groups-to-clubs/ With the $50 billion dollar mark passed on the Pile-Up Poker launch fund we’re releasing a re-think of how Groups Clubs work in Puzzmo. TLDR: Groups are now called clubs, you do not need to have Puzzmo Plus to create your first club and clubs can have leaderboards. Starting today, you’ll see a way to quickly create a club with a leaderboard based on the game that you just completed! /posts/2024/07/22/hints-v2/ Wed, 24 Jul 2024 04:40:29 -0400 /posts/2024/07/22/hints-v2/ Today we’re launching v2 of our Cross|word hint system! We’re ditching time penalties for a cooldown timer that appears if you use three hints in quick succession. The details are towards the end of the blog post here. Puzzmo’s quest to make crosswords more approachable Crossword puzzle solving has a learning curve. There are tons of guidelines that crossword constructors and editors adhere to, and in general these conventions aren’t written down anywhere. /posts/2024/07/16/augmentations/ Tue, 16 Jul 2024 01:25:53 +0100 /posts/2024/07/16/augmentations/ After we launched Puzzmo, there was this moment of “well… what now?”. Zach and I had such a complete vision of what we wanted to build for v1 from the idea phase 3 years ago. We even got a bit of extra time for polish pass due to wanting the acquisition to happen before launch, so to a reasonable extent, we had a solid version 1 we were proud of. We’d never really talked about version 2 in concrete though, and on top of that, our team had just tripled in the last month. /posts/2024/06/23/shiki-hugo/ Sun, 23 Jun 2024 14:59:00 +0100 /posts/2024/06/23/shiki-hugo/ When I decided on Hugo for this blog, I knew I was gonna have to take a hit on something I felt was very important to me and my writing: fancy tools for syntax highlighting. I choose Hugo because it should be super easy for folks to contribute (no fancy Node tooling setup etc) - so I have Shiki being applied as an optional post build step. First up, we need to disable the current syntax highlighting for codefences by editing hugo. /posts/2024/06/20/sdl-codegen/ Thu, 20 Jun 2024 14:18:32 +0100 /posts/2024/06/20/sdl-codegen/ It was 8 years ago when I made my first change to a GraphQL API. My next, real schema change came along a bit later and looked like this: name: { type: GraphQLString, }, + description: { + type: GraphQLString, + }, image: Image, artists: { type: new GraphQLList(Artist.type), We’re talking about the early days of GraphQL, and may even have pre-dated the Schema Definition Language (SDL) being in the spec. /posts/2024/06/17/shopify-integration/ Mon, 17 Jun 2024 12:34:31 +0100 /posts/2024/06/17/shopify-integration/ With the launch of Pile-Up Poker we knew that we wanted to sell a pack of cards. Systemically thinking, this meant a few requirements for what it would mean to buy a physical item from us: We want admins to handle inventory We want to work with third party fulfillment tools We want people who sign up during the launch period to get the cards for free We want folks who had already signed up, to get it for a reasonable price Folks who don’t want a Puzzmo subscription could have a route to getting the cards There was a strong recommendation from the business side to use Shopify, and we didn’t have any argument against it on the technical side! /posts/2024/04/25/theme-editor/ Thu, 25 Apr 2024 15:03:59 +0100 /posts/2024/04/25/theme-editor/ Puzzmo has a pretty comprehensive theming system, we’ve used it to ship 8 different themes before we launched! Then we built a system which lets our partners have a custom theme based on their own site’s color themes: Now we’re bringing the ability to customize your theme to all Puzzmo Plus users! Here’s one I whipped up just now, using the excellent video game Hollow Knight’s Greenpath area as inspiration: /posts/2024/04/18/completion-sidebar-2/ Thu, 18 Apr 2024 10:48:48 +0100 /posts/2024/04/18/completion-sidebar-2/ Hi folks, welcome to our new blog if you’re a first time reader! ( The rest of our posts are tech stuff, which my wife described as “full of jargon”. So, it’d be very reasonable to skip. ) We’ve been trying to figure out a way to give updates on major changes to Puzzmo and thought a changelog section on the blog would do a pretty good job at that. /posts/2024/04/17/v1-launch/ Tue, 16 Apr 2024 12:56:32 +0000 /posts/2024/04/17/v1-launch/ This blog post is trying to do a lot, I want to look back at the initial version of Puzzmo we shipped back in November and talk through what we built. It’s a very long read, and sometimes doesn’t flow too naturally - but it’s comprehensive and a very useful reference for noting a little slice of time when Puzzmo’s users were in the hundreds. I’m mainly going to be concentrating on “Puzzmo” the system, e. /posts/2024/03/28/an-ode-to-game-plugins/ Mon, 08 Apr 2024 12:00:32 +0000 /posts/2024/03/28/an-ode-to-game-plugins/ Control At heart, programming is the art of deciding which systems interact with each other and where decision making happens. This tension became very apparent as we started to first build out the leaderboard systems for Puzzmo. At the beginning, decision’s around control were easy as there was only 2 leaderboards for each game. The API would provide these two leaderboards for every game at the place where we kept the rest of the leaderboard infra. /posts/2024/02/05/open-submissions/ Mon, 05 Feb 2024 12:00:00 -0400 /posts/2024/02/05/open-submissions/ Premise and statistics. On December 26, 2023 I announced on Discord that from January 2 through January 9, 2024, Puzzmo players who had never previously been paid for a crossword were welcome to submit one fully-clued crossword to be considered for publication at Puzzmo. This announcement was also made in Cross|word editor notes during the submission window. The spec sheet and style guide can be found here. I sent all responses from January 17 through February 5, 2024. /posts/2023/12/13/first/ Wed, 13 Dec 2023 12:56:32 +0000 /posts/2023/12/13/first/ Hello world! This blog is the first post of our company blog. We generally want to be using this for Changelog entries, writing about our games, Crossword culture and some of the tech decisions we make along the way. – ./orta