Marcus' Blog

Getting better at chess is really hard.

Last year, I quit my job to work full-time on a chess app I created.

Here are some lesser-known books I’ve loved, that you won’t find in typical recommendation lists – the deep-cuts.

One of the biggest realizations I’ve had when building Chessbook is that onboarding a user is really hard.

I have a chronic problem of committing debug code to production.

Bob: This is where I keep all the notes I wrote in red pen, and likewise for all my blue notes, my green notes, and my purple notes Alice: Doesn’t this split your chemistry notes up into 3 different piles?

In working on Chessbook recently, I often found myself referring to (position, move) pairs.

Ever seen this keyboard?

Welcome to the end-of-year update for the Rust language. 2030 has been a huge year for us, with some huge wins but also a couple setbacks.

I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?”

Abstractions are the best Your code will be safer and more readable.

One of the biggest sticking points of being a solo dev is maintaining motivation.

Background I run a chess site, https://chessbook.com.

I wrote a post yesterday about how to compress chess moves.

UPDATE: I’ve written a new post with a new technique which is about 2.5x more efficient than this approach Chess notation has come a long way since descriptive notation, now we have nice and decipherable Standard Algebraic Notation, like Qxf7 (queen takes…

I recently downloaded Lichess’ database of all December ‘21 games.

Generally, chess puzzles will present you with a position and ask you to find the best move.

The annual book review, 2021 edition.

I spend way too much time on reddit, hacker news, twitter, feedly, coinbase, robinhood, email, etc.

I played chess briefly with my friends in high school, where I had a rating of around 1100 online.

Recently I’ve been working on a project to surface census data via a GraphQL API, mostly as a way to learn GraphQL.

I’ve been dealing with QR codes recently, as one of my side projects generates them, and I got curious about how much data you can really fit in a QR code.

There’s no shortage of posts like “Let’s use Kubernetes!”

Just some quick thoughts on Gatsby and Next.js, after trying both for a project I worked on recently (this one).

In my last project I used Sled and Rocket.

Bevy has seen rapid adoption recently, but the learning resources are still fairly scarce.

I was aimlessly browsing Github and came across sapling, a very early-stage structured editor.

Recently I migrated my side-project from Redux, which I’ve used in every React project for the past four years, to pullstate, here is my tale.

I saw the call for blog posts in the 2021 rust roadmap, so I figured I’d throw in my 2 cents, since I’ve been working on a project recently that uses rust on the backend.

I’ve developed an unusual approach to styling in my React code.

The Commonplace blog has been writing a lot on tacit knowledge recently.

Recently I made the switch to self-hosted analytics, after being a long-term Google Analytics user.

ngrok is a tool that proxies traffic from a subdomain (like http://2fb551c6b2fd.ngrok.io) to a port on your localhost.

I’ve been working on a web project for a few months now and thought I’d take stock of the tools I’ve been using.

I’ve been using kitty and tmux together for years and recently realized my setup for true colors was broken, thanks to neovim’s :checkhealth command.

This is just a rapid-fire summary of the books I’ve read this year and what I thought about them.

Recently I acquired a project, Now What Do I Read?.

I started a Haskell rewrite of a project, and after not having used Haskell for a long time, found the process of setting up my Vim environment to be a pain.

Recently, I made a chess program in Python and published the source on github here.