♟️ Building My Own Chess Engine
I built a chess engine! And it was hard!
I’ve written down all my learnings and resources in Building My Own Chess Engine. I’m a beginner chess player myself so it was quite a journey.
Over the last month, I’ve been trawling the Chess Programming Wiki, videos, and papers from the 50s to learn all about computer chess. If you want to start from point zero, I recommend Programming a Computer for Playing Chess, a paper written in 1950 by Claude Shannon.
My toy engine is open source @ healeycodes/andoma. It’s written in Python and I’ve included lots of standalone snippets in the blog post to help you get started with your own engine.
This month, I’ve been adding features to my Among Us league website, submitting PRs to cool projects, and learning how to be a lead dev at work (I love my team, I think at least one of you read this newsletter).
I might have some more free slots for mentorship coming up soon but I continue to be available to advise beginner devs (wherever I can — I’m no expert) about projects, resumes, and blog posts.
Elsewhere on the internet, Justin Duke redesigned his personal website and it blew me away. I’ve also been reading more articles by Dan Luu, and Julian.
To quote Justin Duke:
Lastly, if there’s anything I can convince you of: you should build a personal site, you should obsess over it, you should meticulously document it, and you should have quite a bit of fun doing so. (It’s worth it.)
Take care!
Andrew