So I wrote a version of the famous mathematical puzzle Tower of Hanoi in Inform 7, a language for creating “interactive fiction” or text adventures in the style of Zork.

Download a playable file, or play in your browser at https://rileypb.com/inform/. Type “help” for information on how to play.

Most semesters, I teach a class in Software Engineering. The centerpiece of the course is a group project using Scrum, and the students absolutely require a good web tool to organize their work.

I have a number of requirements for a Scrum tool:

• It has to be free;
• It has to be easy to use;
• It has to implement some basics of Scrum:
  • separate product and sprint backlogs,
  • orderable backlogs,
  • fixed-length sprints;
• It has to be easy for me as an instructor to follow my students’ progress.

Moreover, I want whatever tool they use to implement the basics of Scrum and not much else; teams should be free to work how they like within the bounds of Scrum without the tool imposing its own viewpoint.

For a while I used one tool until it was no longer free; then I used another, but it didn’t really do what I wanted, etc.

Finally, I gave up and wrote my own, and the result is Scrumboard.

Scrumboard makes a few choices of how you might work within Scrum, such as Epics (which group Product Backlog Items), Acceptance Criteria (which define how to know when a story is implemented), and Tasks (which define how work is broken down within a sprint). All of these are optional, but I think they’re pretty lightweight solutions to common needs when working in Scrum.

The best way to get to know Scrumboard is to try it for yourself. Log in at https://www.learnscrum.xyz. There’s also a Github repository at https://github.com/rileypb/sb-angular.

Plus towns and secondary roads.

I’ve recently been playing with procedural map generation, which has been kind of an obsession of mine for awhile. Some output is seen below, in both fantasy map style and satellite map style.

Source code is available at https://github.com/rileypb/worldgeneration.

A lot of inspiration came from https://mewo2.com/notes/terrain/ and from http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/, who has more recently made this brilliant toy: https://www.redblobgames.com/maps/mapgen4/.