wordsandbuttons

A growing collection of interactive tutorials, demos, and quizzes about maths, algorithms, and programming. (by akalenuk)

Wordsandbuttons Alternatives

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NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a better wordsandbuttons alternative or higher similarity.

wordsandbuttons reviews and mentions

Posts with mentions or reviews of wordsandbuttons. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-23.
  • JavaScript Bloat in 2024
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Feb 2024
    Meanwhile, all the pages on https://wordsandbuttons.online/ with all the animation and interactivity are still below 64 KB.

    This one, for example, https://wordsandbuttons.online/trippy_polynomials_in_arctang... is 51 KB.

    And the code is not at all economical. It's 80% copy-paste with little deviations. There is no attempt to save by being clever either, it's all just good old vanilla JS. And no zipping, no space reduction. The code is perfectly readable when opened with the "View page source" button.

    The trick is - zero dependency policy. No third party, no internal. All the code you need, you get along with the HTML file. Paradoxically, in the long run, copy-paste is a bloat preventor, not a bloat cause.

  • Writing HTML by Hand
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 19 Sep 2023
    I do all the https://wordsandbuttons.online/ by hand, and this is my top 10:

        2527 p
  • Homebrew Website Club
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Sep 2023
  • Words and Buttons
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Sep 2023
  • Rule of Three
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Aug 2023
    Cloning things makes maintenance harder linearly. Generalizing things makes maintenance harder exponentially. Counterintuitively, generalization only makes sense on small numbers or reiterations, not the vice-versa.

    I started https://wordsandbuttons.online as an experiment in zero-dependencies architecture. No third-party, no self-reference. Every page is completely independent. I was told, that as it grew, it would inevitably become impossible to maintain.

    Five years passed, including a two-year pause for writing a book. I did more than half a hundred interactive tutorials and quizzes, and continue to add them when I have time. The thing simply refuses to go "too complex to maintain". All the maintenance problems I ever faced with this design were handled within minutes. If there is too much typing, I write a Python script. If not, I do the change manually, replicate it in a few pages, and go on.

    As a free bonus, since all my pages are essentially hand-written, no dependencies = no uncontrolled growth, they are all fewer than 64 KB each. Ultra-fast to load, and I never get a "Reddit effect" since even 1000 requests a second is only 64 MB of data. It's green then tea too. I usually have a few hundred thousand visitors a year, and they barely consume enough electricity to boil a kettle of water.

    I think this rule of three, like many others is just an attempt to escape well-known complexity issues by putting them under a carpet of less known complexity issues. I'm very happy to have ignored it when considering design for my site.

  • Visualization of Common Algorithms
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Aug 2023
  • If you can't write assembly like a poet, you can read disassembly like a hunter
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Apr 2023
    Done! All the expandables have background colors now. https://github.com/akalenuk/wordsandbuttons/commit/22ef6295c... Thanks for the idea!
  • Words and Buttons Online
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Mar 2023
  • Ask HN: How to you monetize a tech blog?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Mar 2023
    Very indirectly. My https://wordsandbuttons.online/ helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning, and the book I wrote for them (https://www.manning.com/books/geometry-for-programmers) works as a hourly rate magnifier in contract work negotiations.
  • Ask HN: What has your personal website/blog done for you?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Mar 2023
    I do https://wordsandbuttons.online/ as a personal-ish website. I don't append my face to every page but a visitor is usually a few clicks away from my other works so the site is de-facto more or less personal.

    First of all, it's a nice hobby. No bullshit programming, no frameworks, no dependencies, no annoying editors. I just write my code and text and enjoy doing so.

    Second, it gives powerful motivation to study. I'm now writing a new page on rational interpolation and just yesterday I accidentally found a very simple way to avoid the Runge effect. I was just playing with interactives and it came out of the blue. There is no way I would have learned it otherwise.

    Third, it helped me cement a publishing deal with Manning. They came to me and proposed to propose them a book on geometry. And so I did. The book is called Geometry for Programmers and it's coming this summer.

    Fourth, I do public lectures (or at least I used to before the war), and the audience loves interactive illustrations. So I usually turn my site pages into presentation-like pages and do lectures with them.

    So for me, having a website pays off in multiple ways.

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    workos.com | 27 Apr 2024
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