I’m taking an advanced ReactJS class in a month, so I needed to get back into front-end a little and remember everything I’ve forgotten.

I’ve been playing a lot of chess with my daughter, and I love chess puzzles, the kind you see in newspapers and books that prompt you to pick the best move for white or black or explain why a certain move won’t work.

I don’t think I can get into hosting or connecting to an engine like Stockfish right now, but given the theme of ‘post and share’ I had from QuizWiz, I thought, “Why not a puzzle site?”

So, my first attempt is at https://www.stevenvictor.net/chess/

There was a mistake in one of the puzzles early-on, and within hours, someone was making fun of it on reddit. I was flattered :)

The code isn’t as clean as I’d like yet – modeling ranks and files is basically an invitation for off-by-one errors :), but I felt like sharing anyway. At first, I was afraid to do bitmap textures for the background – it felt like a bad throwback to 1995 geocities home pages, but I think it turned out all right. I want to add another minimal color scheme mode and a way to easily share to Instagram or print to pdf.

Also, I want to make an authoring tool and a back-end to store submissions.

Here’s what I have so far for authoring. I want to clean up the CSS and merge this with the puzzle viewing page before it goes online. Once that’s better, I’ll start on the back-end.