Swedle

A daily puzzle game where players diagnose common software engineering problems through progressive clues — inspired by Wordle but for SWE/tech.

Play at swedle.com

How It Works

Each day there's one answer: a canonical SWE problem or antipattern. Players receive up to 6 clues, starting vague and getting progressively more specific. Guess after any clue or skip to reveal the next one. Fewer clues = better score.

Share Format

Swedle #42 — 3/6 clues
🟥🟥🟩⬜⬜⬜
swedle.com

• 🟩 Correct guess on this clue
• 🟥 Wrong guess or skipped
• ⬜ Unused clue

Answer Taxonomy

All puzzles draw exclusively from four canonical sources:

1. Site Reliability Engineering (Google SRE Book) — toil, cascading failures, error budgets, incident patterns
2. Martin Fowler's Catalog — code smells, architectural antipatterns, refactoring patterns
3. The 12 Factor App — config, backing services, statelessness violations, deployment antipatterns
4. Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann) — replication lag, split-brain, hotspot partitions, thundering herd, write amplification, consistency anomalies

Puzzle Format

Puzzles are stored in public/puzzles.json. Each entry:

{
  "id": 1,
  "answer": "N+1 Query Problem",
  "source": "Martin Fowler",
  "clues": [
    "Clue 1 — vaguest",
    "Clue 2",
    "Clue 3",
    "Clue 4",
    "Clue 5",
    "Clue 6 — most specific"
  ],
  "explanation": "One-line explanation shown after the answer is revealed."
}

Contributing Puzzles

1. Fork the repo
2. Add a new entry to public/puzzles.json
3. Ensure: 6 clues (vague → specific), valid source, unique answer
4. Open a PR

Tech Stack

• React + Vite
• GitHub Pages deployment
• Daily puzzle resets at midnight PST
• Streak tracking via localStorage

Development

npm install
npm run dev

Deploy

npm run deploy

License

Apache 2.0 — © Adar Butel