chendry

I've been running https://nextchessmove.com/ for 12 years now. I've learned a lot while scaling it. It's currently 150+ servers according to a quick grep | wc of my ansible inventory: mostly VPS instances, but lots of dedicated servers. It's gone through several (hopefully unnoticeable) major rewrites to keep complexity manageable: CoffeeScript+jQuery to TypeScript/React, Ruby/Rails to Elixir/Phoenix, etc.

I'm a developer and spend most of my time in a terminal, usually in vim. I recently switched from OSX to Linux and have not looked back. OSX/macOS has been getting too goofy for my tastes.

I spent roughly $300 (reusing my current Apple Cinema LED monitor) to build a desktop replacement for my mac pro. Can't be happier.

Then I spent about $600 on a laptop (Thinkpad T460) to replace my Macbook Pro Retina. Also fantastic.

Everything's been great. The keyboard on the T460 is awesome. The battery life thus far is about 16 hours.

I don't see myself ever going back to macOS again. I'm running Arch, using i3 as a window manager, and feel right at home. Basically this feels like a computer again.

Thanks! It does indeed only give one move. I'm really just standing on the shoulders of the chess engines (GNUChess, Stockfish) and they simply tell me what the computer would do given a position. I'd like to get more insight into why the engine prefers one move to another, but my understanding isn't quite there yet.

I wrote a website (http://nextchessmove.com/, GNUChess-backed) and corresponding iPhone app (Stockfish-backed, $0.99, mostly covers website hosting). Both let you drag pieces around "freestyle" and ask the engine for a move.

I've gotten absolutely clobbered with traffic lately, presumably tournament-related. I'd love to hear what you all think about the site's applicability to learning the game.