Wordy Royale
LIVEA real-time word search against other people. Find a word first and it's gone for everyone else.
Free to play · Play as a guest · Word Search live
techdad.io — status: live
I build things. Then I write down how.
A practical, no-fluff record of how I build software, tools, and products — mistakes, decisions, and the parts nobody puts in the tutorial.
Build Logs
Wordy Royale Got a Second Game. Then We Asked How We Knew It Worked.
Wordy Royale shipped a second game. Then we spent a week asking how we knew it worked, and three times out of four the answer was: we didn't.
LESSON9 min readSep 8, 2026
What I'm building
The writing on this site comes out of getting these to work.
Latest
Tutorials10 min read
From Markdown to a Live Site with Astro Content Collections
Turn a folder of Markdown into a typed collection where a malformed post fails the build — including the draft flag that has to be honored in three places to stay off the live site.
Sep 14, 2026
Tutorials11 min read
The Agent Company: How We Run a Team of Claude Agents
Running several AI agents on one codebase is a coordination problem, not a capability one — the five rules we pay for it with, and how to write your own operating doc in an afternoon.
Sep 14, 2026
Build Logs8 min read
Building Wordy Royale: Three Weeks, and the Four Things That Broke
We built the coin-economy core of a multiplayer word game platform in about three weeks: what shipped, four things that broke along the way, and the tooling that keeps a play-money ledger honest.
Aug 18, 2026
Tutorials7 min read
Getting Started with Claude Code: Your First Session
Install Claude Code, run it in your own repo, and complete one small real task — with the reviewing habit and project instructions file that make it safe to trust.
Jul 5, 2026
Tutorials7 min read
How We Deploy: Railway, Staging, and One Branch to Production
Set up a Railway project with separate staging and production environments mapped to git branches, commit your deploy config instead of leaving it in a dashboard, and keep a human on the promotion decision.
Jul 5, 2026
Build Logs8 min read
How We Shipped an AI-Literacy Game in About a Day
We built and shipped a playable AI-literacy game for teens in about a day, using a team of AI agents each assigned one role. Here's the actual process — plan, build, blind review, two real bugs, and the human call to ship.
Jul 5, 2026
Primers — the building blocks
Short, single-concept reads. Enter cold; link out to the lessons that use them.
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Build Logs3 posts
How we built real projects, start to finish — decisions, bugs, and tradeoffs.
Tutorials4 posts
Step-by-step and hands-on. You build the thing yourself.
Primers2 posts
One concept, explained cleanly — the building blocks the lessons lean on.
Toolbox0 posts
What a tool is and why we reach for it.
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