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
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.
LESSON8 min readAug 18, 2026
What I'm building
The writing on this site comes out of getting these to work.
Latest
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 Logs2 posts
How we built real projects, start to finish — decisions, bugs, and tradeoffs.
Tutorials2 posts
Step-by-step and hands-on. You build the thing yourself.
Primers1 post
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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