Software Design on Ayberk's Blog

Perfection is when there is nothing left to remove

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:33:31 -0700

What a broken seat sensor taught me about simplicity and robust software design.

Solving Wordle

Sat, 19 Feb 2022 22:28:21 -0800

It all started on Discord. I was on a call with my friends and it was clear that they were doing much better than me at this new viral game called Wordle. For those who don’t know, it’s a game where you try to guess a 5-letter word using the hints given to you. When you make a guess, you are given back a “feedback”:

Green if you guessed the correct letter in the correct position¹
Yellow if the letter is in the word but in a different position
Gray if the letter doesn’t exist in the word

It’s a pretty simple and fun game, so of course it went viral. So much so, it was acquired by The New York Times². But I digress. On that Discord call I remembered that while I might not be good at the game, I’m not too bad at making computers do certain things – and this game looked like something that a computer would be much better at than humans. So on that call, I started thinking out loud, annoying my friends, to quickly come up with an algorithm. Since my memory is really bad (why do you think I’m bad at Wordle?), I quickly wrote the algorithm down on a google sheet:

The Other Side of The Interviews

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 21:59:38 -0700

We all hate it, but we all have to do it: software engineering interviews. Even the well-prepared candidates inevitably make common non-technical mistakes and are graded harshly for it. To make matters worse, feedback is rarely, if ever, given, and all the while interview preparation has become a standalone business. As someone who has facilitated dozens of these interviews, I believe this current state of affairs is a consequence of candidates rarely being on the other side of the table.