Bad Calculators and the Fruit Matrix Status

I’ve temporarily taken Bad Calculators and Fruit Matrix offline for cost reasons. I plan to bring them back, but don’t have a definitive timetable for when.

When I was teaching myself to code, I built a ton of small projects. Some of those projects were throw-away tasks to help me learn some technique or skill. But, Bad Calculators and Fruit Matrix remain projects I am proud of and passionate about.

I want these to continue to exist in the world. But, continuing to support these projects in their current state is not sustainable technically or financially.

The main source of the challenge is that I built these projects when I had very little idea what I was doing. Each has its own eccentricities and design decisions reflective of someone just learning web development. And, naturally there are consequences to not having much of an idea of what you are doing.

The most impactful consequence is that these projects cost me $21 / month to host. To me, that’s a reasonable cost for sharing personal projects. The issue is that I can’t reuse any of the resources these projects use for building new things. I want to muck around with new projects you’ll (hopefully) find cool, but I can’t justify ten more dollars per month every time I want to roll out a new project.

So, I started building some infrastructure that could support multiple projects at a fixed cost. You’re reading this update on that infrastructure. It’s super messy and needs tons of work, but it is headed in the right direction. It’s far enough along now, that it is time to migrate Bad Calculators and Fruit Matrix to this new infrastructure.

There’s a lot of work to do. But, I’m going to prioritize getting things up-and-running in a minimal way. I know you all get way more use out of Bad Calculators, so I’ll work on recreating those puzzles with reduced features. Initially it won’t include saving progress via an account nor adaptive rankings of puzzles based on difficulty. I’ve got some ideas to make things better, and this new infrastructure unlocks some of that!

I really appreciate the love many have shown these projects in and the past and I’m sad they won’t be available for a time. I’ll do my best to keep that time short and to bring them back better than ever.