This is a tool for editing / solving crosswords in a web-browser. I have some relatives who like to work on crossword puzzles together over video call - I made this for them to make it easier to keep the puzzle synced across the call.
Live at crossword.gloudemans.fun
Collaborative Editing: Different users can work together on a single puzzle - the host creates a game code, and other users can enter the game code to join. Any edits made by any user sync in real time for all participants
Picture-to-puzzle: Rather than manually selecting all the black boxes to setup the puzzle, you can automatically set the puzzle up using a photo. Just upload a photo and select the corners of the puzzle in the image, and the puzzle will auto-adjust to the correct dimensions and autofill the black boxes.
Hosting: Originally used GitHub pages, moved to Firebase Hosting when I started using other GCP services for the extra features
Collaborative editing: Firebase Realtime Database makes this really straightforward. Just add the SDK in JavaScript and add some reading and writing and callbacks
Picture-to-puzzle: Made a really basic Cloud Run microservice with a single POST endpoint that takes in an image and spits out a grid of 1s and 0s representing the puzzle. Written in Python - Flask for the server, OpenCV / Numpy for the image processing
Version control / deployment: Both the web app sever (Firebase Hosting) and the Cloud Run microservice are linked to this GitHub repo - any changes to the master branch trigger a re-deploy of the website, and changes to the crossword-from-image directory trigger Cloud Build to build the container and upgrade to the latest version. Also if I create a PR of a branch into master, Firebase creates a temporary url with the new version, so I can make sure the changes are working before merging. Pretty cool stuff!
