Solving Scrabble with Crystal

I recently solved a problem I’ve always wanted to solve: writing a library that can unscramble words. I know, this is a pretty geeky and pointless endeavor. Geeky, though, is what I do.

Originally, the library focused on exact matches. Given some string, I could find all words that can be formed with those letters. After accomplishing my goal, I decided to extend the project to finding the longest word possible. I noticed that this sounded a lot like finding solutions for the game Scrabble. While the library is still a work-in-progress, I thought it might be fun to share my progress. This is the story of how I wrote a library and simple web service for solving Scrabble with Crystal.

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Meet Bullion, An ACMEv2 Certificate Authority

I’m a huge fan of Let’s Encrypt and what they’ve done to secure the Internet. They’ve made safe communication free and open. Through their ACME protocol (and subsequent ACMEv2 protocol), they have changed PKI and the way we look at automating certificate provisioning for good. All that said, Let’s Encrypt only really helps for public-facing services; for internal domains and services, I want a solution that doesn’t require creating public records. I also don’t want to reinvent all the tooling; I want to be able to use ACMEv2 (through things like cert-manager on Kubernetes or certbot for EC2). Enter Bullion, an unassuming Ruby ACMEv2 Certificate Authority built specifically for internal domains.

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