Spindle, a cross between Wordle and a Rubik's Cube made in PHP
Hi HN, I was late to wordle, so I am also late to making my own version. In Spindle, you rotate words on a grid with the aim of assembling the day’s target word. I enjoy it, so I thought some of you might enjoy it too. From a tech perspective, it’s a very simple Laravel / Livewire app. My happy place in recent years has been Typescript and SvelteKit, so this was a bit of an adjustment, but it allowed me to take advantage of an existing shared hosting server meaning no additional financial outlay. Happy to report a positive experience with PHP and this framework, although I do miss…
In plain words
Spindle is a daily word puzzle game that combines Wordle mechanics with Rubik's Cube-style rotation. Players rotate words on a grid to assemble the target word for the day. Built with Laravel and Livewire on PHP, the game is simple to play and runs on basic shared hosting. It's designed for players who enjoy word puzzles and spatial reasoning challenges.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I was late to wordle, so I am also late to making my own version. In Spindle, you rotate words on a grid with the aim of assembling the day’s target word. I enjoy it, so I thought some of you might enjoy it too. From a tech perspective, it’s a very simple Laravel / Livewire app. My happy place in recent years has been Typescript and SvelteKit, so this was a bit of an adjustment, but it allowed me to take advantage of an existing shared hosting server meaning no additional financial outlay. Happy to report a positive experience with PHP and this framework, although I do miss types! Deploying with rsync feels enjoyably old school. (I gather PHP does have types now, but perhaps I’m using the wrong IDE or need a specific VS.Code plugin…) Very happy to answer any questions, although I’m the first to admit it’s very simple from a tech perspective. Your guess at how it was implemented is probably a better solution than what I actually did :) Happy holidays all!
More dev tools this month
the category →
Open-source GTM skills for technical founders
Dev tools · 29d ago · gtmcofounder.com
OpenTrailPaper is open-source bike computer firmware for the LilyGO T5S3 4.7" E-Paper PRO. It supports offline maps, GPX routes, FIT recording and Bluetooth sensors.
Dev tools · 2d ago · opentrailpaper.com
Launched alongside, December 2023
the whole month →- BM
Hi HN! I’m proud to share that we have built a real 3rd party iMessage client for Android. We did it by reverse engineering the iMessage protocol and encryption system. It's available to download today (no waitlist): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.beeper.ima and there's a technical writeup here: https://blog.beeper.com/p/how-beeper-mini-works. Unlike every other attempt to build an iMessage app for Android (including our first gen app), Beeper Mini does not use a Mac server relay in the cloud. The app connects directly to Apple…
Commerce · 2023 · beeper.com
- HA
Hey! I made Heynote entirely for my own use case. For many years, I always had an Emacs instance running with the scratch buffer open, even long after I had abandoned Emacs as my programming editor in favor of more recent IDE:s. The simplicity of having just one big scratch buffer appeals to me, but I still want to separate the different things I jot down somehow (without using tabs or similar). Previously, my solution was to insert a bunch of blank lines between the notes, but hitting C-A would still select the entire buffer. That's why I came up with the concept of "blocks", which turned…
Work · 2023 · heynote.com
FuseBase▲941Client collaboration platform for professional services
Dev tools · 2023 · thefusebase.com
Beep! 2.0▲871Fastest tool to assign and share visual tasks with your team
Work · 2023 · justbeepit.com
