Gambito, a chess App in Rust

danigm — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0200

Chess

I've been always interested in Chess, but never learned to play it correctly or even spent some time playing more than a couple of matches with friends. But during the COVID lockdown I started to watch people playing chess, and then I realized that the game is even more fun than I expected.

After that I started to play a bit online and discovered the great online platform Lichess, that's even free software. I do not play a lot, but I discovered that I like a lot the game and I watch chess streamers everyday and I even followed the professional competition.

So if you don't play chess, give it a try, it's a really nice board game, and a beauty "video game" that you can play online in a complete free software platform with a lot of community resources to learn, and even if you are a bad player like me, you can always enjoy the beauty of the chess watching other people playing.

Gambito

With this new interesting hobby, I installed the chess application that I found in gnome. GNOME Chess is a good application, but then I ask myself, why not rewrite it in Rust? Okay, it's not a rewrite, it's just a new application, my idea is not to replace GNOME Chess, but to experiment with Gtk4 and Rust, and that's the reason I started to work on Gambito, that's just a new Chess game for GNOME, written in Rust with Gtk4.

The first idea was to create a simple app, without widget inheritance or anything, just draw a board with existing Gtk Widgets, and do the drawing with CSS and the interaction with drag & drop. And I did that for almost all the application, but at some point I needed something more specific that I was unable to do without a new widget. So right now almost everything is done that way but the marks and arrows, that are custom widgets.

I'm doing almost all the development in live streaming (in Spanish), in my twitch account, so you can find some of the videos here in my youtube channel.

Right now you can use the application to play against Stockfish or to analyse a match. At the beginning the idea was to create just a chess game, but right now I'm thinking more about a chess learning application, so I think I'll work more in analysis tools, tactic training games, and maybe some good content for beginners, inside the application, like a tutorial and some kind of assistant with theory.

And there's a lot of fun things to do, like linking with the Lichess platform, to be able to watch games in live, play online using the app instead the web interface, analyze Lichess matches and look for cheaters doing some kind of IA (yes, there are cheaters using chess engines to win matches in online chess platforms, I don't know why, but there are people like that).

So I'm getting a lot of fun from the old game Chess, fun playing, fun watching an fun writing a Chess game.

Have fun!

Twitch: GNOME live coding streaming

danigm — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0100

This year I've started with something that I wanted to do since the first COVID lockdown, but never did. So as a first year resolution I decided to start streaming and I created my Twitch channel Abentogil.

I've been thinking about streaming since lockdown, when a group of Spanish people created a nice initiative to teach kids how to code and other tech stuff. I never participated on that initiative, but it was the seed of this.

This year I've seen other GNOME streamers doing live coding, like ebassi and Georges and, at the end, I pluck up the courage to start.

The plan

I've started with one our at the end of my day, so I'm trying to stream from Monday to Thursday from 20:00 to 21:00 (CET).

This routing also will help me to spend more time in free software development regularly, so not just on weekends or holidays, but a bit of work everyday.

Right now I've started working on my own projects, like Timetrack and Loop. I've fixed some issues that I had with Gtk4 in Timetrack and I've started to work on the Loop app to add a MIDI keyboard.

The other day I discovered the Music Grid app idea in the gitlab and it's related with the MIDI implementation I've been working on, so the next thing that I'll do on my streams is to create this music grid widget and add it to the Loop app, to have a nice Music creation App.

The language: Live coding in Spanish

I've decided to do the streaming mainly in Spanish. The main reason to do that is because now you can find documentation and a lot of videos in English, but for people that doesn't master the English language, it's harder to follow this content and even harder to participate, to ask or say something.

Spanish is also my main language, and the idea is not just create tutorials or something like that, this is just for fun, and if I'm able to create a small community or influence someone, I want to show that the language is not a unbreakable barrier.

I want to make this for the Spanish community, but that doesn't mean that for some streams I cannot talk in English, all depends on the audience, of course, if a non Spanish speaker comes and ask something, I'll answer in English and try to do multilingual stream.

The International English is the language to use in Free Software, but it's really important to do not convert that in a barrier, because there are a lot of different communities and people that don't know the language and the first contact with something new is always better in your main language. Everything is easier with help from people that's near to your cultural background.

The future

Right now I'm working on Loop and every stream is similar, live coding on this Gtk4 music APP, but in the future I'll do different streams, doing different things on each week day. These are the current ideas that could be a day on my stream:

Maintenance day: Work on my apps, code review, fixes, releases, and development.
GNOME Love day: Give some love to the GNOME project, look for simple bugs to solve in different projects, help with translations, initiatives, and other possible one hour task to give some love to the project in general.
Learning day: Pick some technology and learn by doing, for example, I can explore new programming languages writing a simple app, learn about Linux writing a driver, learn how to animate with blender, anything new to play and discover.
Newcomers day: Create simple tutorial or introduction to some technology, How to write a GNOME Shell extension, how to create a Gtk4 app in python, teach to code from zero, etc.

This is just a list of ideas, if I discover any other interesting use of this time and stream, I can do that. The final goal of this is to have fun, and if someone learns something in the journey, that's even better.

I'll also upload any interesting stream to youtube, so the good content could be viewed on demand.

So if you like this, don't hesitate to view some of the streams and say "Hola":