From JSON to Playable Marupeke Puzzles

Marupeke puzzles are not the most challenging or elaborate games, but there's something satisfying about creating a Rust algorithm (as a Rust noob) to generate hundreds of these puzzles.

Over the past few months, I've been working on creating these puzzles programmatically during the weekends and early mornings and I've now reached the point where I can add a daily puzzle to marupeke.today.

The puzzles there are simple and mildly fun, but learning rust with AI code generators and seeing it come to life has been rewarding enough for me.

It's been strangely fun to work on a small project, away from the corporate drudgery. As I mentioned previously, the mind seeks ways to express itself creatively. After years of saving and investing money, the desire to produce and have complete ownership over my work is becoming stronger.

The goal was to learn Rust by building something meaningful. I think I've achieved that. But the project isn't quite finished yet– there's one final step to make it truly complete: enabling visitors to buy a PDF puzzle book with 100 puzzles.

What's Left to Do

To wrap everything up, here's what I still need to complete.

• Create the puzzle book.
• Upload it to S3.
• Add a payment link with Stripe.
• Build a Thank You page with a link to the book.

But It's Just a Puzzle Book

Yeah, but so what? Corporate life often asks us to channel our best hours into someone else's vision, while side projects let us move fast and make decisions without endless alignment meetings.

These projects remind me of the value of owning something–even something small. The simplicity of the work is freeing compared to the growing complexity of large organizations.

The Challenge of Finishing

Still, my brain already wants to move on to the next shiny thing. The real challenge is committing to finishing this little project instead of abandoning it for something new in a never-ending cycle of starting without finishing.

See you in the next one.