If you were to ask me “Bailey, how many coffees have you had today?”, I could probably give you an answer. But how can I really know?

It started with IsBaileyButlerInTheOffice.Today (or IBBITOT for short), a service I had built to track whether I’m in the office on any given day. I habitually have a coffee when I get into the office every day. My colleagues, fascinated by IBBITOT and my coffee drinking habits, started asking the question: “how caffeinated is Bailey Butler today?”

Knowing I had a coffee is one thing. Knowing how much caffeine is currently running through my body at 10:45am is another. That distinction is what led me down a rabbit hole of quasi-scientific research into caffeine and the body. The parameters I landed on, roughly scaled to my body weight:

I am a sucker for a good logic puzzle. I am also a sucker for a good leaderboard. And I am also also a sucker for a good software engineering problem - which is really just an extension of a good logic puzzle.

It is quite fortunate then that PuzzleTeam host an array of logic puzzles online, such as Pipes and Binairo. It is also quite fortunate then that those online puzzles are backed by daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time leaderboards where people can compete to complete the puzzle in the shortest time. And it is also also quite fortunate that there is a separate “Robots / programmatic solvers” leaderboard for each of those puzzles.

This post will focus mainly on Pipes and Binairo, however I highly recommend you try any of the other puzzles by PuzzleTeam too.

Earlier this year I travelled to Japan with a group of colleagues. We explored Tokyo and Osaka, and enjoyed plenty of yakiniku, famichiki, and strong zeroes. As much as we were enjoying our travels, we also wanted to share our experience as we travelled around with our colleagues and friends back home.

I could have opted for an elegant solution for us, a solution to a problem that has already been solved - such as WordPress or simple Hugo site. But as a software engineer, the natural solution is to iterate on the wheel and produce an even better solution. Given our familiarity with GitHub, it felt like an easy choice for it to be our platform to interface with for creating our posts.