Devlog 0 - renaming and joining

First, some background.

I’ve been working on a chess engine for a couple months now - first in Python, then in Rust. The Python implementation had a few problems. It made illegal moves and was buggy in general. But it had one problem that couldn’t be solved by more loss of sleep: It was written in Python. This made it incredibly slow, and you can’t do much about the language you’re writing in. I tried for a couple days to port the code base over to Codon, a compiled implementation of Python, but I had used dynamic typing so much that it wouldn’t have been feasible.
So I came to a crossroads. I could keep working on the Python project, with the limitations of either an incredibly slow environment or an unpopular one, or I could leave my comfort zone, learn something, rewrite it in Rust. I’m now about 2000 lines into the Rust version, and it’s faster and more accurate than the old one could ever dream of being.

Joining Stardance

I joined Hack Club a couple days ago, and I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve had fun talking to other like-minded “hackers”. I was reading about Stardance, and it seemed like the thing to do. I was even told that I could bring an existing project! I renamed my engine (“Sophisticate”) to Ocelot, and joined.