hape42
Backgammon & Golf, with a side of iOS code.
Backgammon & Golf, with a side of iOS code.
I'm Peter Schneider — though my passport says Hans Peter. Hape comes from there.
The 42 is from Douglas Adams: in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer spends seven and a half million years computing the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything — and concludes, with a straight face, that the answer is forty-two. Adams later admitted he picked the number at random because it sounded right. Geeks have been quoting it ever since. I mark my golf balls with a 42, so when one of them lands in the rough I know whose it is. Backgammon's doubling cube shows up in my logo for the same reason: it's a number that follows me around.
I studied computer science more than forty years ago, spent a few early years actually writing software, and then drifted into management for most of my working life. Four years ago I retired, picked up golf and backgammon properly — and rediscovered programming as a hobby. These days I mostly build iOS apps in Objective-C and Swift, mostly for myself, sometimes for friends, occasionally for the App Store. The projects I care most about are the ones at the intersection of the things I love: backgammon, golf, and writing clean code.
DailyGammon is a wonderful turn-based backgammon site that's been running since the late 90s. It has thousands of active players and a charm you don't find on slicker, newer platforms.
The catch: the official site is web-only, and using it on a phone is… let's say characterful. So I built an iOS client that scrapes the web pages and presents them in a native interface. About a thousand people use it on a regular basis.
The app is open source and I'd love help with it — especially from anyone who knows Objective-C and likes backgammon. Even bug reports and feature ideas are gold.
I keep a running log of my backgammon match series: opponents, results, performance ratings (PR), match-by-match breakdowns. It's part personal record, part way to spot the kind of mistakes that keep showing up in my own play.
If you'd like to play, here's where I am:
When I'm not pushing checkers, I'm pushing a small white ball across grass. My home course is Golfanlage Hummelbachaue near Neuss — a flat parkland course that asks you to think more than to muscle. Water comes into play on a number of holes and the wind off the Lower Rhine has its opinions, so even a short par four can humble you nicely.
If you happen to find a ball in the rough with a 42 on it, let's trade — I'll give you one of the many balls other golfers have lost in the rough over the years.