Was out to dinner with the family, and my kids were enthralled with the "word search" that was on the kid's menu. I thought it'd be cool to build a custom word search generator - given an arbitrary list of words, it'd spit out a grid containing them. The part that made it fun was trying to figure out a layout for an arbitrary list of words that would be as compact as reasonably possible. I was able to get something working in just a couple of hours, and my kids loved being able to do word searches with stuff that was relevant to them, like names of family members. Of course, there are tons of similar generators freely available online, but it was very satisfying to figure it out for myself and come up with something that the kids enjoyed.
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