Starts With Ends With

Long story short... I built a website that lets you search for words based on their first and last letters. Is it any good? Absolutely NOT... but alas... here is the website for you to try and break :)

If I'm being honest...

... I have absolutely NO clue where this project idea came from.

The most that I remember that I conceptualized of an application like this sometime around mid 2020.

Moreover, I've always had a Python implementation. The code is rather short and it's a matter of searching a really large list of words for certain characters.

All that I did was...

Download a dataset of about 479 thousand English words
Grab a letter to check for the first character
Grab a letter to check for the last character
Loop, loop, loop... and you guessed it... LOOP

Here was the implementation that I went with back in 2020.

valid_words = set(open('words.txt', "r").read().split())

first_letter = "a"
last_letter = "t"

results = [
  word for word in words
  if word.startswith(first_letter)
  and word.endswith(last_letter)
]

print(results)

Dusting Ye Ole Project Off

A couple days ago, I was just scrolling through my previous projects... stuff that I had done during the times of COVID and beyond.

This was one of those projects that I happen to dust off.

In my eyes, I saw it as a pretty chill project that I could knock out in a few hours.

Hmm... WHY NOT??

I said as I proceeded to slap together this hell of a product.

So... what does it do again??

Here's the homepage

It allows you to choose the letter it should start with and the letter that it should end with.

From there, you click the question mark and results appear.

So... HOW exactly did you build this??

At first, I wanted to whip this up using Next.js. I had grown quickly fond of the library and didn't mind creating another site with it.

However, I wanted to publish on Netlify. I've always procrastinated on doing so. As a result... I'VE NEVER REALLY KNOWN HOW THE PROCESS WORKS (spoilers, it was super easy and went well)

I ended up using React and TailwindCSS.

For the fade in animations, I used a super handy component and used react-router to create the simple route between the homepage and the search results page.

The algorithm to search for the words was written in plain Javascript and is pretty similar to my approach in Python.

function wordSearch(startingLetter, endingLetter) {
  let searchResults = [];

  for (let word of wordList)
  {
    let firstLetterMatch = word.charAt(0).toUpperCase() === startingLetter;
    let lastLetterMatch = word.charAt(word.length - 1).toUpperCase() === endingLetter;

    if (firstLetterMatch && lastLetterMatch)
    {
      searchResults.push(word);
    }
  }

  return searchResults;
}

Some Next Steps

There are definitely a few things that I could do as a next set of steps...

1. A better goddamn name.

"Starts With Ends With" is a HORRIBLE name. Sure it gets straight to the point... but alas... IT STILL SUCKS.

Even when I first implemented it in Python back in 2020, I STILL didn't know what I could name it.

In general... I SUCK AT NAMING THINGS.

Ironically, while this is the first step that I'd like to take, it may as well be the last step that I'd take.

2. Incorporate definitions

At the end of the day, all that Start With Ends With only does is give you words... and that's it.

It's just a WALL of words.

It's super DULL and BORING and doesn't hold much to it.

At the end of the day however, it may as well be a result of what I wanted to build.

Regardless, I'd still love to iterate on this site with fresh ideas.

3. I can't describe it with one sentence but hear me out.

Whenever I'm searching something like an online converter, I always see websites that pump out one of their pages and acts as if it's a separate application.

I can't word it well... but the idea is that I'd like it so that when a user searches something along the lines of "what words starts with t and ends with a", they see my website and the certain search result included.

4. Design the site a tad better

The site is only really three colors (and one of them IS LITERALLY JUST MY NAME)

There's space to improve on the layout.

Final Thoughts (for now???)

Not bad... that's really all that I have to say.