The other night, I was trying to fall asleep but I couldn't clear my thoughts. I tried to focus on counting sheep: 🐑 1... 🐑 2... but then I wondered whether there's something better for an engineer to count. I started thinking about Conway's Game of Life and began counting gliders.

Instead of calmly drifting to sleep, I kept falling down the rabbit hole.

I remembered a cool website for making simulators with rules:
- Conway's Game of Life: https://ncase.me/sim/?s=conway
- Other simulators: https://ncase.me/sim/

(The author explicitly shared the source code here)
(And I made a backup here)

I noodled on that for a while and was inspired by the use of emoji as simple UI elements. It's an easy way to spice up a program/website. I also like how they generalized the rules to make tons of different simulators possible.

(Update: I made a tiny dungeon game using emoji)

I wondered if other people would find this site cool too. To get the idea out of my head for the night, I wrote down a reminder to revisit it in the morning and consider posting about it here.

And, somehow, I eventually fell asleep.