Every workshop needs a good work bench. A good bench is stable and flat, letting you estimate the flatness of your workpiece, and with plenty of space to hold the work and clamp it down.

You can buy nice workbenches for many hundreds of dollars, and then you can buy nice clamps for many more. I wanted to use this project as a learning experience, though. So I spent my time researching table plans, trying to pick one that would give me a good surface without being a big expense.

I’m a big fan of Zach Gage’s games. He recently released a game called “Sage Solitaire” in which solitaire is played with poker hands. You can make a Full House, Straight, Straight Flush, etc, to clear cards from the board. To choose what hands to make, it’s pretty important to know what cards remain in the deck, much as it can be in poker.

I wrote Cardsharp to help me keep track of remaining cards in a Sage Solitaire deck. It’s helped improve my score quite a bit, and gave me some recent Python experience before I started looking again for backend engineering jobs.