Expo, A Christmas Story🎄 When I was a child, you sometimes received hand sewn or knit articles of clothing from a family member that had such talent. My talent is a bit different, though. This year, instead of a hand-knit sweater, I gave a gift I can make: an app. My father-in-law is retired, loves crossword puzzles, and still prints them from the newspaper to solve over coffee ☕️ So I built him a personalized crossword app. I didn’t know how to generate crosswords — AI handled that part. H/T to @GantLaborde for setting me on my way with some starting parameters: 2d array, largest word in the middle, a fit word function to connect to existing words. With @expo, the rest was straightforward enough to design, build, and ship in just a few hours. The app includes: 🧩 A pre-seeded word bank tailored to his life 💼 His jobs:🚓 Police officer → 🔥 volunteer fireman → ⚰️ funeral director ❤️ His interests: 🏈 Sports, 🛠️ fixing lawn mowers for beer, 🌱 gardening (begrudgingly), 🚗 road trips He can: • Pick a theme • Choose difficulty (different clues per level) • Select grid size • Preview the puzzle • Optionally reveal solutions • Print it instantly via `expo-print` Built with EAS and via `npx testflight`, shipped directly to him when he unwraps his QR code later this week. My eventual goal is to add a chat interface to prompt an LLM for endless puzzles, but I'm extremely happy where it's at now. A small app. A very meaningful gift. Sometimes the best presents are the ones you build ❤️

Here is a patch to test CSS grid in React native.