GitHub link here.
Recently I have gotten back into the New York Times mini, a bite-sized 5x5 crossword1 that most often takes under a minute to solve.
My best time is 11 seconds and I will forever chase that feeling of frantic glory, as I have never come close to that time since. These days, I earn my mini-related happiness by plastering my time at the top of my friends’ leaderboard.
There is no shared history visible for this leaderboard, though, which means that the day’s victory is eventually erased and soon forgotten. In my ongoing theme of improving the entire New York Times games section I wrote a script to scrape the leaderboard, save it to a file, and send a daily roundup to a Discord channel. Additionally it prints weekly, monthly, and yearly summaries for posterity.
This entire project is a little self-serving, as I find myself at the top of the leaderboard more often than any of my friends. Were this not the case, I doubt I would have been so enthusiastic to immortalize these records. History is written by the victors!
Except for the Saturday minis, which are most commonly 7x7 but occasionally have irregular formats. ^