Herman Schaaf

Mostly software, games and lists of three things

I’m a long-time software engineer, and I like to think and write about software, algorithms, and building great products. I also like to talk about books and games, including puzzle games and game development. If this is your first time here, maybe you would like to dive straight in and read about an algorithm to solve regex crosswords. Or if you like books, check out my controversial-on-hacker-news post 3 Rules for Choosing Nonfiction Books.

In 2026 I founded Moya Labs, a UK-based software development studio that specializes in data- or AI-heavy applications. We have built, among other things, BankStatement.to and Moya Chinese. My work often involves data engineering and AI, and I previously worked as director of engineering or staff-level software engineer at CloudQuery, Fastly and Skyscanner.

You may also know about another open source project, Go Report Card, that I started many years ago with my friend Shawn Smith.

Moya Chinese

A new iOS app for learning Chinese, 11 years in the making

New Game: Picnic on the Moon

Picnic on the Moon is a daily puzzle game. A robot tells you what it's bringing — can you figure out the rule?

Moving my Blog from Hugo to Zola

Zola is the static site generator I almost built myself, but thankfully didn't need to

Rugby

An Algorithmic Approach

Minimum Palindrome Partitions

Given a string, partition it such that every substring of the partition is a palindrome

I Rewrote my Blog in Go

Streamlining from Django to Go. Here's what happened