Type Two Letters, Get a Record: Building a Music Recommender with a Trie and Quicksort

Ioana Daria — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:38:53 +0000

I collect vinyl, and I'd just finished the Trees and Graphs module on Codecademy's Computer Science path. So when the portfolio project asked me to build a recommendation program, the choice made itself: a tool where you type a couple of letters, and it suggests a genre from my shelves, then ranks the best records in it. It's small, but it let me put two things I'd just learned — a tree structure and a sorting algorithm — to work on data I actually care about.

How it works

You type a few letters, the program suggests a matching genre, and if you say yes, it prints that genre's albums ranked best-first.

The code

The program has two moving parts. The first is a trie — a tree that stores each genre one letter per node, so words sharing a start (like rock and rap) share nodes. Typing letters is just a walk down the tree: from the letters you enter, I step to that node and collect every complete genre in the subtree below it. That's the autocomplete behaviour, and it's a plain recursive tree traversal underneath. The second part is a quicksort that ranks a genre's albums by rating before display. I wrote it to take a key function, so the same sort can order by rating or by year without changing the algorithm — it partitions each list around a pivot into higher, equal, and lower buckets and recurses. The data lives in a dictionary mapping each genre to a list of album records, and a short terminal loop ties it together: read input, search the trie, sort the results, print them.

Code on GitHub: https://github.com/ioanadaria/music-recommender

Conclusion

Building this made a trie click in a way the lessons alone didn't — seeing shared prefixes fall out of the structure for free, rather than being something I had to code. The obvious next step is letting the user pick when several genres match instead of defaulting to the first, and swapping the sort key to rank by year. If you're learning data structures, I'd recommend picking data you find fun; debugging a trie is a lot more motivating when the payoff is a record recommendation.

I Built a Wordle Clone in Python - Here's How You Can Too

Ioana Daria — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:22:51 +0000

Introduction

Wordle took the world by storm in 2022 — a simple daily word puzzle that had millions of people sharing colored squares on social media. What made it so compelling wasn't complexity - it was clarity. You get six guesses to find a hidden five-letter word, and each guess tells you exactly how close you are.

I wanted to understand that magic from the inside, so I built my own Wordle clone that runs entirely in the terminal using Python. This project was part of a personal challenge to build an interactive terminal program from scratch, version-control it with Git, and write about it. Whether you're a beginner looking for a fun project or a developer who wants to see how color-coded terminal output works, this post is for you.

What It Looks Like

Caption: The Wordle clone running in the terminal with color-coded feedback

How the Code Works

The full source is on GitHub: [https://github.com/ioanadaria/wordle-clone]

The program is built around three core ideas:

ANSI color codes for terminal styling
Standard Python print() can't produce colored output on its own, but terminals support ANSI escape codes — special character sequences that change text color and background. Green (\033[42m) marks a correct letter in the right position, yellow (\033[43m) marks a correct letter in the wrong position, and gray (\033[100m) means the letter isn't in the word at all.
Two-pass feedback logic
Scoring a guess against the secret word sounds simple but has a subtle edge case: duplicate letters. The get_feedback() function handles this with two passes — the first pass locks in all exact (green) matches, removing those letters from consideration. The second pass then checks remaining letters for yellow matches. This prevents a letter from being double-counted.
Input validation with input()
Every guess is validated in a loop: it must be exactly five characters and contain only letters. If not, the player is prompted again. This keeps the game from crashing on bad input and makes it feel polished.

The game loop itself is clean — six attempts, feedback after each guess, a win message if the player solves it, and a "play again?" prompt at the end.

Conclusion

Building this Wordle clone taught me more than I expected. The color output alone opened up a whole area of terminal programming I hadn't explored before, and the duplicate-letter problem forced me to think carefully about state. It's a small project, but it has real depth hiding inside it.

If you want to extend it, here are some ideas:

Load the word list from an external .txt file
Track and display win streaks
Add a hard mode that forces you to reuse confirmed letters
Port it to a web app using Flask

The full code is available here: [https://github.com/ioanadaria/wordle-clone] — feel free to fork it, break it, and make it your own.

DEV Community: Ioana Daria

Type Two Letters, Get a Record: Building a Music Recommender with a Trie and Quicksort

How it works

The code

Conclusion

I Built a Wordle Clone in Python - Here's How You Can Too