Picking a Winner, One Font Pairing at a Time
Choosing a coding font is a strangely personal decision. There’s a new way to settle the debate, though: a tournament-style bracket where you pit two fonts against each other, pick your favorite, and let the bracket narrow things down to a single champion. It’s a simple, effective way to surface your own preferences without wading through endless galleries of samples.
The game itself is a lightweight web app, but what’s interesting is how it was made. Wenting Zhang built the entire thing using Retool, a low-code platform. Instead of hand-writing the full stack, she leaned on pre-built UI components and focused her own code on the core game logic and experience. The write-up on the Retool blog explains the approach in detail.
Five years ago, if I wanted to build this coding font game, I would have had to spend days or weeks hand-coding it in React or other frameworks. But since then, I have discovered no code and low code apps which are essentially libraries of pre-existing informational or functional things. They can be powered by a database or an API, and the interaction layer is standard, often with minimal customization needs.
That’s not to say no code was involved at all—the snippets of logic shared in the post are far from trivial. But they’re targeted, handling the parts that make the game what it is, while the boilerplate of layouts and state management gets handled by the platform. The final product is just an <iframe> pointing to the Retool-hosted app. It’s a neat demonstration of how much of the friction in app development has been abstracted away.
For those who prefer a curated list rather than a competition, we’ve also put together a small site showcasing some high-quality coding fonts worth a look.
