coreyja.fm Episode 2: Taking Over Battlesnake

Hey Team! Episode 2 is out — this one's all about Battlesnake.

You can listen to Episode 2 here.

Before diving into Battlesnake, I covered a couple things:

Mull is getting close to launch. If you want to try it, head to mull.sh and sign up for the wait list — I'm hoping to start pulling people off in the next couple weeks.

Grove is a new CLI I built for managing Git worktrees. With AI agents writing code in parallel, you end up needing multiple copies of your repo running at once. Grove handles creating worktrees, spinning up isolated databases, running setup commands, and opening your editor. Check it out at grove.coreyja.com.

The bulk of the episode is the Battlesnake deep dive. If you haven't seen it, Battlesnake is a competitive programming game — you write a web server that controls a snake, the engine POSTs the game state to your /move endpoint every turn, and you have 500ms to respond with a direction. It's multiplayer snake where the last one alive wins.

I got hooked in 2021, competed in tournaments, and gave a talk at RustConf 2023 about it. When the original team moved on and the project went community-driven, I joined the core team. Then in January this year, I took over the infrastructure and day-to-day operations from Brad (the original creator).

Two big things are happening:

The RFC process — The Battlesnake rules have always been defined by the Go implementation. I'm writing them up as a plain-English specification so we can build alternative implementations (in Rust, naturally) and verify them against the spec. There's a draft RFC for the standard rule set already.

Arena — A complete rewrite of the platform in Rust, live at arena.battlesnake.com. You can sign in with GitHub, register a snake, and play leaderboard games today. It's built on my CJA framework (Axum + job queue + cron), which is a stack I know inside and out. That matters because this is my first personal project where other people depend on uptime.

Custom tournaments are the most-requested feature — bracket-style events for live streams, hackathons, and school groups. Targeting summer 2026.

Solo challenges were the best on-ramp when I started playing. Things like "grow the longest snake" or "survive 500 turns." Bringing those back to make it easier for new players.

I'm also hoping to get Brad on as a guest for a future episode to talk about the history of Battlesnake. See you in two weeks!

As always — coreyja.com, @coreyja.com on Bluesky, coreyja on GitHub. Or just reply to this email.