Enigma
a walkthrough from Caesar ciphers to a working Enigma machine
Details
- External ID
- 48295250
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Enigma
- Website domain
- rory.codes
- Launched
- May 27, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1147011308562197
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I recently went on a long walk (to get newborn twins to nap) and ended up having a long discussion with ChatGPT in voice mode; asking it to explain how the Enigma machine worked and clarifying all the errors in my current understanding.I ended up going right back to basics and then subsequently spent ages failing to understand how it was cracked. Anyway, I built this in an attempt to recreate that arc for people (like me) who find Enigma intimidating: 13 stages, ~15 minutes, ending in a sandbox machine and the "no letter encrypts to itself" flaw that doomed it.Built with React + SVG + GSAP. Rotor wirings and stepping are historically accurate; an Advanced toggle exposes Ringstellung and M4. Feedback very welcome, especially on stages that drag or lose you.
Enrichment
- Theme
- interactive simulations and creative experiments
- Vertical
- Education
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- interactive walkthrough of cipher cryptography
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes This is an educational frontend application that visually simulates classic ciphers and Enigma rotor stepping using standard JavaScript.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 127 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #105 of 128 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 209 days after the earliest competitor.
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- I Dedicated 4 Years to Mastering Offline Password Cracking · hn · 2026-05-21 · 268 upvotes · similarity 0.40
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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