Lucena
A chess training platform, built on one idea: what players lack is not analysis, it is the story of their own progress.
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Opens on its own site.
Every platform now offers an engine evaluation: analysis has become free and unremarkable. What is still missing is the long story of a player getting better. Lucena starts from there.
The idea was first put to the test with a throwaway script: analyse about fifty games with Stockfish and see whether the recurring mistakes come out, accurate and actionable. Without that signal, the application was not worth building.
What exists today is the import: the application fetches games from Lichess, from Chess.com or from a PGN file, brings them to a common format, discards duplicates and only resynchronises what is new. The rest, viewer, in-browser analysis, detection of recurring mistakes, is a roadmap and is presented as such.
An instructive defect: the login link sent by email broke as soon as it was opened anywhere other than the original browser, another device or the mail client’s preview, the code being consumed silently. The problem was not in the application’s code but in the chosen protocol; the flow was changed rather than patched.
The name comes from the Lucena position, the manoeuvre that wins the rook-and-pawn endgame, and from the oldest printed chess book, in 1497. Lucerna, in Latin, is the lamp.