Book Report: Software Engineering at Google
It's a pretty-good survey of important systems (technical systems and people-systems) at Google Engineering. When I say "survey" I mean it covers a lot of topics lightly. E.g., the chapter "How to W...
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Zine Report: Cometbus #59
During 2020 when the USA's pandemic was in full swing, a new issue of Cometbus came out and I didn't notice because pandemics are distracting. But I'm catching up! This issue of interviews looks at w...
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Book Report: The Fighters (Americans in Combat)
The USA invades countries every so often. This book tells the stories of some American soldiers in combat. Some things go well. Some things go wrong. If I knew a kid considering joining the military,...
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Question for you: If you're like most folks, you know it's good to get early feedback on projects but you don't like it when someone judges your rough, unpolished work. How do you get yourself to nev...
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Book Report: Scaling Teams
It's a book about managing and directing software developers. It's pretty good. It has a bag of tricks; it tells you which tricks are appropriate for which situations; it tells you symptoms of those ...
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Book Report: Work Rules
It's a book about business people operations by Google's Laszlo Bock. (Ex-Google, but at Google when he wrote the book…) There's important advice in there even if your company doesn't have gey...
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Novice, Novicer, Novicest
I was site-monitoring at a puzzle hunt. Things were quieting down at the site: Most of the teams had solved and gone on. Not all, though. Those that remained were novices, still learning the puzzlehu...
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Puzzlehunt Pacing
I bumped into Allen Cohn on BART yesterday. We got to talking about puzzlehunt pacing. If you have some easy breezy puzzles and some tough slog puzzles, how do you order them so that players have fun...
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Book Report: Maps To The Other Side (The Adventures of a Bipolar Cartographer)
Maps to the Other Side is a memoir. If you're looking for straight up cartography, you won't find it. But if you're looking for a community organizer, organic farmer, mental health activist… y...
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We escaped the @realegame Time Travel Lab room! @Hungrynerd assembled a crack team; the team's puzzlers were so strong that I could just wander around ransacking…even though it turns out I'm n...
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Looking for Group: Ravenchase Great America Hunt
Are you putting together a team for Ravenchase's Great America Hunt? I wanna play. You should pick me for your team. The good news: Scurrying around all day solving puzzles seems normal to me. The ...
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This tech talk about election software http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBSiuVGQECs shows politicians can't cooperate. In theory, it's a UX programmer talking about how he and other geeks worked with t...
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Milestone: 22 Million Hits
Wow, it's the site's 18 (edit: can you tell I "wrote" the intro to this post by copy-pasting an old post?) 22 millionth hit. (Not as impressive as it sounds. It's hits: someone loading a page that sh...
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Human flesh search engine comes to San Francisco. I am impressed; it helps when the target posts to Facebook. ...
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Intercoastal Altercations: team login, UI, play flow
You might recall that for the Two-Tone game I wanted a good way for teams to log in, but didn't get it right. (Moral of that story: Don't assume that only the captain will want to log in; therefore, ...
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Book Report: Startup Engineering Management
This book Startup Engineering Management is aimed at engineering managers at startup companies—but is pretty good for engineering managers at big companies, too. It has some info about everythi...
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List of Puzzlehunt Team Names
I threw together a list of puzzlehunt team names, gathering names from a bunch of old game signup sheets and results pages. I didn't try to "combine" clusters like { Burninators, The Burninators...
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Thinking about Puzzle Hunt Answer Systems, Unlock Codes
The goal of the Universal Longshots Scoring System is: A team's score should consider hints and time spent on puzzles; it should not consider the time between puzzles. You can agree or diagree that ...
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Book Report: This is not a Game
It's a thriller/mystery, so you wouldn't expect me to like it. But the main characters are Game Control for some big Alternate Reality Games a la I Like Bees. So along the way, there are diverting m...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, like Lindy Hop
Yesterday, Debbie Goldstein was at a playtest and so was I. And thus I got to hear a little about her trip to New York City. Debbie is, as near as I can tell, the force of cajolery behind the DASH ...
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Book Report: Planning Extreme Programming
For me, this was a "Casablanca" book. By that, I mean it reminded me of my experience watching the movie "Casablaca." I kept thinking Big deal, I've seen all this before. But of course, that's beca...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even Rashomon Gate
The BANG 25 Writeup Addendum over at Puzzalot gets into a tricky aspect of team puzzle-solving: figuring out who had which insight. It's a hard problem; I've given up on it myself. If Player A tell...
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White Ninjas-Specific Show Report
Hey, somebody tell Bay Area Night Game Team White Ninjas that I found the perfect band to play their theme song. It's Leather Feather! Most of the people in the band dress up as white ninjas! (Or ...
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Book Report: Peopleware
I work for a large company. Thus, there are "leadership seminars" with "team-building exercises." I attended one of those. I was confessing this to some friends on Saturday, and one of them knew e...
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Book Report: Crossing the Chasm
This book is about marketing; about marketing for products which are at a certain stage: they have enthusiastic "early adopters", but no big uptake. This stage sounds familiar to me based on my expe...
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Link: Arising like a Phoenix from a Bathtub
Further evidence of Darcy's ongoing awesomeness: she rescued the contents of the team Taft on a Raft web site. It's back! Including the material from the The Apprentice Zorg game! If you sadly too...
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Book Report: Going Postal
Skott raises an excellent point: The diskworld novels also have golems. E.g., I read Going Postal. I read this Diskworld novel because it's where the puzzler team "The Smoking GNU" got their name. ...
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Link: Muppet Movie Game Blog
I was was avoiding linking to the Muppet Movie Game Site, but have since figured out that was dumb of me. You might say I avoided linking them due to philisophical differences... but really it was m...
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BANG 19 (aka SNAP 4 simulcast): Photos, Scoring Data, Puzzles
On game day, I mostly watched over the Zombie Chess Clue. Most of the time there was nobody there. Some of the time, there were plenty of people there and they kept me pretty busy. But a couple of t...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Including a State of Inebriation
Rich Bragg of Blood and Bones sent me some mail about turning BANG 18 into a drinking game, vis a vis a strategy to avoid being obliged to run a future BANG. ...By the way, re: your blog post, whil...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere; but so is Problem-Solving
A while back--long enough ago that I'm probably getting details wrong--someone told me how the Scoobies tackle a puzzle. They set the puzzle out where everyone in the team can look at it. They look...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere: Dim Memories of GC Summit 2008
The lovely Just Passing Through put together a fun & educational event last night: a GC Summit. Folks who had run Games and/or were considering running Games showed up to eat, talk, and watch i...
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Embedded Reporter Seeks Team
Is your team playing in the upcoming Back to Basics/Midnight Madness game on April 5? Would you let me play with your team and then write about it afterwards? If so, please get in touch with me (we...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Bless Them
Traffic was bad this evening; my commute was long; I emerged from the bus nauseous. That happens when the commute goes too long: stare at the laptop screen too long while on a moving vehicle, don't ...
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Book Report: Dreaming in Code
Tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day, but I'll probably buy some food. Usually, I Buy Nothing for Buy Nothing Day. To make that work, I stock up on food ahead of time. I was going to do that late Wednesday...
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Site Update: Conversations Before the 2007 GC Summit
Maybe you've already watched the videos of the GC Summit 2007 presentations, where folks talked about how they make The Game fun. I'm sure glad I watched it. I'm a Game newbie and it was pretty eye...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, Even Under One's Nose
The team name "Coed Astronomy" of course invokes memories of "SETEC Astronomy," the mysterious code name from the movie "Sneakers." In the movie, "SETEC Astronomy" turns out to be an anagram for "To...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, but where will Zorg start?
Yesterday, we of Team Mystic Fish got our collective act together long enough to figure out the time & location of the start of the The Apprentice Zorg game. This was, of course, a puzzle. Or, ...
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"Life" is the Noun Form of "Absurd"
The ever-gracious Eve Andersson published my question. To see it, follow the link and scroll down until you see "mysterious envelope". In other news: Snakes on a Plane!Labels: link, pi, teams...
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Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere
I walked from U.C. Berkeley towards the BART station. I was at the tail end of a comics and library run. I'd picked up a few good books, and many good comics. So my pack was heavy and it was hot a...
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