Today what I’m most proud of is a server that I set up. This requires a bit of explanation: In about a week or so, as part of a larger team, I’ll be participating in something called the MIT Mystery Hunt. It’s a sort of puzzle-solving competition which has been going on for many years and is pretty famous. It typically centers around the physical MIT campus, though for years now it’s had a large online component. But for obvious reasons, this year’s contest is entirely virtual, which seemed like a great time to get involved. As part of a team of about 20-25 folks, most of whom I know from my Austin/Trilogy days, we’re going to enjoy solving puzzles and doing a sort of online scavenger hunt for the better part of a long weekend.
While we have no expectation at all of winning or even coming close, organizing 25 folks to solve over 100 puzzles - at least a dozen of which might be going all at once - is a challenging task. So I took it upon myself to set up an instance of code which some of the leading teams use to organize their efforts. It’s based on a web platform and deployed on a Google Compute Instance. While there were some good instructions, it still took a bit of effort and work to get it deployed, so I’m proud of getting it up and working. Over the last couple of days we did a sort of “dry run” on a smaller puzzle contest called the Puzzle Boat, and it worked great.
If you want to check it out - or join our team! - just let me know. I won’t post the link here because I don’t want web robots to harvest it, but I’d happily show it to you!