Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

Comment by codezero | Hacker News Reader

A few of the things we've done:

- virtual murder mystery (two people on the team wrote it all up, it was intense, but I think you could buy a good package)

- drawing apps online we use https://skribbl.io but the ads are tedious

- we did a scavenger hunt for household items on different themes (we did a thanksgiving one) - this is easy to adapt to a lot and a lot of fun to see what folks have around their house - fills a lot of curiosity and makes folks feel more connected, also folks get creative in their finds - which adds to the fun.

- I like the other suggestions of a lego set / cooking - I have a friend whose company sent cooking ingredients and folks all cooked together - another that had two or three people "compete" like a cooking show with the rest of the team judging - good times.

- literally just get a cheesy icebreaker book - for once these things really do help get folks primed and engaged.

- Play Among Us

- Give folks a gift card and have them bring what they buy to a show and tell

Really looking forward to other folks' ideas.

(Self promotion) If you're looking for an alternative to Skribbl.io that has less ads you can check out a version I host[0]. It runs Scribble.rs[1] under the hood. They offer an official hosted herokuapp version here[2] but I've found it to be unreliable.

[0] https://scribble.feud.today/ [1] https://github.com/scribble-rs/scribble.rs [2] https://scribblers-official.herokuapp.com/

May I ask why the heroku instance is unreliable?

I only skimmed the code but my guess would be:

* it's running on a single dyno, which will go to sleep if there is a lack of activity or your reach the usage limit for your account for the month.

* it's using websockets to communicate, but seems to not use any shared persistence for managing state. So running a 2nd dyno to load balance + keep dynos awake doesn't appear to be an option.

Well, I am not too well versed in this area. I'd be very happy to add a way to enable load balancing. Any tips, help or contributions are welcome ^^

(Sorry, way late to this but if you're checking replies...)

At a high level it's a matter of doing the following:

* Persistence needs to be moved to something that isn't specific to a single dyno/can be shared across dynos (i.e., not local RAM or disk). * Updating your app code to check that shared store * Now you can scale up to N dynos, the limit on N usually determined by your budget or when the level of concurrency creates performance issues in some other connected system (e.g., the shared persistence).

For the type of use case you've got, specific to Heroku, what I've normally seen people do is use Redis as the shared bus or just refactor the app to use Pusher Channels (https://elements.heroku.com/addons/pusher) directly.

+1 for Among Us, had a lot of fun with my tam playing this.

Some other things: bought the team Minecraft and hosted a server for happy hours. It was fun but fizzled out. I think that’s ok and folks should get used to rotating ideas.

We did a happy hour using Drizzly - if your team drinks it’s a nice service and you’re basically ordering from convenience stores so other drinks and snacks are available.

Play some kind of challenge game and keep a leader board. Puzzles or trivia, or some game the whole team likes and can speed run or some other high score task.

> Really looking forward to other folks' ideas.

No, I want to work for you! (I’m kidding, I can’t leave the company I founded)

PS: Is there something to do with a Lego set? Being able to keep it at the end would be nice to remember the company’s present.

It’s definitely a gift. A year ago I also got my team raspberry pis and tried to get them more into tinkering with Linux without being afraid of taking down our infra :)

You can definitely leave the company you founded, the last two companies I worked for had the founder move on after a while, it’s often a natural evolution, but maybe I’ll come work for you one day instead.

Do you have recommendations for icebreaker books?

Hah nope, I ended up just googling a bunch of list spam and it had a similar effect, I just assume a book might be better curated :)

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