mozz100

“Plugins are web apps built with standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript/TypeScript) and the Even Hub SDK.”

I wonder if owners of these smart glasses who also hang out here have tried this. Might persuade me to buy a pair!

Side question: I love the charts in your blog post. Would you be able to share how they were generated?

Could you say a bit more about "it is very unreliable"? I'm considering using django-tasks with an rq backend [1] and would like to hear about your experiences. Did you find it dropping tasks, difficult to operate, etc.

[1] https://github.com/RealOrangeOne/django-tasks?tab=readme-ov-...

I created a developer escape room so I was interested in this.

I've given it a try, and have enjoyed the first few puzzles. I'd be up for some cross-promotion if you were, too?

My feedback would be: consider some hints. After a player has tried (say) ten guesses, maybe? I've lost motivation after getting stuck on one puzzle

Thank you for this, you made my day.

I have recently made a new room for /dev/esc - my idea was that in the run-up to Christmas, plenty of dev teams would be looking for activities to do together. Full disclosure: it didn't work - I didn't get a bump of new customers.

If you can look past the festive theming, IMHO there are some good, totally original new puzzles in "Santa's Tech Disaster". (choose from drop-down when setting up a new game)

https://app.dev-esc.com/new_game/ - an online escape room for developer teams. I aimed to make a team-building experience that was a bit different. unashamedly geeky: you’ll need puzzling and some coding to solve the challenges.

Fully remote for teams of 1-8ish; free to explore. Requires a computer, although you can explore on mobile/tablet.

Originally it was free to play - I got a fair few plays off my HN post, now I have a trickle of paying customers.

Use code hackernews22 for a 40% discount

Original submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28579191

...when I looked a handful of seconds ago, https://status.gitlab.com was reporting no issues. In this situation, my goto news sites are (i) twitter and (ii) Hacker News. Also https://downdetector.co.uk/

Where else do people go for confirmation of problems?

UPDATE: status.gitlab.com is now acknowledging the incident, so that was fairly quick. My question still stands, but I guess it's less urgent now

Thank you. That’s an interesting thought about “aha” moments versus meticulousness. I’ve tended to offer “slow burn” puzzles, although I think there’s one exception in the escape room at present.

Really fun idea and a great implementation. I have been trying to come up with programming puzzles for my own project https://www.dev-esc.com - an escape room for devs

My own “Show HN” is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28579191

andersource would you be willing to consider letting me incorporate something like a checkerboard puzzle?

Have you any metrics on average completion times etc? Striking the right balance between fun vs difficult has proved tricky for me.

The challenges don't have instructions. The idea being that they're not necessary: curiosity is sufficient.

Jump into an example puzzle with one click here:

https://www.dev-esc.com/link_puzzle/promo/

I'd love to know how people react to this.

I've built an online escape room for developer teams. I am seeking alpha testers.

Come and try to escape, and help me while doing so!

* Free to play (for now). Asks for an email address, completely optional.

* Fully remote; BYO video conf (works over Zoom, Skype, Teams, Google Meet - anything that enables screenshare + audio)

* Team size can be between 1 and 12

* You'll need to understand code, maybe write some code, hack a bit (needs a real computer, not a tablet or a phone)

* Currently, every game will be the same. In future I can build custom games, parameterised games, pick'n'mix.

Basic premise: for dev teams, coding together is something that is actually enjoyable. Get some satisfaction and build some team cameraderie without, y'know, meetings and JIRA and, well, clients/customers. Especially with covid-imposed remoteness, I see dev teams needing a bit of levity, a bit of (cringe) team building - I wanted to try a way that's not online drinking or a straight-up quiz.

Each player will be asked for a player name, then the team is dropped together into the escape room. Swarm over the puzzles, pair up or spread out (up to you) - puzzle/code/hack your way out together, then reflect on the fun you had on the way. Heavily influenced by Advent of Code, Project Euler.

I would like to charge for this eventually. The main challenges as I see it are content and game dynamics. I would like to learn from the first few teams that play. Getting the puzzle difficulty right, making hints available to the players at the right times, finding out how different teams handle and react to the UX. That kind of thing.

I look forward to hearing people's initial reactions, ideas and feedback.

Love this article. I wonder if this is a brain-type thing. It really rings true for me.

Developing the idea, I have a similar multiple definitions problem, in a much smaller context, with the word “prescription”.

In the UK it means all of: a doctor’s idea of what medicine to give to a patient, a piece of paper with that written on it, and the medicine itself.

I got thoroughly confused when I went to collect a prescription from a pharmacy and was told “it’s (still) over at the surgery”. It wasn’t, or rather, it was. But we were talking about different prescriptions.

Anyone else have these (pedantic?) confusions?

Early days in a creative experiment with tech - we have had great success getting young children to connect with their grandparents. This feels so much better than "here's YouTube, be quiet for an hour". What have others tried? Does this trigger any other good HN ideas?

Launch one of the Christmas songs, let it play for a few bars, then grab one of the blobs and sing a solo. Amazing!

Love this. Reminds me of when I tried a git-based taxonomy of sauces a while back.

https://www.rmorrison.net/mnemozzyne/2019/01/20/saucy-chat/

Here’s the diff between tartar sauce and mayonnaise

https://github.com/mozz100/sauces/compare/mayonnaise..tartar

Totally agree with you about the need to click "+" and then remove two lines you don't want. I was planning a drop-down as you suggest.

Then I got a full-time job and have stopped working Estigator for now.

It's really nice and encouraging to hear the feedback and read the bug reports on HN. I think the most likely next step for Estigator is for it to become an open source hobby project. Still mulling things over.

So - no newsletter sign up (privacy policies, GDPR, bler) - but I will certainly announce at https://www.rmorrison.net (my personal homepage) if I ever move things along.

I love bug reports with CSS selectors in them. Thank you! Now fixed

Excellent - thank you for sharing. I wanted to be able to allow custom probability distributions for the tasks/items in estigator.com - uncertain.io is a great way to capture them

Thanks again for this. Now fixed.

Thank you.

It's not open source yet - but I'd like to release it one day I think.

More probability distributions (maybe event custom ones) were something I was thinking of for the future. Maybe a paid one.

dur, yep - thank you for the catch. You are right: this is the worst kind of typo! Will fix

(about estimating - I don't tend to write proposals) You could have a look at https://www.estigator.com

(NB it's a half-finished side project right now)

I'm no longer a contractor, although I have been, and I'm frequently asked by my new employers to provide estimates for dev tasks.

Trouble is, businesses/clients tend to see an estimate as a promise, or a target. From the developer's point of view it is hard to do anything other than guessing (at smaller and smaller granularities). Book recommendation: "The Clean Coder" by Robert C. Martin - esp. Chapter 10)

I started building https://www.estigator.com to see if I could learn React, and come up with something to help me illustrate just exactly who's taking a risk when we say something like "it'll probably take about 3.5 days"

I wasn't quite ready to "Show HN" with this one, but your question made me think of it straight away. Would love to know what people think