Get ready for Bloomberg’s Summer of Puzzles 2023
July 12, 2023
Welcome to Bloomberg’s Summer of Puzzles 2023! Starting on Friday, July 21, we will be posting a new puzzle every Friday at 12:00 PM EDT. The hunt will last 9 weeks. All puzzles are logic-based with no directions; they will take your creativity and ingenuity to solve. Solving the weekly puzzle will earn you points toward becoming the winner! Check this page each week to learn more about what inspired the creators!
If you miss a week, don’t worry! Puzzles from previous weeks will remain unlocked for you to solve at any time throughout the duration of the 9 weeks until the hunt closes on Friday, September 22. For the first three days that each puzzle is available, hints will be released every 12 hours. All released hints will remain available for the full 9 weeks.
Some important things to understand about how Summer of Puzzles works:
- If you solve a puzzle after all of the hints have been released, you can still earn the maximum number of points, but your ranking will be below those who completed the puzzle before you.
- There is no penalty for submitting an incorrect answer.
- Looking at hints does not impact your score.
Visit https://puzl.ink/summer today to register to participate in Bloomberg’s Summer of Puzzles. We encourage you to invite your friends to compete with you! Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter at @TechAtBloomberg (we might just drop a teaser or two there) or to tag your posts on social media with #SummerOfPuzzles and/or #BloombergBpuzzled.
Our first, second and third place winners will each receive a Bloomberg swag bag! Additionally, our first place winner will win Apple AirPods Max over-ear headphones, our second place winner will receive a GoPro HERO11 Black Mini camera, and our third place winner will score a Sonos Roam portable speaker.
And if you’ve ever wondered why software engineers love puzzles so much, Puzzle Team Member Greg Howell, a senior software engineer on our Structured Products SRE team, shared some insight into why puzzles are fun and interesting:
“I enjoy hunt puzzles as they’re a fun step up from the simpler logic puzzles and brain teasers I loved as a kid. Before you solve a hunt puzzle, you first have to figure out what the puzzle even is. These can ask you to do anything — recognize text as song lyrics and find something all the artists have in common, make a connection between some images and a list of TV episodes on Wikipedia, or play a game in your web browser that then sends you somewhere in the real world before you can win.
For me, that ‘Aha!’ moment of learning what to do is the best part of puzzling. So, when I write puzzles, I hope it’s the solvers’ favorite part as well. I’ve made solvers do escape rooms, take a wizarding exam, count jellybeans, and groan at terrible punny answers. This is my fifth year writing puzzles for Bloomberg’s events, and our Puzzle Team has been a great way to meet and collaborate with creative people from across the company.”
Happy Puzzling!
Meet our puzzle creators & designers
Week 9 Meta Puzzle: Six Shifty Characters
Our first eight puzzles have dropped. Our first eight puzzles have dropped. At 12:00 PM EDT tomorrow (Friday, September 15, 2023), our Meta Puzzle will open! If you got stuck on one or two of our previous puzzles, don’t worry – every puzzle is unlocked already and all their hints are also available! The answers to the earlier puzzles will feed directly into the Meta Puzzle.
Our Summer of Puzzles winner will be the first person to solve Six Shifty Characters!
Software Engineering Manager Nico Aiello (he/him)
Creator of Week 8 Puzzle: Dropped the Ball
How has your experience working as an engineer on Bloomberg’s Multi-Asset Risk System (MARS), a comprehensive suite of risk management tools, influenced your approach to creating puzzles?
We use a lot of the same language when discussing puzzle creation as we do in software engineering: design, research, implementation, testing, and bug fixing. Being an engineer has taught me to appreciate the importance of each of these steps. I think a fun difference between the two is that, in software building, you’re developing solutions to interesting problems, whereas in puzzle building, you’re developing interesting problems for others to solve.
Is there anything you learned building or solving puzzles that helps you manage your team of engineers?
People see and approach the same problem very differently. This is something you really get to see in real-time as people try to solve a puzzle you made! However, a good puzzle has components that guide the solver toward aprescribed mechanic they need to succeed. While people management is much more individualized than this, puzzle making has helped me be deliberate in my communication as I guide and support my team members along their unique career paths.
What excites you most about creating puzzles?
Puzzle creation is a huge creative outlet for me. Most people favor the “aha” of the puzzle, but I greatly appreciate satisfying or clever puzzle mechanics. I also love that any topic can be made the central theme of a puzzle. I have had the opportunity to design puzzles with all sorts of fun datasets: drag queens, Disney movies, and types of pasta, to name a few!
What was the last BHOT event you attended?
I got to attend the INvolve New York Role Model Gala Dinner at the Deutsche Bank Center, which celebrated people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ leaders who are making positive change at their organizations. I’m proud to have been honored that evening as one of the Top 100 LGBTQ+ Future Leaders on the 2022 Outstanding LGBTQ+ Role Model Lists, in recognition for my work leading the BProud Tech group at Bloomberg.
What’s one of the most challenging puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
Simmons Hall from the 2022 MIT Mystery Hunt. This meta puzzle involving multiple iterations of a plane fractal kept me up all night. While I needed some hints, I did end up solving it!
Software Engineer Roseanna McMahon
Creator of Week 7 Puzzle: Add Dusted Fillings
How did you end up at Bloomberg?
I interviewed during the Summer of 2019 after hearing about Bloomberg on LinkedIn. I had previously been working on software in an investment bank, so I had heard of Bloomberg, but had not realised it was such a big tech company, with a large Engineering department, until after I joined!
What makes Bloomberg an exciting place for engineers?
The scale of some of the work we’re doing is super exciting. It’s fun to look at all the different functions on the Terminal and realise that absolutely everything there was created by one of my engineering colleagues.
How has your experience working as an engineer on Bloomberg AIM, a leading order and investment management solution, influenced your approach to designing puzzles?
Solving problems in the portfolio management space in Bloomberg AIM is a little different to solving puzzles, but there’s an overlap in both in terms of creativity. I sometimes get stuck designing a puzzle, just as I sometimes get stuck trying to write a solution for a problem in code. In both cases, it’s good to have a team to get inspiration and ideas from.
What excites you most about creating puzzles?
I also enjoy solving puzzles. So when I’m creating them, I’m thinking of people solving and picturing the satisfaction when they get to the next step. I like to use themes I’m somewhat familiar with, so I’ve previously created puzzles around my favourite musicals, running, and now, for this puzzle, the kitchen. When I was 16, I chose to study computer science at A-level, but my second choice would have been to study catering or food chemistry!
What is your favorite pantry snack?
Jaffa Cakes. But those are not stand-alone snacks. I like to pair them with the coffee syrups 😋
What’s one of the most challenging puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
I remember an escape room in London that had fake candles we thought were flickering on and off in a pattern. We spent ages writing down the pattern, trying to interpret it as Morse code, maybe binary, maybe some other smoke signal we didn’t know yet. It turns out that they were motion triggered, so whenever we walked past them, they would flicker off and on. We just had to turn them all off at the same time for the next step to be revealed!
Did you know?
All Bloomberg offices have full-service pantries, offering meals, snacks, fresh fruit, and beverages – including local snacks specific to each city or region!
Software Engineer Jose Garcia Negron (he/him)
Creator of Week 6 Puzzle: Meals on Wheels
You’ve been at Bloomberg for five years. How did you end up here?
Back in 2017, Bloomberg had recently started recruiting from the University of Puerto Rico and I was honored to be among the first batch of students from there who were given internships. Until then, I hadn’t heard of Bloomberg at all! But, after talking to the recruiters, researching and learning more about the company, I knew it would be a great fit for me. The rest is history!
How has your experience as a software engineer influenced your approach to designing puzzles?
It is my opinion that puzzle making is a more artistic version of the same process we use as engineers to develop software. In a (hopefully) simple overview, engineers gather requirements, design, develop, test, iterate on feedback, and then release what they’ve built. Puzzle making is very similar! Just like when we engineer products, puzzle testing also enables us to find “bugs,” while iteration helps us release the best puzzle.
What excites you most about creating puzzles?
The “aha!” moment – that split second between “what does this even mean?” to “I get it!” – is really the best part. That said, the “aha!” usually happens when you’re solving, rather than creating. In terms of creating a puzzle, figuring out how to manufacture that moment is equally interesting. For me, it involves research, experimentation, and some inspiration to find the right combination of elements needed to create an elegant puzzle.
What is your favorite Bloomberg Corporate Philanthropy event that you’ve participated in?
The first one! Every year, there is a huge philanthropy event where all of our interns participate. While it changes every year, in 2017, we built bikes for the community. Hundreds of bikes were assembled that day for kids and adults alike.
There were two things that made this my favorite event. After the build, people were coming up to collect their bikes and they tested them out immediately. For some of them, it was the first time they had ever ridden a bike! Seeing the happiness in their eyes made all the effort worthwhile. On top of that, there are the connections I made that day with other interns; friendships were started at that event that still endure to this day!
What’s one of the most challenging puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
That would be the puzzle titled ‘Things’ from the 2019 MIT Mystery Hunt. The puzzle itself isn’t too hard. The objective is to fill in a series of Venn diagrams with different kinds of things. However, and I hope this isn’t too much of a spoiler, it requires some pop culture knowledge to successfully break into it. Luckily, as is the case with the best puzzles, there’s an easier portion of the puzzle that clues you into the approach that is needed to solve the rest of the puzzle. Unfortunately, we did not solve it as a team during the hunt, but I eventually tried it again and finished it!
Did you know?
In 2022, more than 18,300 Bloomberg employees globally made an impact by volunteering over 131,000 hours across 614 cities around the world.
Software Engineer Chris Benedict (he/him)
Creator of Week 5 Puzzle: Worth its Weight in Gold
You’ve been leading the Puzzle Team for Bloomberg Engineering since 2015. How do you keep things fresh from year to year?
There are so many ways! As far as theming the various hunts that Bloomberg produces (e.g., our Intern Puzzle Challenge, Bpuzzled, Summer of Puzzles, etc.) throughout the year, we always try to pick a theme that is currently relevant in some way or another, ripe with potential puzzle targets, as well as something that is different than anything we’ve done in the past. In terms of the puzzles themselves, there are so many categories of datasets and mechanics that we have not yet explored that we should continue to have fresh puzzles for a very long time.
What excites you most about creating puzzles?
I really enjoy letting my creativity run free in coming up with novel ideas and then refining those ideas iteratively into as perfect a puzzle as possible. But, my absolute favorite part of puzzle creation is getting to see the solver’s sudden moment of discovery – the “Aha!” moment – if I can get them to think in a way they haven’t before.
How did you most recently use your fitness stipend?
I got myself a subscription to BODi (formerly Beachbody on Demand) so I can do fitness programs on the go, as well as a copy of the Insanity MAX:30 fitness program. I’ve been doing fitness programs ever since!
What’s one of the most interesting puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
One of the most interesting puzzles I’ve ever tried to solve was named “Image“. It was created by One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish as part of the 2015 MIT Mystery Hunt. You were given a file named image that shows up as a TIFF image with a maze in it when opened. However, this file is NOT simply a TIFF file, but is something completely different instead. I won’t say anything further, as I don’t want to spoil the puzzle for anyone!
Did you know?
Bloomberg provides reimbursement for eligible wellbeing-related expenses, including gym fees, exercise equipment, financial wellness expenses, and mindfulness classes, to name a few.
Software Engineer Michael Molisani (he/him)
Creator of Week 4 Puzzle: What’s the Point?
You’ve been at Bloomberg for almost seven years. What keeps you here?
Similar to the puzzles we create, I enjoy my work at Bloomberg because I have a set of really compelling challenges. I work on an internal engineering team writing tooling for our application frameworks, so my “customers” are the 8,000+ other Bloomberg engineers. It’s incredibly satisfying to help improve the tools and workflows that we all use every day.
What makes Bloomberg an exciting place for engineers?
Bloomberg is a large company, which means that you get to work at a very large scale. There are internal communities of engineers for many of the different programming languages and technology solutions used within our tech stack.
This also extends to public-facing work outside the company. One of the co-chairs of TC39, the standards body that works to advance the future of the JavaScript language, works at Bloomberg, where he leads my group of engineering teams focused on JavaScript Infrastructure & Tooling. Several other people on my team are closely involved with the standard and have open proposals for new language features that they are advocating for right now. We also work with TypeScript (and several other JavaScript tooling projects) to solve some upstream issues and provide open source contributions.
How did you first get involved solving puzzles?
I first discovered puzzles while in college, where some friends and I would try to solve some online hunts or look for an in-person one hosted in our city. I didn’t intern for Bloomberg before starting here full-time, so I didn’t even know about the Intern Puzzle Challenge until after I had been working here for a few years. I started by helping out in the hint room, and now I’m creating and test solving new puzzles every year.
What excites you most about creating puzzles?
Great “AHA!” moments are always the best, and I find them to be most impactful when they build on some material with which you’re already familiar. My favorite puzzles to create are ones where I can pull some things from pop culture and find an inherent connection between them that isn’t obvious without the right context. It might be two songs’ shared lyrics, titles of TV show episodes, or a video game’s box art. At its best, this kind of puzzle makes you feel like you’re in the middle of your own version of “The Da Vinci Code,” discovering patterns in things you’ve seen dozens of times before but never noticed until now.
One of the perks of working at Bloomberg is the opportunity to access museums and other cultural institutions around the world for free or at a discount. Where’s your favorite spot to use this benefit?
It’s hard to pick just one, but I use this benefit all the time! The Morgan Library & Museum is nice because it’s so close to our New York City office, and it doesn’t take all day to see everything. Whenever my parents are in town and the weather is nice, I grab some tickets to the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, as it’s one of the most beautiful outdoor areas in the whole city. And this perk extends around the world, so it was exciting to visit the many places I had access to the last time I traveled to London on vacation.
What’s one of the most challenging puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
One of the most challenging puzzles I’ve solved – but also one of my favorites – was the meta puzzle from DASH 11. Without giving away too much (as you can try it out yourself), it required you to reuse strategies from earlier puzzles in the hunt, but in new and novel ways. It felt like the rest of the hunt was just training for this final challenge, and that made solving it feel like an amazing accomplishment.
Did you know?
A Bloomberg badge not only gets employees into any of our global offices, it also gives them and their families free or discounted admission access to hundreds of museums and cultural institutions around the world, including The Met and the Guggenheim!
Software Engineer Patrick Schoch (he/him/his)
Creator of Week 3 Puzzle: A Turn of Phrase
You’ve been at Bloomberg for nine years. What keeps you here?
I very much like the rewarding challenges, supportive and professional colleagues, and positive work environment at Bloomberg. The firm sets a strong emphasis on employee wellbeing by providing wide opportunities for professional development and work-life balance. I work in the Frankfurt Office, where our Engineering presence is constantly growing. New teams are settling down here, and for those who have never been here, Frankfurt is a great place to live and work 🙂.
What Engineering team are you on and what does your team do?
I work as a Product Owner in the Exchange Trading Connectivity Engineering team. We create the gateways that connect various Bloomberg applications with trading venues (i.e., exchanges) and clearinghouses all around the world.
How did you first get involved solving puzzles?
Some years ago, we held an office-wide Bpuzzled event, where we were asked to solve one of the prior year’s Bpuzzled challenges. We teamed up in groups of four to solve as many puzzles as possible in a given time. That challenge was fun, even though my team did not win. While that was the first time I heard about Bloomberg Bpuzzled, I have subsequently always been excited to participate in Bloomberg puzzle events like our annual Summer of Puzzles.
What excites you most about creating puzzles?
Creating puzzles is exciting because it triggers creativity, engages the mind, and offers participants a sense of accomplishment. In the end, designing a puzzle is a similar process to developing a new software project. It requires planning and problem-solving skills, code reviews, and tests before it can be released to production. As solvers unravel the mystery, the best part is that the puzzle creator feels a shared excitement in seeing their puzzle cracked. It’s a rewarding experience to witness the enjoyment and satisfaction that others derive from solving your creations.
Tell us about the theme of your puzzle and why you chose it.
I originally created this week’s puzzle for the recent season of the Bpuzzled puzzle competition that Bloomberg hosts at schools across both the U.S. and EMEA. Each puzzle was meant to represent one of the rooms from the board game “Clue.” Since Bloomberg News was the theme of my room, I was immediately attracted to the study and decided to integrate an old fashioned typewriter in my puzzle.
As this was my first Bpuzzled creation, it took me several sleepless nights to develop the whole elaborate puzzle, but I was super excited once I had finished developing this concept and could present it to the group. I hope you will enjoy typing on the typewriter as much as I do 🙂.
What’s one of the most challenging puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
I think the puzzles created by my Bloomberg colleagues are quite challenging. Trying to solve some of the puzzles from prior Summer of Puzzle seasons have taken up some of my weekends. This is further complicated by the fact that every puzzle creator has their own idea and the puzzles do not follow the same schema, so it’s always a completely new challenge to figure out the solution to each puzzle.
Did you know?
Bloomberg’s newsroom now has more than 2,700 journalists and analysts globally, and publishes more than 5,000 stories a day.
Software Engineer Dan Padawer (he/him)
Creator of Week 2 Puzzle: Black and White and Something All Over
How has your experience developing Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) workflows for Trading Systems application engineers influenced your approach to designing puzzles?
I work in a DevX team. My goal is to make tools that are generally intuitive to our end-users (not to say we don’t also write documentation). At a high level, my approach is the same for a puzzle; I don’t want someone to look at a puzzle I’ve made and be completely lost, but I want them to at least have a notion of where to start. Hopefully, users will then see a repeated paradigm for how my various tools work, just like solvers will suddenly have an aha moment after staring at a puzzle when they realize there’s something that all the pieces have in common.
What excites you most about creating puzzles?
Eliciting emotions. Whether it’s the moment when a group of people light up at “oh, this puzzle’s actually about Pokémon!” or a groan when everyone realizes they’re been subjected to a bad pun, I try to make puzzles that people will remember later for some fun reason or other.
Why did you choose the theme for this week’s puzzle?
Without giving away too much about the puzzle I’ve created, Bloomberg’s done a bunch of fun deep dives on various business-adjacent topics over the years that have been fun. These introduced me to quite a few things I otherwise wouldn’t necessarily have read up on on my own.
What’s one of the most challenging puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
Deconstructed Crossword from Admiral Boötes’ Cosmic Discovery Expedition: Further Galaxies was a great play on a usual puzzle type I’d not seen before. It was brain twisting in all the right ways to throw out ideas while my teammates helped keep me from going too far off base with any theories.
Did you know?
Launched in June 1994, Bloomberg TV is now distributed globally and focuses on business programming.
Senior Software Engineer Lesley Lai (she/her/hers)
2023 Summer of Puzzles Design Team Leader
How has your experience as an engineer at Bloomberg influenced your approach to designing the artwork for this year’s “Summer of Puzzles” puzzle hunt?
I learned there are a lot of commonalities between software development and art design.
From a project management perspective, both have requirements, limitations, and deadlines – the Design Team worked closely with the Puzzle Team leadership to understand the theme of this year’s puzzle hunt, and took notes on specific elements to either include or not include in the final designs. We also synced up with the Development Team and Testing Team to set up test sites for dry runs. We communicated our progress and demonstrated our deliverables to our stakeholders on a weekly basis to make sure we are on track and to receive feedback. When the final product was delivered, there were no surprises and we were able to get everything we needed done on time.
From a design perspective, just like we hold brainstorming sessions to discuss architectural designs for software applications, we also set up brainstorming sessions for art designs. We discussed the theme of the puzzle hunt, gathered inspiration from the internet, and doodled concept sketches on the whiteboard. We also took some iterative approaches to our designs, sharing draft artwork within the team, and incorporating feedback to improve them.
From a collaboration perspective, we recognized that everyone has different strengths and preferences to how they work, so we let everyone in the Design Team pick the task(s) they wanted to work on most and to choose whichever tools and medium they were most comfortable using to execute the design. This is similar to how we empower our developers to work on the project(s) they are passionate about, and use whichever tools and technologies seem to be the best fit for the project!
What excites you most about creating the artwork for puzzles?
Seeing our on-screen designs turned into reality! The Design Team not only designs the website for the “Summer of Puzzles” puzzle hunt and helps out on some of the artwork for a few of the puzzles, but also we design and work with vendors to create swag. Seeing our design printed on a physical item and seeing people wearing or using the swag makes us really happy 😀. I once saw someone on the subway in NYC wearing the t-shirt we designed last year, and I just want to say ‘thank you’ to that person because they really made my day!
What open source technology/technologies do you work with in your daily role as a software engineer at Bloomberg?
I mainly use React and TypeScript when I develop applications. For databases, I often use one open source technology that people may be less familiar with called: Comdb2. When I first started at Bloomberg, Comdb2 was only an in-house technology, but over the past few years, the company was able to publish it as an open source solution from which people outside the firm can benefit!
What’s one of the most challenging puzzles you’ve ever tried to solve, and why?
I still remember when I was first recruited to the Puzzle Team. I was presented with a small practice puzzle to solve – without the handy reference sheet we have today. Without any prior experience with puzzle solving, I wasn’t even sure how to start! Honestly, I feel that not knowing how to start is probably the biggest challenge, which made my very first puzzle one of the most challenging ones I’ve ever tried to solve. If you are new to puzzles, here’s a good way to start: pay attention to the title of the puzzle and the flavor text used to describe it, as these may provide some hints to solving the puzzle!