Alastair Stanley, Senior Software Engineer

Creator of Week 9 Meta Puzzle: Touch Typing

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
As a child, I spent a lot of time with building blocks of all sorts. I would spend hours trying to work out how to pack them into satisfying patterns, or to construct an unusual angle by using them in creative ways. This led to a fascination with 3D and tactile puzzles and thinking outside the box to produce unexpected and delightful solutions.

What makes a good puzzle good?
The best puzzles teach you something new. Maybe it’s a cool fact about how asteroids are catalogued, or perhaps you didn’t realize there were so many flowers named after animals. If a puzzle introduces you to a new world or just a new point of view then it really sticks with you.

Walk us through your creative process for building your puzzles.
I like to think about fun or interesting topics for a puzzle that people may not have seen before and then try to work out how to make a satisfying puzzle out of it. I like my puzzles to have a strong, consistent theme and will often let that guide the creation process in more than one way. Building puzzles this way can be challenging, but the results are extra rewarding.

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
As I’ve matured as an engineer and a puzzle designer I’ve realized how important proper planning is to both disciplines. Each time I do this, I spend more effort in the planning phase and reject more ideas than the previous one. This is also true of my software engineering projects.

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
I really enjoy the challenge of making a puzzle that fits into a larger theme or narrative. Our puzzles often fit together in some way. This can lead to strict requirements that each puzzle must meet, like the starting information or the solution, or maybe something even more subtle, like the number of letters in each clue. These constraints force you to think more deeply about the puzzle design.

Are there engineering concepts you’ve worked into a puzzle design?
Not that I can remember, or at least not deliberately. Both engineering and puzzle design require a lot of creativity and problem solving, but puzzles allow us to use the other half of our brain. They often require visuospatial reasoning, double meanings, and sometimes, a little ambiguity.

How has puzzle-making changed the way you approach creativity and/or collaboration?
When making puzzles, it’s important to consider your design from different points of view. You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone who hasn’t seen this kind of puzzle before, or maybe somebody who doesn’t have the same background as you to make sure the puzzle is accessible to everyone. This is a valuable skill in many creative endeavors.

What’s one of the coolest / most interesting technologies you’ve had the opportunity to work with as an engineer at Bloomberg?
I once had to fix a bug in my Python code that I traced all the way into the CPython interpreter. That led me down a deeper rabbit hole of code optimization and infinite generators, about which I eventually presented in a talk at PyCon UK.

What inspired your puzzle this year?
One of the most recognizable Bloomberg products is our eye-catching keyboard. There have been many iterations of it, but it has always been a part of company life. The patterns of colorful keys have inspired several puzzles over the years, but I wanted to take it in a different direction.

Nico Aiello, Software Engineering Manager

Creator of Week 8 Puzzle: Taking Notes

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
I’ve loved puzzles my entire life and have used them since college as a teaching tool and a way to build community and collaboration. I earned a Ph.D. in mathematics – specifically number theory – before joining Bloomberg as a software engineer. I was so excited to learn about Bloomberg’s Puzzle Team and have been a member ever since. 

What I love most about puzzles is the feeling you get when you’re making progress or finally solve a puzzle. It’s the same feeling for me when doing math or writing code.

What makes a good puzzle good?
A good puzzle sparks joy, both in your brain and your heart. Your brain appreciates the cleverness of the puzzle and feels that joy of accomplishment. Your heart feels the creativity of the puzzle and appreciates the joy of having fun. 

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
Creativity, perseverance, and being open to feedback are the first things that come to mind. Creating a good puzzle and problem solving through an engineering challenge both require imagining and exploring many different ideas, persisting and pivoting when an idea isn’t quite working, and incorporating a lot of commentary from your peers and testers.

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
For my style of puzzle creation, the more constraints, the better. Some of my favorite puzzles I’ve designed came from really tight constraints about the theme or solve word because it forced me to rely even more heavily on the creative process and the need to uncover unexpected connections between the constraints.

Are there engineering concepts you’ve worked into a puzzle design?
My puzzle this summer incorporates many engineering concepts! Those concepts might just have some other connection as well. 🙂

What’s one of the coolest / most interesting technologies you’ve had the opportunity to work with as an engineer at Bloomberg?
Back when I was an individual contributor, I took a machine learning course at Bloomberg that was really cool. The project my partner and I worked on for the class ended up being the proof of concept for what’s now an entire team at Bloomberg!

Liana Reilly, Senior Software Engineer

Creator of Week 7 Puzzle: Fined and Replace

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
When I was growing up, my dad would always listen to NPR’s “Car Talk” on his Walkman. They often had a “puzzler” at the end of their segment. When a good riddle came up, my dad would write it down on the chalk board in our kitchen and challenge my siblings and I to solve it. We’d then work together – or more realistically compete against each other – to try and solve it.

I always loved getting my brain to see things differently and trying different approaches. In the end (hopefully), I had that gratifying light bulb moment of a solve. It was always a good feeling running up to my dad and excitedly whispering the answer in his ear!

What makes a good puzzle good?
I think everyone has slightly different opinions on this! And that’s what makes everyone’s puzzles a little bit unique, and different to solve. To me, good puzzles offer a balance between mystery and satisfaction. There should be parts of the puzzle where you’re slightly confused, need more information, to feel like you’re on the edge of something but not quite there… and parts where you solidly feel like you’re headed in the right direction, all content and getting that instant satisfaction when you arrive at the correct answer. Of course, all good puzzles should have an “aha” moment that ties it all together.

Walk us through your creative process for building your puzzles.
I usually take the theme of the year, look through some of the possible answers (since there’s almost always a pattern we need to fit due to the meta puzzle), and try and pull at everything and nothing to come up with a skeleton. I have some puzzle mechanics I’m a fan of (most are in this puzzle), and sometimes a strong thematic tie I want to hold onto. At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of trial and error for me. I try random things and see if anything is fun and just happens to work out.

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
Lot’s of things! When designing puzzles, working in collaboration with others is really important, the same of which goes for engineering problem-solving. It’s so hard to come up with an entire puzzle on your own, and even if you do come up with something, there’s always feedback to be considered from fellow designers or puzzle testers who found little holes or the need for improvements here and there. So, it’s definitely a collaborative process the whole way through.

Both also benefit from being open to different ideas and perspectives. Not everyone would approach a puzzle or solve it in the exact same way, so it’s good to keep that in mind. Similarly, two people may bring different solutions or perspectives to an engineering problem-solving discussion. So, every idea should be heard and considered!

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
Technical constraints can often help with puzzle design since they really narrow the scope to specific themes, potential answers, even puzzle mechanics (because we don’t want the solves to become too repetitive or similar). So, it’s quite nice to have those constraints dictate a little bit of a puzzle’s design.

In general, the overarching theme is probably the most fun to work with. We’ll brainstorm new themes every year for our different hunts, and there’s really so much one can do with the deliberately vague themes. It’s fun to try and come up with creative connections and inspiration for puzzles based on the theme.

Are there engineering concepts you’ve worked into a puzzle design?
I think I’ve actively stayed away from that most of the time! But, I have used the idea of “recursion” in some puzzles before. Recursion usually creates multiple layers of a puzzle by requiring previously used steps (or mechanics) to be applied to answers from a previous section of the puzzle. This is pretty common as a last step in a puzzle. It can be used to hide an answer just a bit more and tie the whole theme together a bit better!

How has puzzle-making changed the way you approach creativity and/or collaboration?
I think puzzle-making has helped me a lot with that initial phase of creativity where a bunch of ideas are swimming around in my head but nothing is really making sense or connected yet. Sometimes it can be hard to organize thoughts, or communicate early ideas to others. Getting to practice that skill in puzzle-making and letting it translate to my engineering work has been really helpful.

What’s one of the most interesting technologies you’ve had the opportunity to work with as an engineer at Bloomberg?
It’s been really interesting to see how Bloomberg has adopted different AI workflows (for both engineers and clients) over the past months. Incorporating some of those tools into my everyday work has been exciting!

What inspired your puzzle’s direction this year?
I really wanted the puzzle to look like the Bloomberg Terminal’s iconic double monitors. I was actually scrambling with some ideas last minute, so here’s a shout out to Chris Benedict, our Puzzle Team founder and lead, who helped me brainstorm something we could get out on time!

Alban Lefebvre, Senior Software Engineer

Creator of Week 6 Puzzle: Tricycle

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
Since I was a kid, I’ve enjoyed activities that require thinking out of the box: magic tricks, wooden brain teasers, logic puzzles, and board games, just to name a few. But, it wasn’t until adulthood that I really got into puzzles. I organized a scavenger hunt for a group of friends that sent them all around the town I lived in. That experience hooked me.

What I love most is the satisfaction when you realize that some bit of key information clicks into place. It’s such a rewarding moment to uncover something hidden in a puzzle!

What makes a good puzzle good?
In my opinion, a good puzzle should surprise you and trigger a smile for having discovered something new. It should be challenging without being too tedious. I also love when I get to learn something that I probably would never have encountered otherwise.

Walk us through your creative process for building your puzzles.
I like to start by deciding the type of puzzle I’d like to make, whether it’s a crossword, something image-based, and/or a logic puzzle. Then, based on the theme of the Summer of Puzzles or some other hunt I’m creating for, I try to find the surprising twist that will be hidden in the puzzle for solvers to discover. That could be anything from a new dataset to an original mechanic or a fun blend of unexpected concepts. After brainstorming on my own, I then generate even more ideas together with other members of the puzzle team. The goal is to bring in a variety of perspectives from folks with different backgrounds and pick the most interesting one.

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
Building a good puzzle and leading a successful engineering project both require a process that has been proven to work over time: going through the phases of design, implementation and testing. Both also greatly benefit from collaboration. Without it, solutions would stay constrained.

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
I like being given some constraints on my puzzle solution, especially when they come from the meta puzzle – like needing the answer to match an expression. When that happens, the first challenge as a creator is to find a valid answer that also fits the theme of the hunt in some more or less distant ways.

I’ve also enjoyed making physical puzzles for our Bloomberg hunts. In those cases, I work with BINK, our in-house printing and fulfillment shop, to see what’s feasible and then utilize their creative capabilities to come up with something cool. The BINK team has seemed to enjoy working with us on new and different puzzles!

What’s one of the coolest / most interesting technologies you’ve had the opportunity to work with as an engineer at Bloomberg?
A couple times during my career at Bloomberg, I’ve had the opportunity to contribute to publish some code as open source. It’s always a great feeling to be able to help the greater tech community by sharing my work.

What inspired your puzzle?
For the past year, I’ve been trying to improve my crossword skills by solving daily puzzles online. So, for this hunt, I really wanted to make a crossword puzzle with interesting constraints that would set it apart from a traditional crossword and require solvers to think a little differently.

Spencer Carver, Software Engineer

Creator of Week 5 Puzzle: Docking Station

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
When I was a kid, I had a PC game called “The Incredible Machine,” which was basically just building a lot of Rube Goldberg machines to get some number of different balls into an appropriate goal. I found it really interesting how, as the levels of the game got harder and you became more limited on what you could place, you had to start using certain parts for things that they weren’t intended for (e.g., a broom acting as a ramp, which then gets knocked down and is later on able to slide through a gap that a bowling ball can’t pass through in order to press a button). That sort of creative thinking – “what else could this be?” – is really rewarding in solving and making puzzles.

What makes a good puzzle good?
To me, a good puzzle has a satisfying “aha” moment (ideally around the final step), and either teaches you something new or does something in a way you haven’t seen before. Even if the core mechanic is familiar, like a Sudoku logic puzzle, it can still be exciting if you’re able to interact with it in some unexpected way. For example, this Player Piano hunt puzzle from the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt was such a joy to work through, even though, at its heart, it’s “just” a crossword puzzle.

Walk us through your creative process for building your puzzles.
I like to start with an interesting dataset or unique solving mechanic, and then build an appropriate theme from that point. I like to look for a lot of pun opportunities or double meanings related to the theme and then hint at what solvers should do. As a result, a lot of my early drafts look like recipe blogs: a far-too-long personal backstory before getting to the actual contents. From there, I work on paring it down so it’s just the key details, but still leave in some flavor.

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
Many! Both require being able to build for specific features and user interaction, the importance of testing and QA, and clearly commenting on your output so that when you need to go back to it later, you remember how something worked, not just what was written. Occasionally, if you have a really constrained aspect to your puzzle, you also need to write a program to find answers for you – that’s literal engineering problem-solving!

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
I like building around a double entendre, both mechanically and thematically. After I decide on my theme, I try to look if there’s a relevant encoding or other puzzle tool that fits well with the theme. For example, I want the puzzler to feel that “it makes sense that this is flashing Morse code at me because the puzzle is about light,” and not just to pick something that seems unrelated. Then, in the next step, they realize the flashes were different items with well-defined weights, and they now need to find the lightest or order in an increasing manner.

Are there engineering concepts you’ve worked into a puzzle design?
I’ve previously tried to make a puzzle based on assembly languages, where you would need to cause a stack overflow to get the final answer, but it quickly crosses the line into being tedious. I think the best concept that overlaps with puzzle design is actually user stories, as you’re thinking about the way you want a user to approach your puzzle. If you pull it off, then you can make them hit those “aha” moments and provoke an emotional reaction, just as you intended.

How has puzzle-making changed the way you approach creativity and/or collaboration?
Build prototypes! Since I work in a front-end role for bloomberg.com, I’ve learned there’s a massive difference between how you explain an idea and watching someone else interact with your work for the first time. In puzzles, the key difference is that everyone will have a different approach and knowledge set. For example, someone who does daily crossword puzzles will be much more adept at a puzzle with crossword clues, but might take longer with encoding or logic puzzle elements. As a creator (and software engineer), your background is not always going to match the average end-user, and it’s important to get early and varied experience-based feedback to be able to deliver the experience you intended.

As a specific example for this puzzle, I had created the logic-puzzle element and then marked additional steps that could be added or removed to tune difficulty. We wound up making it slightly shorter during revisions, but it’s a great time save if you can build a prototype that expresses your intention and also have a plan for how to adjust it.

What’s one of the most interesting technologies you’ve had the opportunity to work with as an engineer at Bloomberg?
I think edge computing is a really incredible application of technology that has become more prevalent on the web during my time at Bloomberg. It leads to many interesting patterns of thinking about how you can logically break down your webpage into parts and put them back together efficiently, almost like a jigsaw puzzle! When you do it right, you reduce operational cost and make things faster for your users, but there’s also a lot of planning around how to structure things to best take advantage of what is available, as not every action can be handled at the edge.

How did you decide on the direction of your puzzle this year? Anything more you want puzzlers to know about it?
I really wanted to hide something in plain sight with this puzzle, which is somewhat risky on the construction side. If someone knows what they’re looking for going in, they can skip straight to the final step, which isn’t a good thing when you generally want everyone to start on equal footing. So, the bulk of the puzzle is actually designed to guide solvers towards that insight via a hint, rather than expecting them to connect all of the elements together.

Plus, the Docking Station theme emerged as a punny way to connect to the broader Summer of Puzzles theme.

José García Negrón, Senior Software Engineer

Creator of Week 4 Puzzle: Phoning It In

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
I’ve been doing puzzles since I can remember! Early on, most of the types I would try would be more traditional number puzzles – like Sudoku or KenKen – that were part of the games and comics section in my local newspaper. Back then, and to this day, I love any and all puzzles that leave me wondering “where did my time go?” or “How did the author come up with this?

What makes a good puzzle good?
There’s a careful balance to puzzle creation that makes it elegant, in my opinion:

• Difficulty
• “Aha” Moment
• Time it takes to solve

You want a puzzle to be just hard enough that it takes the solver a bit of thinking time to realize what’s going on. On top of that, the moment they realize what needs to be done, the rest of the puzzle should not be another hour long slog. It’s not an easy task to balance these properly, but those are the puzzles that you remember for a long time.

Walk us through your creative process for building your puzzles.
For me, it depends on the reason for creating a puzzle. In a setting like Summer of Puzzles, I like to burn the candle from both ends, so to speak. I like to figure out the end solution and the starting theme or layout of the puzzle at the same time. The rest becomes mechanics on how to get from point A to point B in the most fun way possible. This method can be high risk, however, because sometimes the path to the solution is not possible and you find yourself having done some work that will not be used.

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
Iteration, iteration, iteration! It’s really difficult, in puzzle making and in engineering, to capture every single aspect of a final product from the get-go. So, we start with a proof of concept which allows us to determine if a solution is viable. Then, we flesh it out, review it, and get feedback to enhance the product/puzzle into the best possible final form.

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
Puzzles should cater to the audience that is solving it. So, to be as broadly relevant as possible, I like to remind myself when creating that “puzzles are not trivia.” If your puzzle’s data set is not findable by a (relatively) quick internet search, people might not enjoy solving it.

Are there engineering concepts you’ve worked into a puzzle design?
Not particularly, or at least not on purpose. That said, I’ve applied many engineering tactics for puzzle creation: puzzle “tests” to confirm completeness or uniqueness, scripts to generate words or phrases that fit the puzzle idea, and iteration to get the best possible puzzle.

What’s one of the coolest / most interesting technologies you’ve had the opportunity to work with as an engineer at Bloomberg?
For a little while, I was working on adding some functionality to the Bloomberg Mobile Professional app. This involved using an internal tool to develop the UI and service. I was impressed at every step of the way by how seamless and easy it made development.

What inspired the design of your puzzle?
When we landed on the general theme for this year’s Summer of Puzzles, I knew immediately that I wanted to incorporate phones! For the longest time, I’ve been trying to create a puzzle involving extensions, like phone or file extensions. The puzzle you see today does not use extensions at all but it is an iteration on a mechanic that might sound familiar from childhood games.

Chris Benedict, Senior Software Engineer in Data Visualization & Puzzle Team Founder and Leader

Creator of Week 3 Puzzle: The a-MAZE-ing Garden

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
I love solving problems and thinking of creative ways to solve them.

My first exposure to puzzles came in the form of lateral-thinking puzzles that my mom used to give me when I was five years old. I started creating my own around second grade. Since then, I’ve read countless books about puzzles

What makes a good puzzle good?
I teach four different classes to fellow Bloomberg employees about this topic through Bloomberg University, our internal training resource with a robust education curriculum.

At a very high level, good puzzles:

• Have awesome “aha moments” that leave solvers thinking “wow, that was cool!”
• Have just enough direction obscured via pun language that still makes sense grammatically
• Have a solution that, makes perfect sense when you arrive at it (e.g., describing some part of the puzzle), while also being tough to guess
• Are elegant
• Have components that are all used and potentially reused; nothing is wasted
• Have multiple levels when applicable (e.g., recursion)
• Take long enough to feel challenging, but are not frustrating

On the other hand, bad puzzles:

• Have nonsensical or unrelated logical leaps
• Lack crucial information
• Require tedious or frustrating busy work
• Have too many components
• Confuse solvers unnecessarily through red herrings

Walk us through your creative process for building your puzzles.
This subject is also one of the topics that I teach in the classes. I think there are five leaping off points to start when brainstorming a puzzle:

• The presentation: The form in which the puzzle is presented; is it a website? Is it something physical?
• The “aha moment”
• The puzzle elements: The patterns, data sources, encodings, and formats
• The techniques used to combine the elements into a solve
• The solution: Often, when you have a meta puzzle, you could be given a regex, category, or restriction of some kind. For example, in the Summer of Puzzles, responses from our first eight puzzles will feed directly into the Meta puzzle. I encourage creators – and solvers – to think about how the possibilities of words or phrases may inspire another idea.

I’m simplifying quite a bit here; if you want to know more, you’ll need to join Bloomberg and take my class! 🙂.

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
Collaboration is key. Designing good puzzles is made far easier with a group of people to brainstorm with and bounce ideas off, just like you do in engineering teams. Rarely will one person have all the best ideas to incorporate into a puzzle, just as one person will rarely have all the best ideas for the design of a large project.

In engineering, you are trying to design solutions, systems, or features that are error-free, intuitive, and efficient, just as in puzzle creation you are trying to design a puzzle that is error (and red herring)-free, intuitive, and elegant. We even have Peer Review and QA for our puzzles.

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
Any! Though it may seem like the opposite is true. Constraints can make the puzzle easier to construct. That’s because the constraints can be a leaping off point for brainstorming. When you have no restrictions, you might be paralyzed in the process with so many different options to pursue.

Anything you want to share about your puzzle this year? Either what inspired it, how you decided the direction, and/or what you want puzzlers to know about it?
This puzzle was inspired by something I had as a child. I’d always told myself that I would make a puzzle about it, but I can’t say anything else!

Have you ever solved a work-related challenge using a puzzle-like approach? What was that like?
Most challenges at work are solved the same as you solve a puzzle. As engineers, we collaboratively solve problems, and solving a puzzle is just about the same thing. The only difference is the medium we use to solve these problems is code in engineering.

Alison Garrity, Software Engineer

Creator of Week 2 Puzzle: Just Add Tea

What was your first exposure to puzzles, and what do you love about them?
The first type of puzzle I fell in love with was sudoku! I’ve always enjoyed math, so I’m not surprised that number puzzles appealed to me at a young age. Puzzles have always been very comforting and satisfying to me, which is why I continue to play puzzle games in my free time.

What makes a good puzzle good?
Good puzzles are satisfying and straightforward, and balance familiar thought patterns with novel ideas in a way that’s fun and scratches the itch in your brain.

Walk us through your creative process for building your puzzles.
I usually start by thinking about the theme for the whole puzzle hunt, then derive my own puzzle’s theme from there. I get a lot of the puzzle content from brainstorming sessions with other puzzle team members, then make whatever drawings and graphics I need from there.

What skills overlap between puzzle design and engineering problem-solving?
The biggest overlap I’ve noticed is about constantly asking “does this make sense?” When writing code, you have to make sure it’s clear and maintainable for the next person, and that they can figure out what you were trying to achieve. When making puzzles, you often have to ask yourself similar questions about whether or not your puzzle is clear enough to be understood without context.

What kinds of technical constraints do you enjoy working with when designing puzzles?
I really enjoy starting with a “solve word” and brainstorming the puzzle around that, essentially working backwards as I design the puzzle.

Are there engineering concepts you’ve worked into a puzzle design?
This is more electrical engineering than software engineering, but I love getting the chance to use resistor color codes in a puzzle. I learned about how to read them in school, so I enjoy putting that knowledge to use in the form of a puzzle.

How has puzzle-making changed the way you approach creativity and/or collaboration?
During brainstorming sessions, we’ll often come up with multiple possible puzzle designs for a theme, and I’ve had to learn how to picture all of them at once, which has proved difficult at times.

Anything you want to share about your puzzle this year? Either what inspired it, how you decided the direction, and/or what you want puzzlers to know about it?
As the title and graphics suggest, this puzzle is tea themed, and it was inspired by my afternoon tea breaks. My favorite teas are Earl Grey and chamomile!