Author Archives: stevek

Team Health, Anonymous Surveys, and Data

I’m often asked a series of questions related to managing team health, creating realistic schedules, the need for crunch time, how to “squeeze an extra 20%” out of an already efficient team, and so on. Here I explain what we … Continue reading

Posted in Management, Uncategorized, Zynga | Leave a comment

Who Cheesed My Penguin?

Some years back, I was seated at a departmental all hands meeting.  My colleagues and I were viewing a series of fairly mundane presentation slides, when up came something new and surprising.  Without additional context, the slide read something like … Continue reading

Posted in Books, Leadership, Management | Leave a comment

Future Home Of …

People keep bugging me to retell funny stories. At my previous employer NetApp® (Network Appliance), funny things would often happen around April 1 each year (surprise!). The year 2002 was not a particularly happy one in silicon valley.  Following years … Continue reading

Posted in Humor, NetApp, Pranks | 1 Comment

Aaaaaand … ChefVille is Live

About a month ago, we had an Unleashed event featuring ChefVille. Our game is now live, you can find it at http://apps.facebook.com/chefville/ Here are a few articles about the game. Games.com – ChefVille: All about the food, its ingredients and … Continue reading

Posted in ChefVille, Cooking, Zynga | 4 Comments

ChefVille Unleashed

For the past few months I’ve been working on a game called ChefVille, announced today at Zynga Unleashed.  It’s nice to have the game announced publicly so I can say a little more about it going forward. ChefVille has a … Continue reading

Posted in ChefVille, Zynga | 1 Comment

Computer Science for Parents

I was discussing recently with friends that it would be amusing to create a computer science reference for parents. So for those of you out there who know something about computers and babies, I offer a few definitions. critical section … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Humor | 2 Comments

Oddball Questions, Part 2

Here is my part 2 follow up from Oddball Questions Part 1. These are my responses to the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions from Glassdoor, presented in Snappy Answers format. Snappy Answers 13-25 13. “Name 5 uses of a stapler … Continue reading

Posted in Humor, Interviewing | Leave a comment

Oddball Questions, Part 1

When I was a kid, I loved Mad Magazine, and read it a lot (And from an early age! What were my parents thinking?!?) One item I really enjoyed was Al Jaffee’s Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions, and those come … Continue reading

Posted in Humor, Interviewing | 1 Comment

New Pedals

My Dahon-D7 originally came with the standard Suntour folding pedals.  One of them went bad on me recently.  The pedal was making crunching noises and wasn’t rotating properly – not good!  Apparently a ball bearing crumbled.  Reading online reviews, it … Continue reading

Posted in Biking | Leave a comment

Wizards and Dwarves

I wrote about interview puzzle questions recently to set the context for this article. A few years back, a colleague asked me to ponder a Wizards and Dwarves puzzle as a potential interview question.  A typical statement goes something like … Continue reading

Posted in Humor, Interviewing | 3 Comments