Author Archives: stevek

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

Fear the Z

For the first time yesterday, AppData’s leaderboard reports ChefVille as the top game on Facebook by daily active users (DAU). Congratulations to the entire ChefVille team, and many thanks to partner teams at Zynga who made this possible. Instant Leader … Continue reading

Posted in ChefVille, Zynga | Leave a 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