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We ran tests on cPanel employees in a conference room at the cPanel home office. After a few runs, we tweaked the clues and added a few notes (that clock lock was a bit frustrating and the weight of the spam wasn’t always the same). And we planned some guidelines on when to give out hints or how much to taunt and distract the players.<\/p>\n
The original plan was to use the locks on the conference room’s cabinets because the virtual reality tour of the W showed handles on their cabinets. We could run the chains through the handles. The change in venue from the W to the Ritz-Carlton<\/a> changed that plan, and when we moved from the W to the Ritz-Carlton, we had to adjust for a whole different space. And the cabinets had no handles. Oops.<\/p>\n (I’ll be down at the bar, reaping Jack and Cokes.)<\/em><\/p>\n We changed our design to borrow luggage from the staff, and ran the locks through the handles, and told the players that they couldn’t open the luggage without opening the locks.<\/p>\n In all, we had 9 teams go through the escape room, and only one didn’t finish (they came really, really close). The best time was by Jon Kagan, Jawad Tabrez, and Michael Blandford. Way to go!<\/p>\n Three teams finished with less than a minute to spare, with one team down to their final ten seconds!<\/p>\n I think it went really well, and it was neat seeing the teamwork and the thought processes and problem-solving strategies that different people use. And, yes, the groans from when y’all realized that “Run a test on your storage” meant that the lock combination was TEST and not FSCK or HULK or CHKDISK (I did have fun setting it to NICK before each session).<\/p>\n (The answer to everything, really.)<\/em><\/p>\n I hope y’all had as much fun going through the puzzles as we did coming up with them and running the event. Plus, Kelli as the SpamAssassin, got to meet Kevin McGrail from the Apache Software Foundation, who develops SpamAssassin.<\/p>\n (Maybe we can do cpHulk next year and invite Stan Lee?)<\/em><\/p>\n Maybe next year, if we do this again, we’ll do a little carpentry and electronics. Rig up some lights, loop some sound effects, maybe even a smoke machine.<\/p>\n PS: In case you’re wondering, here’s the solution:<\/p>\n After 3 minutes, the Grim Reaper tended to hang around the next step of the puzzle, mumbling clues, and point the end of the scythe at it (when not practicing golf swings, taking photos, and calling Uber Underworld).<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Note from benny: In case you missed it, you can see a bunch of pictures from this year’s conference in this Facebook album<\/a>. If you want to make sure that you know about our conference next year, sign up here<\/a>. It’s gonna be a Rockin good time.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hi. I’m Laurence Simon. I’m a writer. I write things. A lot of development teams here at cPanel have been going to escape rooms as team-building exercises. In escape rooms, you get locked in a room, and you have to figure out the puzzles and challenges to get free before the clock runs out. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":64777,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[989,477],"tags":[1665,69,1653,1841],"class_list":["post-46493","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cpconf","category-events","tag-2017-cpanel-conference","tag-cpanel-conference","tag-cpconf","tag-cpconference"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n<\/p>\n
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