Today begins the next journey of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever. For those of you that missed the first one, you can still visit Version 1.0 at http://toughestdeveloperpuzzleever.com.
The basic idea behind this puzzle is that it should challenge software developers. It shouldn’t require intimate memorized knowledge of a specific framework, compiler, or language, but should require some significant search engine expertise, in addition to clever puzzle solving skills.
In the first version of this puzzle, we had 30 levels. For the next one, we are aiming for 100. Because of this, I want to cast a broad net, and find some people that can contribute some challenging puzzles of their own. Here’s how the structure of the puzzle works:
- You can create up to 10 puzzles, which you will host on your personal website.
- Your puzzles will be arranged in order, and assigned numbers.
- Over 100,000 people will visit your website.
It’s that easy. In the three months the first puzzle has been active, we had 104,372 unique users. This number is also expected to grow significantly for the next version. We have only had 230 people actually complete the puzzle.
So, this is your call to action. If you’d like to participate in this little adventure, send me an email. Let me know you’re interested. And then get started thinking about some maddeningly challenging puzzles you can create. We expect to launch the next version of this puzzle in March-April of 2010. So there’s not a rush, but this is also something that can’t wait until the last minute.
I look forward to working with you on this!
JEFF BLANKENBURG 
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