Note: if you are viewing this shortly after it’s published and somehow don’t want to be spoiled on Mystery Hunt, make sure this spoiler formatting shows up: this text should be spoilered; if it doesn’t, try shift-refreshing. (There are Correct Ways to fix this, but I’m too lazy to do them. Sorry.) Well, we did it. ✈✈✈ Galactic Trendsetters ✈✈✈ ran an MIT Mystery Hunt. Somehow, it slipped my mind until trying to write the 2020 year-end post that I’d probably want to write a post on all this. In fact, there was one major project that I started in 2019, but that I didn’t think of mentioning in my 2019 year-end post because it wasn’t ready to be announced at that time, and that I almost forgot that I had never mentioned. But this post is a pretty good place to announce it. Planning Mystery Hunt is a massive year-long endeavor. I didn’t have any leadership or otherwise high-responsibility roles, which made sense because I was busy writing a masters thesis for the first four months of Mystery Hunt planning. Because of that, and because I know many many other people on our team have written and will be writing blog posts (Rahul’s post, Nathan’s post, CJ’s post, maybe more to come?) I will focus on the things I did specifically. (So there is minimal discussion of the theme, overall organization, or big decisions like our COVID-19 response; I think the linked posts cover these well already.) Puzzle-Writing Software One part I did largely have “ownership” of, and that I sank a lot of time into, was maintaining our software for writing puzzles — the website where authors submitted puzzle ideas and drafts, testsolvers tested puzzles, and editors tracked and discussed the statuses of all the puzzles. This role was largely a continuation of me owning the same component for Galactic Puzzle Hunt since 2018, which itself grew out of the comparative advantage of having worked on it a little when writing with Random Fish for the 2015 MIT Mystery Hunt. There is some life lesson about s
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