Announcing Starfighter

I'm all, involved? and stuff? You can, like, ask us stuff, I guess.

Let me answer the most frequent questions we're getting right here:

"CTF" stands for "Capture The Flag". Conventionally, it's a contest with a collection of "flags" each of which is guarded by a programming puzzle; teams of people compete to collect flags. What we're doing is not a conventional CTF, but if you want to get the flavor of what we're doing (without the whole game dynamic), check out MICROCORRUPTION.COM, which is a more conventional CTF we ran last year.

Security is one of two problem domains we're starting with. But this isn't a "security recruiting" service, and our take on security uses it as a venue for systems and network programming, not for the minutia of SQL query quoting rules.

No questions, just a hearty "Congratulations!" and "Good luck!"

I'm excited to see this develop.

> We’re not here to fix the technical interview: we’re here to destroy it, and create something new and better in its place.

That sounds pretty bold - some of us are kind of happy to go in and do an interview and talk about our experience and not spend a lot of time playing a game. I could see the game as more likely to work for people with lots of time and not as much experience or proficiency with the typical process. I could see it working very well indeed to find people who might otherwise have been ignored.

In any event, it sounds cool, and I wish you guys the best of luck with it!

Exciting stuff! It's ambitious but with the talented team behind it I'm confident they can pull it off.

> We come here not to serve technology recruiters, but instead to replace them with a small shell script.

I wonder if the authors are fans of Stargate Universe. The show's premise involves a key character being identified by success on a puzzle embedded in a video game.