As a web design agency, it's important to have a ping pong table. If you're calling yourself a web design agency and you don't have a ping pong table, you're not a web design agency. I don't know what you are, but it's not a web design agency.
In adherence to this immutable law, Buffalo became a web design agency when James started, and one of the provisos of him joining was that we procured a ping pong table. We gladly accommodated this request, and so began the Buffalo ping pong league.
There is a wide range of skill on display here, ranging from James at the top, down through Alex and Paul, to Dan and myself in the middle, then Hannah and Max and, finally, Hugo hanging on right at the bottom, for dear life. It's not that Hugo's bad at the game, necessarily. It's just that he both plays and loses a lot.
When you assemble a crack team of nerds into a league of any kind, it can be that the meta game supersedes the game itself. It started that we wanted to track who was winning, so I created workflows for Launchbar (the best application launcher) and Alfred (the application launcher people use until they discover Launchbar) so that you could enter scores from your match-ups using a simple formula.
We use Elo as a scoring system, as it's the fairest overall way to do things. If I beat James, I take a bunch of points from him. If I beat Hugo, I take far fewer points. Every month, we reset the scores to 1,000 points each and start over. Sisyphus would be proud.
Once you've established a system like this, with parameters and rules, you can take on small challenges outside the game to add an extra layer to it. For instance, Panic released their Status Board app, which prompted us to hook an iPad up to a TV to display leaderboards based on the scores we'd gathered. Quick coding tasks that notably boosted our little community. Everyone has a rival, everyone has a Goliath, everyone's improving, and it's all healthy competition. Plus, who doesn't love knocking someone down when they've been talking smack about your game for weeks?
Last week, Max cut out Dan's, Hugo's and my avatars so that they were only heads, and created new emoji for our Slack #general channel. That gave Dan an idea: what if, when someone submits a ping pong score, a demoralising message was sent to Slack, notifying everyone of a glorious victory and crushing defeat? I loved it. It had everything. Emoji, public shame and playing with APIs. And making emoji from people's profile photos I guess.
And there you have it; our beloved ping pong league. Like a builder's kitchen, it will never be truly finished, but the fun is in the iteration. Next up, some sort of graphs, probably. Nerds love graphs.
