While I was on vacation two events were memorialized. I was honored with 24 years of service at my day job, and my longest-serving colleague at NAQT retired from active duties after 25 years.
I can't overstate how much the technical advances in quiz bowl came out of R's laboratory. Basically, I don't think that quiz bowl grows to where it is today without his technical expertise. Certainly, I don't think high school quiz bowl would have any level of available and local competitions without his work.
The first calendar of quiz bowl events on the web came out of R's work in 1997, when the circuit was stuck between usenet, and a mailing list. The calendar in use at that point was looking at announcements as they passed through subscription lists; they weren’t centralized and they weren’t something a person could stumble upon, even if they had interest in forming or joining a team. That was really the first point migration from those forums to the web, and without that migration, and something pointing us to the web, we might not have made it out of 1997, when the usenet forums imploded.
R developed QBML the Quiz Bowl Markup Language still used by NAQT, and then built the Ginseng engine to process questions written in the language. This was the first way to implement a distribution across subcategories at a level of precision to balance packets automatically, and how to automatically build a packet set from the contributions of multiple writers and editors. Prior to that, the average editor spent the majority of their editing time setting packets question by question and checking for almost repeats. These were editing tasks that didn't require the expertise of a subject editor, but there was no one else who could do the task. The raw force multiplier of Ginseng means that dozens more sets are written and edited every year, because editors can just focus on the questions, not futzing with whether one packet has too many mentions of Italy. If you didn't live through the prior era, I can't explain exactly how painful and exhausting the editing process was prior to that.
Buzzword came out of several previous attempts to add an online competition, that all struggled to work to scale. And when it became clear that COVID was going to cause a significant disruption to the all facets of in-person interaction, R dusted off his old code, and got it to work with AWS, and once he had the ability to run on the cloud, it accelerated the project to something usable in a couple of weeks. I don't know if NAQT would have survived COVID financially if Buzzword had not been implemented in three weeks. I also don't know if the Online Question System, which enabled this year's NCT's to run, could have been developed, were it not for R being forced to work through all the cloud issues that were between Buzzword's concept and actualization.
This are not to suggest someone wouldn't have been able to develop these, the point is that these were all developed ahead of when they were necessary or critical developments. And if these developments were ever to become critical, the circuit would be losing people and opportunities while they were being developed, and people would have to have had the wherewithal to develop and maintain the tech, at a cost of their own playing time. Having R developing tech has been like having a 3 to 5 year advantage in the marketplace.
The thing is, if it was worth doing, R just did it. He didn't need to discuss the problem, or raise the issue on the forums, he just got it done. And he was able to see the problem coming well in advance.
That's something I have never been very good at doing, which is why I've always been glad to have him as a colleague. I'm an excellent identifier of immediate problems, and decent at finding things that will be a problem two or three years down the line, but for every problem I identify correctly, I always find five more that eventually resolve themselves without needing action. I have the temperament of a tester, his is the temperament of a project manager and developer. He's always had the ability to ignore the right things.
24 years less a week ago, I got an email from R. He offered me a job with SiliconAge, the company he and his friends had started in San Francisco. I got this on my ninth day in the office at Ansys (when it was ANSYS). I thought about it, thought about moving out to the west coast, but ultimately decided that because I still thought of myself primarily as a mechanical engineer, and not a programmer, I was probably better off working as a tester of Computational Fluid Dynamics software, than trying to apply the C I learned in one course. But if I ever got laid off, as I had been from another company four months before that, I'd send my resume immediately.
That must have impressed him, because the week after that he nominated me for the empty NAQT Executive Director post, which I held for 15 years until we checked the bylaws and realized that it was written to be held by an attorney.
I've often said that the only reason I never went full-time into NAQT is NAQT is the second most perfect job for me, but I'm currently working full-time in the first. I still haven't left it. I think R's had the perfect job for him for 25 years, and I hope the next step is perfect for where he is now.
A couple weeks back I ended up worried (the tester mindset again) about how in the book I was going to accommodate the change in the J!Archive's search engine setup, in referring to pages over individual questions. Well, the announcement this week that Jeopardy! would have its own 24-hour channel on Pluto.tv would seem to solve a bit of that. If you can't come up with a focused list of questions in subjects, being able to raid a supply of practice questions at higher difficulty than you'll face in performance is not that much of a drop. It will still require focused questions (which is still looking like something I need to supply), but this is something that can be used in practice, or by the students on their own.