amitt

This is missing a pretty big chunk of the end-game(s) of Flash: social network gaming. All of the top Facebook games were using Flash. We built the engine for FarmVille, CityVille, etc. using ActionScript3. Our artists would author the animations and sprites in the Flash editor and we'd be able to drop them in seamlessly into the game.

Additionally, PC/Console 2D & 3D games were using Flash to author and render their UIs for a very long time via ScaleForm. They only discontinued it in 2018.

Flash gaming became much bigger than Newgrounds and had massive influence on how to build future WYSIWIG tools to empower designers and artists.

Depends on the type of training. Walmart is using VR to simulate Black Friday scenarios in which a fully-immersive environment would be more useful than an overlay.

Several AR companies are working on just-in-time knowledge to allow people to do tasks without prior knowledge. We've invested in that area and I wrote on the topic here:

http://www.businessinsider.com/augmented-reality-could-slow-...

I run a VR/AR-focused VC firm (Presence Capital). We've done 30+ investments in this space, so you can say that we believe in the long-term potential of VR. Even given that, we're bearish on how quickly there will be a profitable/sustainable VR consumer business and have advised most of our portfolio companies targeting consumers to keep burn low.

That being said, this article and most of the comments here are taking a singular worldview: consumer-focused VR for a western market. VR is a tool, not an industry. Context on use is required to assess traction.

VR for B2B or enterprises can make money today and doesn't require mass-consumer adoption. If you make someone 10x more effective at their job (tools for sales people: OssoVR) or onboard employees faster (training: STRIVR), you can overcome the cost and rough edges on the hardware and have an ROI to justify the cost of the system.

Walmart, for example, recently announced they are using VR to power their training centers. https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/31/walmart-is-bringing-vr-ins...

We're actively investing in VR for training companies and I recently did an overview of what separates out the best companies in this space: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2017/08/24/ti...

In Asia (and increasingly in the west), VR-arcades are going to be how most consumers first experience high-end PC VR. Culturally, people there are already used to going to internet cafe's to use computers by the hour and seek out 3rd spaces. VR-by-the-hour rooms fit this mold. Additionally, the short length of most VR experiences makes it easy to have a 15-20 minute session and not be disappointed by the lack of content. IMAX is starting to open multiple VR centers and the word within the industry is that the VR Zones opened by Namco in Tokyo are currently profitable.

More info on this here: https://medium.com/@amitt/vr-will-be-huge-in-china-41de0c758....

(disclosure: we're investors in STRIVR and OssoVR)

Mobile games/vr/ar - Unity or Unreal

Web Backend - Elixir/Phoenix (we used PHP for FV), Python in some cases

Web Frontend / Native Mobile Apps - React & React Native

JS has effectively caught up to what AS3 offered back then minus type safety (which TypeScript offers).

End of an era.

We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets)

0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

Sales people at medical device companies. They need to learn how to use the devices and then easily demo them to customers. It's also used by the end customers, after the sale is made.

funny you should mention that. I did an AMA on Whale today and that was one of the questions:

https://askwhale.com/q/86968f/

I run a VR-focused VC firm (Presence Capital). We've done 25+ investments in this space, so you can say that we believe in the long-term potential of VR. Even given that, we're bearish on how quickly there will be a profitable/sustainable VR consumer business and have advised most of our portfolio companies targeting consumers to keep burn low.

That being said, almost all of the comments here are taking a singular worldview: consumer-focused VR for a western market.

VR for B2B or enterprises can make money today and doesn't require mass-consumer adoption. If you make someone 10x more effective at their job (tools for sales people: OssoVR) or onboard employees faster (training: STRIVR), you can overcome the cost and rough edges on the hardware.

In China, VR-arcades are going to be how most consumers first experience high-end PC VR. Culturally, people there are already used to going to internet cafe's to use computers by the hour and seek out 3rd spaces. VR-by-the-hour rooms fit this mold. Additionally, the short length of most VR experiences makes it easy to have a 15-20 minute session and not be disappointed by the lack of content. More info on this here: https://medium.com/@amitt/vr-will-be-huge-in-china-41de0c758...

Red Hot Labs | http://www.redhotlabs.com/jobs | SF, ONSITE ONLY

FULL-TIME ENGINEERS and a FULL-TIME LEAD ACCOUNT MANAGER

We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers acquire users for their apps. Our product, Toro, makes it super easy to split test and optimize mobile marketing campaigns. We’re solving one of the necessary, but tedious, parts of launching great mobile apps. We believe in creating delightful experiences that are easy to use, save people time, and, most importantly, save our customers money by improving campaign performance.

This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure. We're well backed by folks such as A16Z, Greylock, SVAngel, Data Collective, and more.

We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented individuals to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.

==================================

ENGINEERS

We want all engineering members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following engineering profiles:

  - Senior Product Engineer: You've built products from  concept all the way to 
  maturity.  You're as opinionated and influential about product as you are about coding.  
  You're a master at JS/CSS/HTML and customer facing technologies. 
  Bonus points if you’re on-top of your front-end frameworks like Angular 
  (which we use!), Ember, or Meteor.

  - Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to 
  millions of users.  You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the 
  process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server 
  architectures, and low-level services. 

  - Redshift, Redis, MySQL, Rails for our backend API.
  - AWS-suite: EC2, S3, RedShift, EBS, ElasticCache, RDS
  - AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore, Node.JS with D3 for our dashboard and web apps.
  - 3rd party services: Facebook, Mixpanel, Stripe, Mailgun

LEAD ACCOUNT MANAGER

We're hiring for our FIRST account manager position.

Our customer list is growing fast so we're looking for someone that is eager to work directly with our founders to build a process to ensure all of our customers are successful at using our product. Ideal candidates would have prior account management experience and a strong desire to define and implement account management best practices.

==================================

Do any of the above profiles sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com or apply directly at http://www.redhotlabs.com/jobs

Or, learn a little more about us here: https://www.torometrics.com/company

This is a common pattern when you want to batch requests. We used to use it at Zynga for games. Facebook also supports it for their APIs: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/making-multip...

Hi! We’re Red Hot Labs from San Francisco and we're looking for a FULL-TIME DEV (authorized already to work in the US, no remote, no interns, thanks!)

We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers harness their data. Our product, still in beta, functions as the central hub for all the services mobile developers already use. By weaving together the data from these disparate services, we gain a comprehensive view of the app and are uniquely positioned to deliver insights and value back to the developer.

This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure. We're well backed by folks such as A16Z, Greylock, SVAngel, DCVC, and more.

We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented engineers to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.

We want all engineering members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following engineering profile:

THE ROLE:

  Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to 
  millions of users.  You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the 
  process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server 
  architectures, and low-level services. 

  - Redis, MySQL, Rails for our backend API.
  - Mostly AWS with a little bit of Heroku for our hosting.
  - AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore, Node.JS with D3 for our dashboard and web apps.
  - 3rd party services: Facebook, Mixpanel, Stripe, Mailgun

Do any of the above profiles sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com

Or, learn a little more about us here: http://www.redhotlabs.com/jobs

Hi! We’re Red Hot Labs from San Francisco and we're looking for a FULL-TIME DEV and a FULL-TIME ADMIN/GENERALIST.

We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers harness their data. Our product, still in beta, functions as the central hub for all the services mobile developers already use. By weaving together the data from these disparate services, we gain a comprehensive view of the app and are uniquely positioned to deliver insights and value back to the developer.

This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure. We're well backed by folks such as A16Z, Greylock, SVAngel, DCVC, and more.

We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented engineers to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.

We want all engineering members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following engineering profiles:

==================================

  - Senior Product Engineer: You've built products from  concept all the way to 
  maturity.  You're as opinionated and influential about product as you are about coding.  
  You're a master at JS/CSS/HTML and customer facing technologies. 
  Bonus points if you’re on-top of your front-end frameworks like Angular 
  (which we use!), Ember, or Meteor.

  - Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to 
  millions of users.  You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the 
  process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server 
  architectures, and low-level services. 

  - Senior Data Engineer: You've built models which extract insights or 
  predictions from large, living datasets.  You can engage with a dataset in an 
  unfamiliar domain, grasp the dynamics of the system and impress subject area 
  experts with your result.  

  - Stupendous Junior Engineer: You don't have years of working experience, but 
  you have handful of mind-blowing personal or school projects.  You were among 
  the best students at a top tier engineering university. Your TA's and 
  classmates gush about your code.

  - Redis, MySQL, Rails for our backend API.
  - Mostly AWS with a little bit of Heroku for our hosting.
  - AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore, Node.JS with D3 for our dashboard and web apps.
  - 3rd party services: Facebook, Mixpanel, Stripe, Mailgun

In addition, we're hiring for an admin/generalist position. We're looking for someone that doesn't necessarily know how to code (if you're interested in learning we can definitely help you there!), but is passionate about startups and is competent and considerate in any task thrown their way. This role would be to support the rest of the team to help with marketing, sales, general office admin stuff, scheduling interviews, QA, and so on. Basically, all of the "other stuff" in a startup.

Do any of the above profiles sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com

Or, learn a little more about us here: http://www.redhotlabs.com/jobs

San Francisco - Red Hot Labs - http://www.redhotlabs.com

We're on a mission to revolutionize how mobile developers harness their data. Our product, still in beta, functions as the central hub for all the services mobile developers already use. By weaving together the data from these disparate services, we gain a comprehensive view of the app and are uniquely positioned to deliver insights and value back to the developer.

This isn't our first trip around the block. Our previous startup was acquired by Zynga and our core technology turned into FarmVille and the rest of Zynga’s most successful games. It was a wild ride and now we’re full steam ahead on a new adventure.

We're looking for passionate, energetic, highly talented engineers to join our team. By becoming a foundational member of our team you will help shape the direction of our product, company and culture. We’re believe in constantly challenging ourselves to learn new things and would love to teach you what we know and learn from you as well.

We want all members of the team to be full-stack engineers and well-rounded individuals. But, we're especially excited about the following profiles:

Senior Product Engineer: You've built products from concept all the way to maturity. You're as opinionated and influential about product as you are about coding. You're a master at JS/CSS/HTML and customer facing technologies. Bonus points if you’re on-top of your front-end frameworks like Angular (which we use!), Ember, or Meteor.

Senior Systems Engineer: You've architected and scaled backend systems to millions of users. You've put out every kind of fire and learned a lot in the process. You understand the tradeoffs of different data stores, server architectures, and low-level services.

Senior Data Engineer: You've built models which extract insights or predictions from large, living datasets. You can engage with a dataset in an unfamiliar domain, grasp the dynamics of the system and impress subject area experts with your result.

Stupendous Junior Engineer: You don't have years of working experience, but you have handful of mind-blowing personal or school projects. You were among the best students at a top tier engineering university. Your TA's and classmates gush about your code.

Does this sound like you? Send us an email at: jobs@redhotlabs.com

Or, learn a little more about us here: http://www.redhotlabs.com

For FarmVille we sent the actions back to the server and then validated against game state there. It's the only real way to protect against cheating. However, if I were building the game again today, I'd just do what King does and have the client manage the state. It turns out that the set of people that would do this and the set of users that would convert into paying users has very little overlap. The overhead of managing state on the server is that you'd have to write your game logic twice (once in your client-side language and once server-side, though with a scripting language you may be able to avoid this). Second, we benchmarked this approach and found that you can handle 10x the number of players with the same hardware by not doing any server-side logic/validation and just having the server be a dumb pipe to store player state.

Here's a talk I gave on the FarmVille approach: http://www.slideshare.net/amittmahajan/rapidly-building-farm...

and one on the king approach that we're using at my current company: http://www.slideshare.net/amittmahajan/gdc-2013-ditching-the...

Union Square, San Francisco, CA. Full-time. Full-stack Engineer, All Levels.

Red Hot Labs (RHL) is looking for full-stack engineers at all levels that want to work on cutting edge mobile games and services for other mobile developers.

=Responsibilities=

    - Write both server and client-side mobile code for iOS and Android apps. 
      (We can teach you this!)
    - Actively learn and work with new technologies. There’s a very good chance 
       you’ll pick up experience with a new language / technology stack here!
    - Collaborate closely with myself and the rest of our team to develop 
      products and services with a high quality user-experience. 
    - Architect and own big parts of our infrastructure. 

    - REQUIRED: CS degree or significant experience in a low-level language (C, C++). 
         - We're trying to hire smart folks that have a solid CS foundation.
    - REQUIRED: Prior experience working with Javascript required.
    - REQUIRED: Ability to pick up new languages and frameworks quickly.
    - PREFERRED: Prior experience developing either business intelligence or games.
    - PREFERRED: Prior mobile experience in either iOS or Android.

We’re a small 6-person FUNDED startup founded by the guys who made FarmVille and CityVille. We’re building mobile games and supporting services that we think are missing from the mobile ecosystem. This is not our first startup; our last one was acquired by Zynga and led to them being able to IPO using our core-tech and games.

Our company culture is one built on learning and the belief that everyone is a student and everyone is a teacher. We want to work with folks that inspire us to learn more and do our best work. We invest in our employees and want to help you grow in both your core skill-set and other areas you may be interested in. We can afford to do this while we’re small.

We focus on shipping quickly and constantly (our first game was built in 6 weeks with no pre-existing client-side code), so this is a great place to experience shipping multiple products. Our product development process is a full-team collaborative one based on a healthy balance of metrics and design intuition. We care A LOT about good design and are always striving for putting out products we’re proud of both technically and visually.

Our tech-stack is built on accelerating the ability to ship. We’ve developed a unique client/server architecture that we use for all of our apps that allows us to write new backend connected mobile apps without having to write modify any server code. This backend combined with our unique embedded-JS frontend allows us to deploy fully featured cross-platform apps very quickly. Our first-game was featured on Google Play and was built in about 6 weeks.

=Perks=

    - WORKCATIONS! We’re a small company so we do unscalable things such as 
      rent a house for the whole team and spend a week working from a Ski-house Tahoe 
      or in a beach-house in Hawaii. 
    - Early-stage startup equity grants
    - Health/Dental/Vision insurance
 

    - An advanced client-side architecture written in C++ and 
      using embedded-JS bound to Objective-C/Java for our iOS and Android apps.
    - Redis, Couchbase, Rails for our backend API.
    - Mostly AWS with a little bit of Heroku for our hosting.
    - AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore for our dashboard and web apps.
    - 3rd party services: Twilio, Mailgun, Mixpanel, Crittercism, Testflight

About our culture: http://gamesauce.org/news/2013/05/31/red-hot-labs-sons-of-zy... About our strategy: http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/02/28/zynga-veteran... About our funding: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/28/red-hot-labs/

=Applying=

Send an email to jobs+HN@redhotlabs.com with a little bit about yourself and what you’re looking for in a new role and we can chat a bit more about what we’re up to in detail. We look forward to speaking with you!

-Amitt (Founder/CEO)

Union Square, San Francisco, CA. Full-time. Full-stack Engineer, All Levels.

Red Hot Labs (RHL) is looking for full-stack engineers at all levels that want to work on cutting edge mobile games and services for other mobile developers.

=Responsibilities=

    - Write both server and client-side mobile code for iOS and Android apps. 
      (We can teach you this!)
    - Actively learn and work with new technologies. There’s a very good chance 
       you’ll pick up experience with a new language / technology stack here!
    - Collaborate closely with myself and the rest of our team to develop 
      products and services with a high quality user-experience. 
    - Architect and own big parts of our infrastructure. 

    - REQUIRED: CS degree or significant experience in a low-level language (C, C++). 
         - We're trying to hire smart folks that have a solid CS foundation.
    - REQUIRED: Prior experience working with Javascript required.
    - REQUIRED: Ability to pick up new languages and frameworks quickly.
    - PREFERRED: Prior experience developing either business intelligence or games.
    - PREFERRED: Prior mobile experience in either iOS or Android.

We’re a small 6-person FUNDED startup founded by the guys who made FarmVille and CityVille. We’re building mobile games and supporting services that we think are missing from the mobile ecosystem. This is not our first startup; our last one was acquired by Zynga and led to them being able to IPO using our core-tech and games.

Our company culture is one built on learning and the belief that everyone is a student and everyone is a teacher. We want to work with folks that inspire us to learn more and do our best work. We invest in our employees and want to help you grow in both your core skill-set and other areas you may be interested in. We can afford to do this while we’re small.

We focus on shipping quickly and constantly (our first game was built in 6 weeks with no pre-existing client-side code), so this is a great place to experience shipping multiple products. Our product development process is a full-team collaborative one based on a healthy balance of metrics and design intuition. We care A LOT about good design and are always striving for putting out products we’re proud of both technically and visually.

Our tech-stack is built on accelerating the ability to ship. We’ve developed a unique client/server architecture that we use for all of our apps that allows us to write new backend connected mobile apps without having to write modify any server code. This backend combined with our unique embedded-JS frontend allows us to deploy fully featured cross-platform apps very quickly. Our first-game was featured on Google Play and was built in about 6 weeks.

=Perks=

    - WORKCATIONS! We’re a small company so we do unscalable things such as 
      rent a house for the whole team and spend a week working from a Ski-house Tahoe 
      or in a beach-house in Hawaii. 
    - Early-stage startup equity grants
    - Health/Dental/Vision insurance
 

    - An advanced client-side architecture written in C++ and 
      using embedded-JS bound to Objective-C/Java for our iOS and Android apps.
    - Redis, Couchbase, Rails for our backend API.
    - Mostly AWS with a little bit of Heroku for our hosting.
    - AngularJS, jQuery, Underscore for our dashboard and web apps.
    - 3rd party services: Twilio, Mailgun, Mixpanel, Crittercism, Testflight

    - About our culture: 
      http://gamesauce.org/news/2013/05/31/red-hot-labs-sons-of-zynga-forge-bridge-to-the-beyond/
    - About our strategy:    
      http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/02/28/zynga-veterans-red-hot-labs-says-can-cut-game-development-time/
    - About our funding: 
      http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/28/red-hot-labs/

Send an email to jobs+HN@redhotlabs.com with a little bit about yourself and what you’re looking for in a new role and we can chat a bit more about what we’re up to in detail. We look forward to speaking with you!

-Amitt (Founder/CEO)

This is great advice.

This is how the Unreal Engine was architected and it makes it really easy to create new composite objects.

In contrast, when we did the first version of the MyMiniLife/FarmVille engine in flash, in the name of the speed, we made the mistake of not architecting the game object model in this way. We had to go through a painful refactor process 6-months after FarmVille's launch to fix-up the object model because we were duplicating behavior across objects that were really close to being the same...but not at the same time.

Couple other benefits of using this approach:

1/ You can let game designers dynamically create new objects without programmer intervention. Just let them mixup new components as they see fit through an editor.

2/ If you build a visual editor/CMS for your objects, you can do some pretty nifty stuff with custom editors/renderers for components. For example, the UnrealEditor at one point had a custom color picker for the ColorComponent that made it much easier to work with colors than entering R,G,B manually.

3/ If you build in serialization to your components at a low level, you can do things like have lazy deserialization of your components so that they are only instantiated/initialized once you access the component. This may not seem like a big deal at first but when you are working with tens of thousands of objects across millions of users, deserialization time ends up being significant.

Seems the test-drive feature is disabled or not working (for me at least). The tech behind how they got this to work is cool and could end up being a competitive advantage vs. other app stores.

I'm in this picture (the blobby looking guy) and yeah we were working under the desks while all of the aftershocks were happening. It was pretty intense as we've been having earthquakes here the last few days and thought it was going to just be another small one. It kept intensifying, however, until we were forced to go under the desks. Definitely a very long 3 minutes.

i live there, expect 1500-1800 a month per person on rent for a 2bd room in one of the high rises. The apartments are all new, though with W/D in unit and other good amenities.

exactly. its the same reason you want to have your databases and application servers in the same data center.

The article is somewhat confusing, for FV we didn't split our servers across ec2 and a data center. games are either fully on ec2 or fully in the data center.

This is using the Canvas tag which is new to html5

We use AMF protocol as XML is slow to parse on the client

I second that, I had him in '05 and specifically waited to take the class with him as the teacher. Was well worth it, he brings a sense of humor and style to teaching that turned an otherwise difficult class into an absolute joy.

This is exactly the type of mentality we employ when trying to hire folks for the FarmVille team. We tell our recruiters to put job descriptions out for "Software Engineers" versus "Flash Developers" and "PHP Developers".

For us, it's rare to find someone with both PHP and Flash experience. Heck, most of the senior devs have less than 2 years experience using both at the same time. So, instead, we look for really smart programmers with solid software engineering fundamentals since we figure that it's much easier to teach a smart person a new language than try to teach someone core CS concepts.

We've seen this work fairly well with several new hires. The language is, like you said, just a medium and changes depending on the project. The real challenge comes from understanding how to architect code in a way that's flexible/scalable/maintainable.

Having used both and worked at companies that make 3d engines as their main product, I've seen that one good way to approach this problem is to simply abstract away the API into a common interface that can be swapped between.

At a high level, the concepts that both APIs provide arent that unsimilar and abstraction is possible even if you are using some of the more esoteric features of each.

UnrealEd 3 is based on wxWindows and is theoretically portable to linux and MacOSX. When I was working there a few years back, however, it wasn't actively compiled on any platform other than Windows.

I used to work at epic on UE3 and can say that there's a LOT of engineering and considerations that go into keeping the engine flexible and usable for so many different types of games.

As a programmer on UE3, part of my job was spent responding to licensee questions on mailing lists (usually within a fixed timeframe), looking into bugs that held up QA'd releases (once a month code drops to licensees). Epic really does take the concerns of its licensees seriously. The idea is that helping licensees ship successful games using UE3 can only help Epic's business and image.

Also, one of UE3's biggest sell points was the tools. The tools are what helps get UE3 in the door over other tech. UnrealEd was designed to be WYSWIG and to help artists create as much content as possible with programmer intervention. Massive parallelization of teams is what helps save cash and ship games quickly this gen. However it's really up to the licensee to use the tech to its fullest. Many teams just take our demo tech and modify it a bit to meet their needs. The business reasons for doing this are obvious (ship fast!), but it's not really indicative of what the engine is fully capable of.

Depending on how you're trying to exercise your mind, there are different options available:

1) I tend to use google reader to keep tabs on several authors I find interesting. I then make it a habit to find time to read a couple articles a day. So in aggregate, I've actually read quite a bit and kept my mind from falling into a routine pattern.

2) Someone else suggesting sitting in on classes. I'll also say that depending on your location, there are like-minded folks that have meetups and tech talks. These tend to be great opportunities for exchanging ideas and networking.

3) Depending on what your open source contributions are, you may be able to shift the focus to something that you arent as familiar with. There are OS projects out there that are heavy in math and physics that would provide challenges (3d game engines and libraries come to mind). I tend to do side projects with a specific goal in mind when i want to pick up a new technology.