TeamSPS had a great time playing Kubb today, connecting with colleagues, and having a fun time. We weren’t able to have this event in 2020 due to COVID-19, but thanks to vaccines we were able to throw some batons together! Several people commented how much they loved this event. Here are some selected photos from Tim Van Cleave who was so generous to volunteer as official photographer! He has an entire album of additional shots as well.

You can also see the official SPS Tech Blog post on the Kubb event, and looks back to our 2019 and 2018 events. This event got real momentum after we did Kubb at Tech Jam in 2016. The first introduction was a Kubb Class in 2014 that was part of our SPS Charity Auction. Kubb has some deep roots with Team SPS!

We had a great time with our 2019 #TeamSPS Kubb Tournament today! We had 20 teams having a lot of fun, getting to know their teammates better, and enjoying a gorgeous day outside!

After the round robin our #TeamSPS Kubb groups split into brackets with a winner in each bracket! We kept track old school, just like most tournaments do!

After the 2019 #TeamSPS Kubb tournament a bunch of folks hung out and played, you guessed it, more Kubb! Next year we might introduce Mölkky at the end!

The Kubbchucks played our 8th annual Minnesota Kubb Winter Tournament this weekend. After a week of record cold temperatures we were treated to a fabulous day in the mid-30’s, nice sunshine and no wind. Perfect for winter Kubb!

Round Robin

We opened the round robin versus Team Dondante. This was their first tournament and we helped them with tournament rules. They were good players, but needed to work on their drilling technique. We took the match 2-0 and it went on way too long because we were able to close it out. We went very cold on our 8m and that makes for a long game, if you don’t lose.

We played the Free Agents next, serious Kubb talent here. We had an epic fail in our first game and left a field Kubb on our very first turn, throwing 4 batons at 2 Kubbs. The Free Agents then kindly put us out of our misery. We drug out the 2nd game for a good long time. We got to 8 Kubbs in play and went back and forth for about 20 minutes. Sadly we broke first and left a line, which resulted in the expected immediate loss. 0-2 on that match.

We finished the round robin versus The Four Old Guys, however there were only three of them. They had a good game, just lacked some consistency. We were never really at risk in these games, and closed out the match 0-2.

Bracket

With a 2-1 record out of the round robin we went into the difficult end of the Round of 16.

We had to play Skol in the round of 16. Three monster Kubb players including Evan Fitzgerald. We didn’t stand a chance. On top of that, we played horribly. I don’t mind to lose, but our play was really sub-par. It took about 10 mins for them to put us away.

Free Agents, the team that we lost to in the round robin ended up winning the whole tournament.

We had a great day of Winter Kubb! 👍🏻

Great day for our #TeamSPS Technology Kubb Tournament! Good luck to all the teams!

Results after round 1 of #TeamSPS Technology Kubb Tournament! Skubby Doo v King Kubbas in the lead!

Teams that Kubb together, win together! #TeamSPS

Winners from #TeamSPS Technology Kubb Tournament…

1. Skubby Doo
2. King Kubbas
3. Kubbernetes

Best team name winner… Bring Back Kubbicles Plz!

Today is our annual #TeamSPS TechJam event bringing the global SPS technology team together to learn, share, and have fun. The agenda is packed with over two dozen presenters. Automation, GraphQL, Containers, Architecture and more on the agenda! 🙌🏆 #SPSTechJam

A huge thank you to the #TeamSPS TechJam event organizers! 👏 Your passion and drive make us a better team! #SPSTechJam

Bridget Kromhout getting #SPSTechJam started off! Computers are easy, people are hard! 👏

Great #TeamSPS speakers at #SPSTechJam! Thank you for sharing! 🙌🏆

Today we have people from United States 🇺🇸 (multiple cities), Ukraine 🇺🇦, Canada 🇨🇦, India 🇮🇳 and Bulgaria 🇧🇬 with #TeamSPS and partners here in Minneapolis. Global! 🌏

Evolutionary architecture, Kotlin, and GraphQL. Great 2nd half of the morning at #SPSTechJam! 🙌🏆

Afternoon sessions for #SPSTechJam. 🙌🏆

Women in Tech sharing with #TeamSPS the great work they are leading! 🙌🏆 #SPSTechJam

I left my iPad at my seat while stepping away and #TeamSPS security was on the job with a good reminder! 🔐

“At SPS it might be Kube or Kubb!” Kelly Hamm at SumoLogic knows #TeamSPS — and thanks for the Kubb set!

Another great #TeamSPS #SPSTechJam! Wonderful topics, great speakers and an amazing team! 🙌🏆

Not sure about the Paul DeCoursey sticker in the lower right. 😳

Time for some fun socializing for #TeamSPS at #SPSTechJam! 🍻

Kicking off #TeamSPS TechJam community event. Great day of learning and sharing technology solutions ahead.

Nate and Dan sharing how they are using serverless solutions to create scalable and efficient services. #TeamSPS #TechJam

Marcell sharing capabilities of the newest editions of Microsoft SQL Server.

Valentin from our Kyiv office presenting at #TechJam about migrating their service to microservices. #TeamSPS

. #TeamSPS Introduction to Go by Cody! #TechJam

Cool live coding and running it inside browser / presentation template. Nice!

Jez Humble @jezhumble giving remote keynote for #TeamSPS #TechJam on continuous delivery improvements!

Had a great time doing #TeamSPS VP Jeopardy at #TechJam! Good sports Kent, Amy, and Paul.

Travis @travisjgosselin sharing the DevOps journey in our Toronto #TeamSPS office. #TechJam

Dan talking at #TeamSPS #TechJam about isolation and benefits to systems. Less friction!

Corbett sharing with #TeamSPS #TechJam the fundamental value of the SPS network. Bringing it home to wrap up the day!

Wrapped up #TeamSPS #TechJam with Kubb, beer 🍺 and burgers 🍔!

Tough choices: great beer or great beer? 🍻

It was a surprise to me that this was our 6th year playing in the Minnesota Kubb Winter Tournament. When we were getting ready to play there was some discussion about it, and I thought it was our 4th. A careful accounting of the years brought it to 6 though, and as Eric Goplin started the tournament, we gave a loud shout when he called out any teams that had been there for six years, which is how old the tournament is.

Garrick, Jim and I made our way to the pitches and took our spot in Group D. We played We B Kubbing, Ice Kubb’s YouKubb Channel and Little Lebowski Urban Achievers in the round robin. The Lebowski’s were the 2016 Consolation Champions. We were the seed into the group with our T-9 place from 2016.

We were able to make it through the round robin 3-0. Our match against the Little Lebowski’s didn’t complete, we were ahead 1 game to 0 and ahead on the baseline when they called time. We were close to closing it out but didn’t get it done. The winter tournament has strict 45 minute time limits for round robin matches. The Ice Kubb’s we finished pretty quickly with a 2-0 win and were able to retire to the warming tent for some chili and a beer. We B Kubbing we started ice cold with and couldn’t hit anything. We lost our first game but the batons came back, and we finished it out 2-1 with plenty of time left.

We went into the championship bracket and the round of 16. This is dangerous territory for the Kubbchucks, it’s where we typically fall apart and lose terribly bad. We steeled ourselves for it and went in throwing well. It all worked out, and we took a 2-0 match against a team that I can’t recall the name of. All of the round of 16 games ended quickly, so we moved quickly on to the next round and played Strike Without Warning in the quarterfinals.

Strike Without Warning took us down so fast we hardly knew what was going on. They hit pretty much everything they threw at, and we were out 0-2 within about 15 minutes. We didn’t have a chance. They also went on to win the entire tournament.

We had a great day of Kubb and left with our best place ever, T-5. We’ll get a nice seed next year which hopefully we will use to our advantage for a 7th year showing! If you’re looking for something fun to do in the winter and live in the area, you should get yourself to the Minnesota Kubb Winter Tournament!

Gorgeous day for US National Kubb Championship!

Kubbchucks team shirts this year are awesome!

Kubb everywhere at US National Kubb Championship USA Kubb Championship! t.co/WfGbsFLKu…

Kubbchucks go 3-0 in USA kubb round robin!

Kubbchucks knocked out. Thanks US National Kubb Championship for USA Kubb Championship!

SumoLogic Sumo Sighting on Kubb King at #TeamSPS #TechJam event…

Sumo Sighting with Surly Brewing at #TeamSPS #TechJam event…

After years of talking about getting a cabin we have finally made the big leap! Tammy has been looking at cabins for a while now and we found one that really fits what we were looking for. It’s close to home (45 minutes from our house!) has a great, warm feel and is on a good sized lake with just over an acre of land. Great spots to play outside, setup a Kubb pitch, hang a hammock and have a fire pit along with a dock to get on the lake. It already has a name, Magic Pines.

We close in January and are excited for fun weekends away. This is completely new territory for us. It’s going to be a fun adventure!

I’ve been using Question2Answer for a number of years now to power Ask Planet Kubb. I like Question2Answer because it is simple to run, uses a standard PHP + MySQL setup and can even be used in a multi-site farm configuration easy enough. However, I’ve been frustrated by it’s ability to manage spam registrations.

Question2Answer has built in support for ReCaptcha and it has a plugin method to use other anti-spam measures. I’ve used ReCaptcha for a while, but it results in 4 to 10 spam registrations a day. I tried switching to the Q2A Logical Captcha by amiyasahu which uses Text Captcha. I even submitted a pull request to properly salt the captchas. But this resulted in 3-4 times the spam registrations as ReCaptcha! Ouch!

I decided to apply the same type of spam defense I’ve successfully used for MediaWiki and early results are great. It uses the Numbers_Words PHP package to spell out a number of nine digits and then ask the user to identify the number in a specific position. The question looks like this:

This works really well. You can grab q2a-number-captcha and git clone it for your own use.

Garrick and I joined forces and auctioned off a Kubb Class at the annual SPS Charity Auction this year. The sales engineering team won the event and we got 12 of them together this past week for a tournament level Kubb class. It was an awesome time with a ton of great questions on the game and a jump-start into Kubb strategy and technique.

Do yourself a favor and get one of these awesome new Planet Kubb t-shirts!

Most of the time when I see people playing Kubb around Minneapolis they are folks I know from Minnesota Kubb. It was fun today to stop on a bike ride around Lake Harriet and right by the bandshell were 6 women having a nice game of Kubb. They were playing with a Bex set, the pitch was a bit small and they were doing that weird thing where you stack field kubbs on top of each other. But, they were having a blast throwing wood!

I didn’t get much time to take photos at the 2013 US Nationals Kubb Championship. Saturday was a day focused my team the Kubbchucks progressing through the bracket, and hoping that our club, Minnesota Kubb, did really well. Sunday I was mostly focused on scoring games for Planet Kubb and running the final parts of the Planet Kubb Club Championship. I did get my camera out for about an hour and get some shots in, but only from Sunday.

This weekend we got together with Tammy’s side of the family for the 10th Annual Olson Family Weekend. We returned to Lanesboro this year. The late season snow put a halt on the plans to bring bikes and do a lot of riding. But everyone enjoyed watching the snow melt through Saturday with a lot of fun and then spent the day playing Kubb and having fun outside on Sunday. We also got to celebrate Tammy’s birthday with everyone on Saturday night and have our own Cinco de Mayo celebration on Sunday with lethal margaritas courtesy of the Daily’s!

Photos from the 2013 Minnesota Kubb Tournament!

The Kubbchucks played at the 2012 Dallas Oktoberfest Kubb Tournament on Saturday. In between games I took out the camera.

This last weekend the Kubbchucks, our Kubb team, traveled to Eau Claire for the US National Kubb Championship. It was an awesome time. Here are some pictures I took from the weekend.

The Kubb Fever continues. This vinyl sticker is really well done and looks perfect on the Mini. This sticker is sold by Des Moines Kubb.

I got my package from Old Time Games today with my 2nd Kubb set. The kitchen smells like wood tonight.

I’ve got special plans for this set! I’ll post pictures when I’m done customizing them.

My buddy Garrick came over yesterday and we enjoyed some practice rounds of Kubb across the street at Minnehaha Creek West Park. We played three games. The first one quickly went to him and the last quickly went to me. The one in the middle was an hour long ebb and flow of knights shifting from side to side.