An absolutely astounding piece about how Valve hires and operates; written by a designer who has worked on Steam.

Their recruiting is equally enigmatic. Colleagues of mine far more talented than I mentioned how they had sent in resumes, but never heard back … Internal documents include long target lists, where Valve employees add names of the best and brightest innovators in the industry, and if/when they will be available.

Though the novelty has worn off, the Portal 2 improves on its predecessor in every other way.

★★★★★

• Eurogamer has an excellent article on Axel Gembe, the boy responsible for leaking the code of Half-Life 2 onto the Internet back in 2004.
• Conan’s parody of the iPad 2 is hilarious.
• The Twitter Engineering Blog has a post detailing how they made a faster garbage collector for Ruby by adding an additional heap.
• The Khronos Group released the final version of their WebGL 1.0 specification today.

But knowing what not to do is the reason Newell is on top. As EA Chief Riccitiello says about why Newell succeeds: “I don’t know what would be the right expression . . . maniacally focused?”

A short but sweet article by Ars Technica.

Now that Steam is running on the PlayStation 3, the service may be added to other games as well as Portal 2, but Lombardi refuses to give any specific news. “We are hoping other titles will benefit from the Steamworks tools and services we’ve created for Portal 2 PS3, but we don’t have anything to announce today.”

• Grickle — the foundation for Telltale’s Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent.
• The Times has an article on speed stacking that is worth a read. Apparently, “up- and down-stacking six pyramids in just over six seconds” is humanly possible.
• Valve knows how to properly announce a title being delayed. From the Portal 2 press release: “This two month slip not only marks the shortest delay in Valve’s proud tradition of delays, it represents the approaching convergence of Valve Time and Real Time”.