I used a reddit thread (google barbiedreamhorse seattle neighborhood) for the housing. It is also getting expensive out here, but if you're willing to not live on capitol hill it shouldn't be as bad.
No idea on the tech scene out here - I've been consulting & bootstrapping from home.
If you're crazy like me and constantly refresh the page to see if your favourite talk will make it to the next round, here is a simple Python script to do it for you:
https://gist.github.com/4502077
Implementing a Letterpress cheater in Python took me around 10 minutes. Computers are very fast nowadays: https://gist.github.com/3968275
There is no need for a whole game engine if you want nothing more than to know the best possible word to play each turn. It will be enough to win with 99% of people. If you want to win a Letterpress AI tournament, you would of course need to look at alpha-beta and other algorithms.
Dont't know whether it's good or bad but these questions closely resemble the ones I've been asked during my final exam (Faculty of Mathemathics, Informatics and Mechanics at University of Warsaw).
Of course there were a few nontrivial questions too, like the one abou fixed point theorems.
"We're still wondering why Google would reject Carrier IQ from its flagship devices but allow phones with the software to pass the various Android compatibility tests required to license its apps like Gmail, Google Maps, and Android Market."
I've worked on a very similar project for WolneLektury.pl, but were fortunately allowed to use Python instead of Java.
XSLT and XPath proved to be tremendously useful, cutting development time at least in half. Thanks to the wonderful lxml library I could easily extend XSLT with any functionality I wanted. Of course I've kept the single best future of this domain language intact - its declarative nature.
