Here we are with our final C3 recap of 2025, closing out another year of learning, building, and growing together. Our work is powered by a simple mindset: great software is built by teams that stay curious, collaborative, and always learning. It’s a philosophy that guides our client work, our internal growth, and our connection to the developer community.
Last month, we helped Sally escape a mysterious corn maze that appeared out of nowhere. This month, we uncovered where that maze came from: the Upside Down.
When Sally stepped out of the maze, she didn’t return to safety; she found herself facing THE GREAT PUMPKIN, now revealed as a Demogorgon-like creature lurking in the shadows. Ghostly guards patrolled the city, standing watch on fixed paths: some looping, some pacing back and forth, others frozen in place. Between Sally and safety stood a moving puzzle of timing, strategy, and risk.
Back at the community center, Sally’s friends worked to map out a safe path through the maze, one that avoided both the guards and the Great Pumpkin.
The Coding Challenge: Movement, Timing, and Strategy
Marcie quickly recognized the problem as a familiar maze challenge, but with a twist. Along with moving up, down, left, and right, Sally could also wait in place, allowing her to avoid incoming danger. This added an entirely new layer of complexity to the algorithm.
Of course, Marcie could only take it so far. After all, she was coding in a language that didn’t exist yet, on computers that hadn’t been invented yet, using technology that…well, you get the idea.
The task for our teams was to complete the program by fully implementing the guard movements so Sally could safely navigate around them. What sounded simple at first quickly revealed itself to be anything but. Several teams solved the challenge, but not all, which made the collaborative problem-solving and shared breakthroughs even more powerful.
In the end, everyone walked away with a better understanding of breadth-first search with wait, stronger array and matrix traversal skills, and unexpectedly, the knowledge to build their own version of Pac-Man.
Why Our C3 Matters
C3 Meet ups are a reflection of who we are. At Ingage, growth moves us forward in how we support our people and how we show up for the Cincinnati tech community. C3 channels that momentum each month, turning hands-on learning and collaboration into real impact across the teams we build and the work we deliver.
If you’re a developer in the Cincinnati area, we’d love to see you at our next C3: Code, Craft, Community meetup. We are planning our schedule for the year of 2026, so stay connected to us for more updates on our next events.
