Thanks for the discussion, I think you have a very good and open mindset. Good luck!

Some feedback/thoughts:

1. I don't think the current approach to difficulty is fun, its just feels limiting without any interaction or ways to turn it into an advantage. Some other ideas would be to have non-tetris pieces that are more difficult to place (but might be very good if you find agood placement), or temporary board obstacles that you can work around until they are gone/removed. Or pieces that do something else when placed like become obstacles until adjacent pieces are cleared. There are many ways to find a more fun difficulty approach :)

2. As others have pointed out it's frustrating to lose when you have "powers" left

3. The difficulty progression vs leaderboards are not clear to me. Am I only competing against players in the same difficulty? Can I choose a lower difficulty? (I would rather get the difficulty from competition than the fixed blocks on board)

4. Getting "holes" in normal tetris feels a lot less punishing than in your game. Here it almost feels unrecoverable at times. I don't have suggestion, and maybe it's not even a problem. Just wanted to mention it.

5. The powers feel a bit "meh". They are useful sure, but seem pretty similar in a way.

Two examples from recent memory:

Someone merged the develop branch into their branch, then changed their mind and reverted the merge commit specifically (i.e. reversing all the incoming changes), then somehow merged all of this into the develop branch, undoing weeks of work without noticing. I had to go in and revert the revert to undo the mistake. Yes they messed up, but these things happen with enough people and time.

Another very interesting issue that happened to a less technical person on the team was that their git UI somehow opened the terminal in the wrong folder. They then tried to run some command which made git suggest to run 'git init', creating another git repo in that wrong location. Fast forward some days and we had an issue where people had to clean their repos, so I was in a call with the person helping them run the clean command. The UI opened the wrong location again, I helped them put in the command and it started cleaning. The problem was that this git repo was essentially at the top level on their disk, and since was a fresh repo every single file was considered a new file so it tried to delete EVERYTHING on their disk. This was of course mostly my fault for not running git status before the clean command, but this potential scenario was definitely not on my mind.

You could also argue that for such as small country Israel has managed disproportionate amounts of suffering and should be treated thereafter. I'm so sick of people taking the Israeli side as if they are some innocent nation being harassed by Hamas. They are ruthlessly killing Palestinians and the world is mostly acting as if this is a proper response to a single incident killing just a fraction of people. What Hamas did on the 7th of October 2023 was terrible, what Israel has done since then is way way way way worse, not even comparable. And going back in history it looks the same. AI and HRW is taking a stance against these terrible crimes, while the rest of the world is cheering on.

A tech sync that is more than a standup, to allow for discussions, is the most useful way I know to align devs and make sure we are building things in a good way. It's something I usually advocate for, not because it's ideal, but because people are bad at syncing/discussing spontaneously thoughout the day.

Social energy for me is a bit like physical energy. I love working out, but then I get tired and need to rest. In this analogy the extroverts somehow gets more energy while working out. That part is very hard for me to understand.

The pandemic was a total eye opener for me. I always thought that (ever since I started working) I didn't like to go to after works, nor parties in the weekend. What I realized was that I really love those things, but that my social battery drains completely at the office so I needed the evenings and most of the weekend to keep running. Hybrid work has complete changed my ability to socialize outside work.