Room 1: the RSE office

You arrive at the RSE office a few minutes early, only to find it completely deserted. The team must be out at a meeting, and surely they’ll be back soon.

There’s a couple of cheap but comfy-looking chairs next to a coatstand near the door, so assuming these are intended for guests you take a seat. This office is in a newer part of the campus, on the other side from your department’s main building, so you’ve had a few minutes’ walk to get there.

While you wait you cast your eye around the room: maybe you can figure out what an RSE does by studying their natural environment! Next to your seat there is a desk, obviously well used by its usual occupant.

• There is a cup of coffee on the desk. It’s still steaming, so its owner can’t be far away.
• There is an open laptop on the desk, with a newspaper right next to it. The laptop screen is on, but locked, and a password prompt is showing.
• There is a bookshelf with a few books on it. You scan your eyes over the titles on the spines hoping for some insight. For some reason a lot of them are about snakes? Maybe RSEs mostly work with zoologists…

Actions:

Look at the cup of coffee

The coffee is still warm. There is something written on the bottom of the cup: "Passcode is the number of letters in API"

Look at the newspaper

It's from last week. Someone has already filled in the crossword

Look at the bookshelf

• The novel is "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula Le Guin. it's old and worn. It looks like a fun read, but you don't have time for this at the moment.
• "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software". it looks like the cover was originally white, but as now turned gray. Most of the pages contain scribbled drawings.
• "Web APIs for the 20th century": This looks interesting... Maybe I should look at this in more detail.
• "Python Crash Course": This books seems to have no mention of snakes, false advertising!

Look at "Web APIs for the 20th century"

You have a sift through this book, there is a lot of jargon that you don't understand. However you do see that on the first page it mentions something called a Application Programming Interface, "In building applications, an API (application programming interface) simplifies programming by abstracting the underlying implementation and only exposing objects or actions the developer needs.".

Enter passcode to computer: