🟡 Fun for Week 3: The Annual SAP Cryptic Crossword and Other Puzzles 🧩📝

[Dan_Wroblewski]

As we do each Devtoberfest, we have published an all-new and improved SAP Cryptic Crossword. And ... we have 3 additional puzzles -- including new types of puzzles -- to challenge you even more.

TLDR: Here are the puzzles:

• SAP Cryptic Crossword
• SAP Cryptic Crossword Bonus
• Scramble: Programming Languages
• Scramble Event-Based Processes CodeJam

SAP Cryptic Crossword Puzzle

The centerpiece of the 2025 puzzles is again the SAP Cryptic Crossword. Just go to the crossword tutorial and you can complete it there: https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/devtoberfest2025-sap-crossword.html

The tutorial has some guidance on how to solve cryptic crosswords, but feel free to ask for help in this blog post.

👉TIP: Best to print out the grid and clues, solve it, and then enter the answers in the tutorial.

There is also a bonus puzzle where you have to take some of the letters in the completed puzzle and derive the name of 2 of our esteemed Developer Advocates: https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/devtoberfest2025-sap-crossword-bonus.html

How an ex-CEO of SAP saved the day

I'm going to tell a story about embracing failure, laughing at yourself, and learning from your mistakes. But ...

🚨🚨🚨SPOILER ALERT - I will spoil one of the answers of the SAP Cryptic Crossword, so skip this section if you don't want to have that clue spoiled.

When I first started creating the puzzle, I had this area of the puzzle that needed a clue/answer:

Since the puzzle focused on developers, and I was quite familiar with SAP Build Apps functions, I thought of the function CIEL(), which rounds a number to the next integer. Perfect! I even had a really good clue.

Command to round up horrific lice

 Well, I gave the puzzle to @qmacro to test. And besides being able to complete it in what seemed like 5 minutes, he found an embarrassing error -- I HAD MISSPELLED THE NAME OF THE FUNCTION!! The function was CEIL() not CIEL()!

I literally cursed out loud when I saw the mistake 😠.

Well, it was quite difficult to somehow make the function's real name fit and to move the puzzle around. So I searched for another answer that would fit. And the first thing I thought of was BILL, as in the name of our former CEO (also a word contained in some of our business processes). Bill McDermott was the longest-serving CEO during my tenure at SAP.

And that's how Bill McDermott saved my puzzle.

Scramble Puzzles

I am a big reader of Games magazine, since high school. And one of the simpler but fun puzzles is one where you have to find 10 words by taking each one's clue, removing one letter and then rearranging the remaining letters to form a new word. And then you have to figure out the common denominator of all those words.

Here's one from a recent issue. Try it.

So I decided to create my own for Devtoberfest, one related to programming languages and one related to the Event-Based Processes CodeJam that I do with my good colleague @ajmaradiaga.

• Scramble, Programming Languages: https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/devtoberfest2025-fun-scramble-languages.html
• Scramble, Event-Based Processes CodeJam: https://developers.sap.com/tutorials/devtoberfest2025-fun-scramble-codejam.html

Admission: Not that difficult to make 

It is pretty easy to create these puzzles. You take an online Scrabble word finder app -- I use this one, https://scrabblewordfinder.org/. 

Let's say you are doing a puzzle on fruit, and you start with a possible answer like apple. You search for any word with those letters plus any other letter by adding a question mark.

Then you look for a word that looks the least like apple. Here, I would say upleap. And that's all you have to do.