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CFML Code Challenge

Posted by Russ Johnson in Development, Community on October 15, 2008 | 2 responses
CFML Code Challenge

I was having a really great discussion with Brian Meloche, John Farrar and Isaac Dealey Friday night on Skype and I tossed an idea that I have been having out to them for their opinions. Since then, this idea has really been nagging at me to the point that I finally decided to do something about it.

So, Im putting the details together for a CFML development contest. I have the rules about 80% finalized. Im not sure of the start date yet but I will say that I hope to kick this off in November sometime. Here are a few of the thoughts that Im putting into the rules.

  1. Contest is open to any CFML developers
  2. You may enter as an individual or a team of up to 4 people
  3. Application must run on one of the available CFML engines (bonus points for apps that are compatible with all 3 engines)
  4. Development CANNOT start until the specified start date!
  5. Non digital planning of your application can be started prior to the start date but no code or digital assets can be created.
  6. Entries must be an "application", not open to custom tags, etc at this point
  7. You may utilize any open-source code in your application that you like providing it doesnt violate that codes license.
  8. You can choose to keep your application closed or you can open-source the app (preferred).
  9. Judging to be done by the community at large, no judging panel.
I will post some more details later this week as I finish hashing things out. I will go ahead and say that my company, Mad Piranha Inc., is donating brand new iPod nanos as pr izes. And I dont mean just one! I'm donating one for each member of the winning team!

If you are interested in helping out or perhaps sponsoring some prizes for the contest, please contact me at russ@madpiranha.com.

I'm working on coming up with a way to host SVN accounts for each team to be used during the contest. Ideally, temporary hosting would be great for the judging process as well but that might not be doable.

More to come.

 

 

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2 Comments »

  1. Don Q Don Q Says:
    October 16, 2008 at 7:28 AM Dettaaaiillllssss
  2. ike ike Says:
    October 25, 2008 at 4:35 PM I'm wondering if it might be worth considering instead of starting with a whole app, having the first iteration or two of the contest be for something smaller like a small CFC-library that does x-y-and-z. Having svn for each team hosted is a great idea, although I would also be mildly concerned about people starting coding work prior to the contest start date and then just adding the files they'd already created later. I'm not sure there's a huge risk of that as folks in the community are mostly pretty honest folks anyhow, but y'know, the incentive of free iPods could make it a challenge to resist cheating. :) Though if you really wanted to prevent any cheating, you could have the teams register and then not announce the project details until the date the contest starts. So they would know they're in the contest, but have no idea what they'll be working on. And on a personal note I think that could even add to the excitement of the whole thing as well, so personally I think that's kind of a win-win. And really, given how the FLIP method is supposed to put 80% of the work in the design phase and 20% of the work in the actual programming, I think it's really most fair if the teams are really in the dark until the contest starts.

    I do love this idea tho. :) And I really like the idea of letting the community at large judge the results rather than a panel of judges. I'd also recommend dividing the community judging up into several ratings, so instead of just voting for team X, they would give each team a rating from 0-5 stars on each of a handful of areas like 1) met the project goals 2) usability 3) creative problem solving.

    So there's my 2 bucks. :)

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