I’m in the middle of writing an article for SitePoint about the use of gaming and MIDI devices for hyper-fast web development (ie keyboards/mice/MIDI controllers) and ended up scoring an extra Razer Naga Hex from a deal in a local store.:
Being a huge believer in battle testing and improving your skills through friendly competition, I was wondering if the community would be interested. We can do something winter or New Years themed, a plugin, or anything else web dev related.
I think this would invite more people over from the Articles side of the site into the Community side. I’ve only been here a month but I’ve been lurking the crap out of this site since I started 3 years ago and now that I’ve started posting in the community I find it very rewarding.
Anyways, some ideas:
50K Web App Challenge (packaged, no external files or CDN)
I love this idea and fully support it, but be warned - we’ve had very limited success with competitions here over the last 12 months or so (very few quality entries, if any entries at all).
I know I would! I would suggest App using Googel Spreadsheets so I can win
Now, seriously, I love the idea and the tree competitions look really cool
@hawk is right, we haven’t had a lot of success with our competitions lately but I think it is worth a try and maybe we can try to be creative with our methods and try to engage members… I don’t know, instead of promoting it with just a topic and announce it through FB and twitter, try to send mysterious messages in differnet days and times, and see if people feel some curiosity and react to it
Oops I kept meaning to come back to this! I’m going to hold off on setting this up for a few weeks while I try to increase interest. I’m going to talk to people at Meetups, spray flyers in the community colleges here, and see how many people I can grab.
Here’s the skinny of what’ll go down:
It’ll be a twice a year, 48-hour challenges called “DotDare Challenges” where you basically get 48 hours to build a themed based thing in HTML5. I was inspired by this article about reverse engineering google docs, and I’m working on a prototype that’ll play back JSFiddle code.
It’ll be limited to JSFiddle for now because it’s free and supports free (and awesome) collaboration tools for teams. Since JSFiddle saves revisions, I’ll be able to play these revisions back in a sort of animation so even non-developers can see the entire development process.
It’ll be neat.
These will be SitePoint exclusives (in fact I was going to call it SiteDare but that domain was taken), so entrants will need to register on an “official” post I’ll create later. I’ve been working on a landing page for the competition, which I’ll throw up for review in the review section this weekend.
