We recently wrapped up the first Ibuildings Challenge of 2012; a contest to create a Sismo notifier. At the moment Sismo ships with Growl, DBus, Google Talk and XMPP notifiers. They all extend the SismoNotifier to provide feedback to developers in a particular way. The task was to create a new notifier that was useful, creative or inspiring. This post announces the winners and makes some observations based on the submissions we received. (more...)
We recently wrapped up the first Ibuildings challenge of 2011; a contest to create a virtual gamer able to play Four in a Line (you might also know it as Four in a Row, Connect Four or Find Four). Ibuildings provided the gaming field and the abstract player class that everyone needed to extend, and the competitors provided the rest. This post announces the winners and makes some observations based on the submissions we received.
Four in a Line as game has been mathematically solved and the advantage lies with the player taking the first turn. To level the playing field, we allowed each player to fight against all the others; in this way, any player had the chance to begin with the first move advantage playing against all the other opponents at least once, sharing the elements of luck and making it easier to spot skill. Each game was played on the official 7 x 6 grid on a basis of three rounds per game. At the end of each qualification session only the players with the highest score moved further in the tournament.
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In May and June we ran another one of our PHP coding contest. We love to play with PHP and offer people a chance to show off their coding skills in exchange for prizes!
This time the contest revolved around creating a class that satisfies a given unit test case.
The test case contained tests for 7 mathematical operations. The contestants did not only have to guess the actual operation, but also provide a class that implements the operation in as few lines as possible.
The main contest was just that; because there was some discussion on twitter regarding the 'fewest lines as possible' we updated the contest with a rule about 'good coding practice' and we ignored coding standard issues; so a brace on the same line or on the next line was considered equally good, and we accepted both regular if constructs and the ternary operator. Some contestants removed all methods from their code and replaced it by a single __call construct, but our jury decided that that is not considered a decent coding practice.
We recently wrapped up the Ibuildings Elephpant Challenge, a contest where a PHP Elephpant traveled around the world visiting a given set of landmarks. Contestants had to write a script that calculated the shortest route for the Elephpant. The contest has several side goals: entries were not not only validated against the given landmarks and a second secret set of landmarks, they also were scored based on their performance, code complexity and code size.
In this post, the winners will be announced and we will make some observations based on the contest.
In February and March we ran a bug hunt contest. We asked people to download a small application and tell us any issue they found. We promoted the contest at PHPBenelux and PHP UK conferences and it was open to all residents of the EU. We got a large set of responses and, besides being able to determine a winner, we were able to get some interesting analytic data from the contest entries. I will share those later in this post. But first things first...
We had 3 categories:
