Ironcoder Future
We’ve had two Ironcoder contests so far. Ironcoder v0 was a definite success. We had ten entries, most of which were on target with theme and API (mine excluded) and one entry is even being turned into a product. It is good to see something permanent come out of Ironcoder.
Ironcoder \01 had only one entry. I for one would like Ironcoder 2 (0×02?) to have more entries than that.
What can we do about this? The format of Ironcoder was completely arbitrary and decided during a late night session on the #macsb channel of freenode.net. In fact the whole idea stemmed from a semi-joking comment of mine on the channel along the lines of “we need a #macsb ironchef contest”. I don’t think anyone involved with ironcoder is particularly tied to the format of the contest, so if a format change will help improve Ironcoder then we will be all for it.
So I ask anyone interested in Ironcoder to please step up and comment on how they would like to see the next Ironcoder improved.
(See also: Jesper’s blog entry)
May 23rd, 2006 at 7:54 am
I nominate “0b10″ for the designation of the next contest. After all, there areonly 10 kinds of people in the world - those who can understand binary and those who can’t.
Further, I agree with wootest’s suggestion of having the Chairman creating a proof-of-constraints entry. Beyond that, I don’t think Iron Coder needs to change; I think this was just an unlucky case of the theme and API colliding in incompatibility. Better theme+API next time == more entries.
May 23rd, 2006 at 7:55 am
Further, the eleventh contest should be 0xa.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:02 am
First off, further congratulations to Gus for winning, and Lucas for chairing the second contest.
Personally I dont think the 24 hour for theme and 24 hour for API format works. The first 24 hours after you receive a theme can be dead time. I think it might be better to give the theme and the API at the same time. This will give you two solid days to code (hopefully anyone with any form of free time should be able to find some time within 48 hours to code).
I do like the limitations of theme and API but I think theme-less and API-less entries should be encouraged more. If you create a cool app that uses the theme but doesn’t use the API (or vice versa) you shouldn’t be afraid of submitting it.
And although fame and glory (Gus and Lukas - how are the groupies?) is great I also think there should be actual prizes for the contest. It would be cool if a handful of Mac shareware authors offered free registrations for their products to the entrants of the contest.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:10 am
Thanks - it means a lot that criticism is being respected and taken seriously. Not that I expected anything differently from the Ironcoder community, of course, but it’s nice to have it publicly acknowledged as well.
It’s not at all impossible that calling for the complete abolishment of the theme criteria was rash and poorly thought out, and that the theme and the API work together. My major point was that the combinations to date have seemed absurdly narrowed, almost to the point of one wondering if the judge is just trying to zing potential contestants. (Thus my idea of obligatory judge semi-participation, which on second thought may sway judgement on the real entries towards those that look like the judge’s own entry. Hm.)
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:26 am
I think we’re still in the “feeling-out” phase. Very narrow / off-the-wall topics seem to not work as well. We learn, and we adjust. Someone in the channel suggested that a tuple of (iTunes Visualizer , Antarctica) would have wider international appeal, as well as being a larger topic to get a hook on.
I like the very short format, and I would like having both the API and Theme available from the start. That way, someone with an open friday night, but a very busy saturday evening through sunday would still be able to participate.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:31 am
Personally in this case it just came down to a question of timing. The 48-hour format is fine with me. I did v0– What stopped me this time was just that it was too soon for me. I can pull off this kind of schedule, but not this soon after v0. For the full-on 48 hour cram session, I don’t think I’d manage more than 2 or maybe 3 times per year. If v1 had been held a month or two later then it’s much more likely I would have entered. The theme did seem a little odd to me, but honestly I had planned on not entering at least a week in advance.
I don’t know what other people’s reasons were, but there is also a sort of group dynamic that can promote or hinder success. Half the fun last time was the excitement and discussion in #macsb before, during, and after the event. This time there was just no excitement in advance, which might have discouraged potential entrants who might have perceived a lack of interest. The contest is so far just for glory and fun, but there’s not a lot of either unless there are worthy competitors.
[In contrast to Jesper's comments, during v0 I had gotten more than 5 hours in by the time I went to bed on Friday night, and maintained that pace through Saturday and Sunday.]
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:35 am
I totally agree about the theme/API at the same time. I feel like the contest is 48 hours no matter what, and to some extent it makes it a luck of the draw as to whether somebody’s work on the first 24 hours is “themeable” or not in the second half.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:51 am
I agree with Tom about the missing group dynamics.
I can definitely take some of the blame for some of that. I was unprepared for Ironcoder \01 and had kind of forgotten about it. When Lucas announced the dates I was unprepared and had to make a mad rush to get the website updated. Unfortunately real world constraints prevented me from investing much time or energy into the contest preparations.
Ironcoder \01 was missing a certain something from the start. It certainly wasn’t Lukas’s fault. He did a fine job as Chairman. The v0 contest had a lot of buzz in channel and on blogs. I wonder if \01 didn’t have the same buzz because we had all “been there, done that”. I am hoping that we can do something to generate the same level of excitement next time around.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:56 am
Some more publicity would be good. We probably don’t have to go the press-release route, but getting it posted on all the popular developer blogs, as well as getting it onto stepwise. If we can get the date staked out before the typical Cocoaheads meeting time, I can ask all of the organizers to announce it at the meetings. Likewise for xcoders CAWUG, and PHAD.
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:55 am
Mark, that sounds like a good idea. Which leads us on to - how often should we host Ironcoder?
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:08 pm
I agree the api+theme should be done at the same time. Prizes would be good as well, and I had already planned on making a demo app before the api+theme was announced (to make sure it wasn’t too insane). I suppose we’ll hash it out a bit more in #macsb as well.
I think iron coder should be every 3 months.. maybe 4?
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:27 pm
I like three months - it’s once a quarter / once a season. “It’s springtime, when a young man’s fancy turns to IRON CODER!!11!!!”
May 23rd, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Kind-of a crazy idea, and I’m not a developer (I want to be one, I just don’t know Cocoa yet!) but what about lengthening the contest to one week (I know, not very “Iron Chef,” more “Iron Man”) so that more people will be able to enter. To keep it from being too many entries, maybe it has to be “useful.” While one’s definition of useful is arbitrary, it can be agreed that Emily Dickinson poems from iTunes songs probably isn’t — despite how cool and random it is.
(Note that this is not meant to be a jab at Gus’ application, it’s very creative, but probably not something many people would use on a day-to-day basis.)
It may not be what people want, but it could result in more applications that people in the Mac community would use. I can imagine a lot of other non-developers would get interested in the contest - because it would result in a few free applications that *other developers* have approved - that they can use in their everyday lives.
May 23rd, 2006 at 5:42 pm
For me, this past contest was strictly a matter of timing - I was out of town.
However, I think giving both the theme and the API on Friday - giving a full 48-hours for the contest would be great. During IronCoder v0, I spent several hours reading over the Accessibility API, but didn’t actually start coding until I heard the theme - I had a hard time coming up with a solid idea with only half the required info.
As for the theme+api combo for /01, it might have been a bit esoteric - literature mixed with a visual API might have been too difficult for people, too. I was surprised there weren’t more entries anyway.
-Blake
May 24th, 2006 at 6:00 am
I almost put in an entry. Even though I’m in Australia, the start time wasn’t too much of a problem. But the API and theme threw me.The following comments aren’t a criticism of Lucas, but more an insight into how a a less experienced, mostly Cocoa programmer found the event.
I was hoping for a Cocoa API but we got a Carbon API. That was OK, but Apple’s SDK sample in this instance was poor (compiling with errors and warnings, having to be upgrade the project to a native target to compile without errors though still with warnings, and seemingly causing iTunes to quit occasionally). I wasn’t happy about using the SDK sample as the basis for an entry in a competition to be scrutinised by our highly experienced judges. I thought cleaning up the sample *might* be something the judges expected.
The other issue with the API was that I couldn’t find any info on how to use the waveform and fourier transform data (?) to do stuff on the screen. For example, how do I work out the beat of a song with this info? As an aside, I’m was hoping one of the entries might shed some light on this.
The theme wasn’t straightforward, being Australian and not big on English I hadn’t heard of ED. But the Wikipedia entry was a good, and it gave me an idea for an entry. It noted that many of Dickinson’s poems use of common metre and can be set to music. So I thought I’d have a poem that was displayed in iTunes one line at a time, and each word was changed (coloured, enlarged, etc) to the beat of a particular song whose beat fit the common metre.
So I’d worked at the I could use various QuickDraw string methods to draw to the graphics port provided by iTunes to plugins. But I was stumped how to do this to a beat. (See the comment above about the waveform and fourier transform data available in the plugin.)
In the end I decided not to go ahead as I couldn’t work out this technical issue (I’m obviously no musician, either
and wasn’t happen about the quality of the SDK sample (it was taking too long to clean it up).
So after all of this waxing and waning, what would I suggest about future Ironcoder events?
I like the idea of giving the API and theme together, and providing 48 hours. This’ll let contestants focus on using only the part of the API they need. (Or is this a negative?) More publicity would be good - getting everyone blogging about it. And maybe a some words of advice for less experienced developers about the API to encourage them. For example, with the iTunes Visualisation API, letting people know the SDK is poor and to just use it as is.
May 25th, 2006 at 6:35 am
I agree with Dale; the lack of solid code from Apple was a difficulty.
Alex Kadis’s idea sounds intriguing; Jonathan Rentzsch gave out several awards for different categories, so why not have a second tier of awards for those who were unable to complete it within the two days, but were able to get something together after a week? (One month is Right Out.)
(Also, completely off topic, the v0 contest posts from tales of the red shed should be retrofitted into this blog. Just to have, see?)
May 25th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Allan: see http://ironcoder.org/blog/2006/05/17/ironcoder-v0-entries/ for the old entries.
June 23rd, 2006 at 11:01 am
As a totally new user here at ironcoder I thought I’d share some of my initial thougts and observations about this site.
As a potential participant the things I’m looking for is past competitions, with a detailed description of the assignment, the competitors, and the results of the competitions. I’d have to look through a lot of pages before I was able to find the latter. And have yet to find the two former…
And I want that information for two reasons - first of all I want to know what level of difficulty the competitions are, and secondly I want to get inspired by what the others are able to come up with.
I would like to see a page dedicated to this which shows past and present competitions, which has a complete description of the assignments, and also the results where all competitors are listed with their submissions. Downloadable.
And there should be a seperate page where competitors are listed, perhaps ranked by results from past competitions. It would be nice if it could show a profile of the competitor, showing his/hers experience/knowledge/education within IT. On the offchance that somebody where looking to hire a talented cocoa programmer. Who knows?
And if there was only one competitor the last time, for whatever reason, this site deserves a lot more attention to attract other programmers. I was just bu accident that I stumbled across this site.
I’m sure we all have lots of ideas on how to accomplish just that.
As for the format of the competition? I have to come back on that when I’m able to find the the assignments for the two first competitions (if they are there at all..).
Well anyway, it’s great find a place like this.
Looking forward to get to know you all.
JTB