Ironcoder 7 Aftermath
Friday, November 23rd, 2007Ironcoder 7 has been and gone. Friend of Ironcoder, Jeff Smykil over at Ars Technica has posted a nice write up about some of entries.
The winner this time around is “Etcher” by Geoff Pado. Etch is a virtual etch-a-sketch for Mac OS X. The voting was very close, with Etcher winning by a mere 1 vote over its competition.
I’m sending Geoff his prize of an 8GB iPod Touch (kindly donated to Ironcoder by Brain Murmurs the makers of mentat: Project Management Rebooted, and apparently it will be replacing Geoff’s old iPod Shuffle.
You can read about, see the voting and download all the other entries from the new ironcoder contest site.
Ironcoder 7 was a major change in the way Ironcoder is managed.
Instead of lots of small donated prizes, we had a single big prize.
Instead of previous winner judging the contest we had the contestants vote amongst themselves to chose the winner.
Instead of managing voting, entries and prizes by hand we used a new website to manage all this.
Instead of focusing on one weekend for the contest we spread the contest out over just over a week.
Some of these changes were for the good. The new contest.ironcoder.org is a great start, but needs a lot of work and some tweaking. And the sponsored prize this time was great. The community voting definitely worked, and I think that will stay, although perhaps we’ll open the vote up to anywhere (with contestants perhaps getting more votes). The longer duration Ironcoder is a tough one and I think Ironoder may be returning to the single weekend format.
If you have any feedback on Ironcoder please email, or use the ironcoder blog comments.
A big thank you to everyone taking part and Mentat for the donated prize.
Update: A disk image containing all projects (source and executable) is available from the Google code server. Individual projects are available as well.
