ironcoder

Important Ironcoder 7 is now a week long. Ironcoder starts a week earlier on Friday 9th November and finishes on Sunday 18th November. That’s 9 full days of Ironcoding.

As if 216 hours of solid coding isn’t its own reward, Ironcoder 7 has an awesome prize for the winner:

First prize is an 8GB iPod Touch kindly donated to the cause by Brain Murmurs the makers of mentat: Project Management Rebooted

Ironcoder 7 will feature community based prize voting, but with the twist that only developers who submit an entry to the contest will be able to vote. The API and theme will be announced at 7PM CST on Friday 9th November. <spoiler>You should expect the API to be new to Leopard</spoiler>

Maybe the best way to get more interest in Ironcoder is to host another Ironcoder contest so…

Ironcoder 7 will be held on the weekend of 17th/18th November. Kick off will be at 7PM CST on Friday 16th November and judging will commence at 7PM CST on Sunday 18th November.

UPDATE: Ironcoder 7 is now a week long event. See the latest blog post for details!

We’ll be doing things a little bit differently this time. We’re still working out the details but we plan on having community based judging from now on. More details will be announced as they are finalised. Also, to celebrate the release of Leopard the theme and API will be chosen by the Ironcoder organisers.

Free your weekend and fine tune your compilers.

Phillipe Casgrain has done an excellent of organising and categorising all of the Ironcoder source code. Source code for all entries of the first five Ironcoder contests is now online at the Ironcoder Google repository. Code for the Ironcoder 6 Live contest held at the C4 conference is being made available as it arrives.

Many thanks to Phillipe for the effort and to the Ironcoder entrants for writing the code in the first place.

We’re due for another Ironcoder contest soon. The eCamm guys won the special Ironcoder/C4 event with their iPhone Video Conferencing application. With Leopard just around the corner we should be able to host a very interesting new contest.

But before a date for the next contest is chosen I’d like to ask the community for help with Ironcoder. I’ve been running Ironcoder pretty much on my own (with help from the usual suspects) but I need help. The last Ironcoder contest before C4 took a lot of time and effort to organise. Finding sponsors, judging, tallying scores, allocating prizes all took a long time. This was all amplified by the huge success of the contest.

So I need help. I’d like volunteers to help with some of the grunt work of running Ironcoder. There are a few things Ironcoder needs:

I think Ironcoder really needs some kind of automation put in place to help organise the sponsors, entrants and entries. I’m thinking a simple web-based system to allow users to register, create and edit sponsorships, upload entries, vote for entries, assign prizes, issue prizes and so on.

The Ironcoder automation system could be written in php or (ideally) Turbogears or even ROR, I don’t much care. The Ironcoder blog currently uses Wordpress, so some kind of Wordpress integration may be necessary (who knows, maybe there is one or more Wordpress plugins out there that Ironcoder could use).

I would like to some improvements made to the look of the blog. The standard Wordpress theme is incredibly boring. A custom theme (or just a really good looking pre-existing theme) would be great. While we’re at it I’d like to find people willing to maintain the blog and organise it a bit better and perhaps act as editors. I’d like to move away from using blog posts to announce contests, sponsors and entries and use a format more suited.

I’ve been trying to organise the previous contest entries in subversion on code.google.com I haven’t been able to finish this and some help would be appreciated.

Ironcoder has been very successful so far, but to continue being successful in the future and to grow it needs work. Work that I don’t think I can do alone (and stay sane).

So what else do we need to do to Ironcoder to improve things? I don’t know, but I think the Mac Developer community should have a voice. Feel free to add comments to this blog post if you have any ideas. Alternatively I’ve set up an #ironcoder IRC Channel on freenode.net

Mark your calendars, warm up your compilers, stock up on bouncy bubbly beverages…

The next semi-regular installment of the #macsb Ironcoder contest will start at 5PM central time on Friday, March 30th running through to Sunday, April 1st.

We’ll be hosting the contest on ironcoder.org and as always live commentary/support will be hosted on the #macsb channel of freenode.net.

Once again we’re asking software authors for to donate licenses of their software as prizes for the winners.

Based on our previous post it looks like sponsored prizes for Ironcoder is a good idea. I’ve begun e-mailing a few people who I think might be able to provide cool prizes but I really don’t want to spam every Mac OS X shareware developer in existence. So this posting is a call for sponsors.

So if you’re a Mac OS X software developer and wish to contribute one or more free product licenses to Ironcoder please either email me directly at schwa at this domain. or attach a comment to this thread. There is no need to provide licenses right now, just commit to providing a license at the time of the next Ironcoder contest (which tentatively looks like it will be scheduled for just before WWDC).

Sponsors will probably not gain much in the way of fame and glory from sponsoring Ironcoder. We will not be plastering adverts for sponsors over ironcoder.org but will be listing and linking to all sponsors during the contest. No one will be tattooing icons onto any body parts. The main reason to sponsor Ironcoder would altruistic, to help the contest thrive by attracting more entries.

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)

With just a little over four hours left, it’s time to detail the submission process.

Zip up (or tarball, or whatever) your entry, including full source and a built copy. Put your name in the filename. Keep your file under 5 meg.

Go over to the submission page. Get yours in by 6pm Eastern today. Judging will begin shortly thereafter.

I have selected the theme and the API. Naturally, you need to wait until Friday and Saturday to find out, but I like to tease.

Here is your hint:

The API will require bending one of the rules of the game.

Ironcoder v0 was a great success. Many cool submissions were entered. Egos of geeks were raised and then crushed. Much fun was had by all involved.

However the zeroth Ironcoder contest was a very ad-hoc thing, very much created on the spur of the moment. This time we’re trying to make the contest seem just a little bit more professional. This blog is the first step towards that goal.

Ironcoder v0’s winner Lucas Eckiels along with Gus Mueller, Daniel Jalkut and Jonathan Wight each have editor privileges for this blog and will all (hopefully) be posting more information about Ironcoder \01.

Additionally anyone creating a submission for Ironcoder \01 can request a temporary “contributor” user account and can make postings to introduce themselves and provide commentary during the duration of the competition.

We are also investigating how to submit the entries to the judge. For Iconcoder v0 we used an FTP dropbox, we have since moved services providers and an FTP dropbox may not be possible. A simple HTTP upload form might be sufficient (if anyone wishes to create a simple PHP HTTP upload script or can point us toward a suitable Wordpress plug-in please let us know).