Hi folks,
we're attempting, later this week, an experiment in reaching out to new potential developers (volunteers and paid developers alike) by means of an online coding challenge. The general idea is that, by posing interesting challenges, we'll be able to attract interesting people :-). It's described a bit more here (some information is out of date): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Weekend_of_Code
For this purpose, Jeroen de Dauw has led implementation of the "Contest" extension which can be used to manage different types of contests and have a select group of judges evaluating submissions:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Contest
The overall project is being coordinated by Greg DeKoenigsberg, formerly Senior Community Architect at Red Hat. If you'd like to be involved as a judge, please let him know (greg.dekoenigsberg at gmail dot com).
This is a first experiment and it may not work, in which case we may never do it again. Greg will post a full announcement about it shortly, but in the meantime, feel free to poke around the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Weekend_of_Code pages, make edits or suggestions, etc.
We'll run a CentralNotice to advertise the coding challenges, for about a week at most. During the time the banner is running and for a week or two beyond that, we may see a few more newbies on IRC and the listservs. We'll set up some alternative communications channels for them if the flood becomes too much, but I hope that won't happen and we'll see some promising developers pop up in our community. Thanks for your hospitality. :-)
All best, Erik