On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
That's a lot! :) I wonder how many of them will proceed to code something useful and submit it. And how good will it be.
An issue I see with the challenge is that it encourages the cathedral model,* so we lose the opportunity of training them as they go (eg. point out how we do i18n).
Indeed, this is very different from how we traditionally get volunteer developers involved (by letting them walk into our web of addictive code and giving them feedback on their code until they can't imagine doing anything else ;).
I think the theory is that some small percentage of contestants will be interested enough to actually dive in and do research, write code, and ask people for feedback directly, and those are the people we'd actually want to get back to?
Depending on how many of those 2000+ signups actually submit anything, that might be a *lot* of extra judging work to find them, or it might not be too much.
-- brion