Ever since Erik mentioned the weekly puzzle idea, I've also been having an idea of a "coding competition." This would be something different than the puzzle so it's possible we could have both puzzles and coding competitions. I'd like to present my idea here and get feedback from everyone on whether or not it would be fun and/or useful.

My idea is that once a week a "coding challenge" could be posted to a new area of the site. A very simple challenge might be, "Code a function that calculates the average of the values in internal RAM from 40h to 4F". This challenge would be visible to everyone and any registered member could submit a response. Responses would NOT be visible to others while the competition is open (probably one week).

Once the competition closes, all code submitted would be made visible anonymously so that no-one would know who contributed each answer. Everyone would then be able to vote on which answer they liked the best (no voting for yourself).

Once the voting period (probably 3 days or so) is done, the system would automatically announce the top 3 choices and the names of those people. This could end up providing a nice library of code to solve specific problems; it'd be different than the code library in that multiple solutions would have been submitted and the members of 8052.com would have picked the best answers. And it might be fun.

Additionally, the system would allow members to submit their ideas for a future coding challenge that could be used in future challenges.

Any thoughts?

Regards,
Craig Steiner
8052.com Webmaster