Talk:October 2011 Coding Challenge

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Using a global sitenotice for this is a really bad idea, IMO. --Yair rand 01:26, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Point taken. Saying "why" would be helpful, though. --Gregdek 21:38, 16 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Er, it's an incredible annoyance to users? BTW, there was a RFC on meta a while ago indicating that global banners require consensus, so I hope you intend to try to get consensus for this before it runs. --Yair rand 23:18, 26 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Do you intend to try to get consensus for this before it runs? The "project plan" on this page seems to say that the banner will run on October 18, which isn't too far away... --Yair rand 19:26, 3 October 2011 (UTC)
 * ...? --Yair rand 04:11, 5 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Dear Yair,


 * standard operating procedure is to add planned notices to CentralNotice/Calendar, which is done.


 * the gist of this project is described in the page itself -- it's an experiment in attracting talented developers, both as volunteers and as potential candidates for WMF job/contract opportunities. If successful, it could become a key component in enabling the success of very high priority WMF initiatives like the visual editor and other much-wanted feature and site improvements.


 * In other words, given the long backlog of technical improvements that we have, if taking a little bit of attention can help us accelerate tech work, then I don't see any credible argument that we shouldn't to that. Of course, there's a lot more to it than running the challenges, but either this experiment works in achieving its stated aims (in which case that's wonderful and we should keep doing and improving it), or it doesn't (in which case we'll never do it again unless there are clearly identified causes we can fix).--Eloquence 05:10, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Collaborative "tweak this code" idea
http://www.starchamber.com/gulley/pubs/tweaking/tweaking.html Not for this coming (October) challenge, but a neat idea for a future one. Sumanah 21:14, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Mentoring, collaboration, peer interaction?
Weekend of Code goes straight from picking a challenge to completing a challenge; it seems to me that most of the interesting and useful part of a code challenge is what goes in between those two steps.

Interacting with other folks to learn is a *huge* portion of what learning to code is all about; when we hire from the community, we do it more based on how well we know people can talk out ideas, look up documentation, ask others for guidance, and work with others on review and refactoring. This should be the #1 area that any coding challenge aimed at bringing people into our community should be emphasizing. --brion 18:07, 19 October 2011 (UTC)