Code Challenge #1

Che Guevara Fy

Btw, I have recently started a small code battle upon an easy task.
The goal is to improve your self estimation skill and to code something minimalistic in the shortest time possible.

If you want to join the battle, just do the following:

1) Check the briefing: "Create a webservice that is generating the 'Che Guevara Effect' on an uploaded picture"
I have already done my job and implemented an working version of this here: http://che-guevara-fy.heroku.com/

2) You can accept the challenge by giving an upfront estimate on how much time you think is needed to implement and deploy the briefing.

3) When working on the implementation _always_ have an time tracker running. This is for your your own good, as the better you can estimate yourself the better it is. It only works if your honest with yourself and track the exact working time from start to finish.

4) When you're done, send an link to the publicly available project of yours. It must be able to process any reasonable sized image file with the expected result to pass.

5) After that make your complete source code and hosting plan available. It will be compared and evaluated against the other implementations.

6) Last but not least, you are free to use any technology (yes, even webservices) but it must work repeatingly whenever evaluation takes place.

I want to try this challenge using Sinatra, since I haven't use it yet and this is a good occasion. Since I am a Sinatra rookie I want to give myself 4 hours to create and deploy it to Heroku

my version: http://cheguevarafx.heroku.com/

There have been 3 participants in this contest:

• Overbryd https://github.com/Overbryd/che-guevara-fy
  I estimated to write it down in 1/2 hours but it took me 2
• jamesu https://github.com/jamesu/checheche
  He estimated under an hour and finished in 50 minutes
• rtacconi https://github.com/rtacconi/cheguevarafx
  Estimated 4 hours to complete and finished in 6 hours.

Feel free to explore their findings.

Funny how everybody ended up using Sinatra and ImageMagick in one way or another.

Would be interesting to see how things work out under different circumstances... :)

Any ideas for the next challenge? Give me one, and I'll manage an new round :)

I think
jamesu: won because he did it in 50 minutes and his estimate was accurate.
Overbryd: provided the cleanest and simplest solution (I did not know about the convert command).
rtacconi: I think I am third since it took me ages. My solution is very similar to jamesu. I lost time because I did not know Sinatra and I had a tiring deployment issue on Heroku because of image magick.

Was is really interesting is that we have chosen the same hosting solution, same framework (Sinatra) and a very similar code.

In my listing there was no ranking intended.
Yea, I think so too. It's funny that we all funneled the solution through some core techniques.

Any ideas for the next challenge?

Idea:

Create a simple persistent key/value storage capable of SET, GET and DELETE actions. It is forbidden to use Redis, MongoDB, or other ready made key/value solutions, only storage to file, databases, serialization... are allowed

The UI should be the CLI, not web this time... just for a change.

@Overbryd not sure, but i think it needs to be conceptually simple like this task (unless you want to turn it into a full-blown coding competition). Will brainstorm later unless someone comes up with something before then.

@rtacconi count me in :)

Hey guys,

a new challenge is on: https://gist.github.com/1029706 =)

I like @rtacconi 's idea.

For the future, possible staring points for other ideas. Note that these may be too elaborate for the competition, but i'll post them anyway in case anyone gets stuck:

WEBSERVICE

Create a pasteboard
Create a file sharing solution
Create a youtube frontend for synchronized social playback (ala synchtube)
Create a synchronised whiteboard
Create an anonymous imageboard
Create a wiki

TECHNICAL

Create a simple command-line based todo list
Create a random article generator
Create your own package management system

That is a whole bunch of really cool ideas! Thanks for sharing, future code challenges are going to happen! What I really like is the synchtube thing, I'll vote that for code challenge #3. Lukas Am 16.06.2011 um 19:29 schrieb jamesureply@reply.github.com:

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I like @rtacconi 's idea. For the future, possible staring points for other ideas. Note that these may be too elaborate for the competition, but i'll post them anyway in case anyone gets stuck: WEBSERVICE Create a pasteboard Create a file sharing solution Create a youtube frontend for synchronized social playback (ala synchtube) Create a synchronised whiteboard Create an anonymous imageboard Create a wiki ## TECHNICAL Create a simple command-line based todo list Create a random article generator Create your own package management system ## Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/1003516