A programmers Heaven - CompZone

The idea is simple. To recreate that buzz feeling, which developers experience every year with Google and Facebook hackathons and coding competitions. But, on a daily basis.

Zando plans to do this; and with a more elegant way around it.

Competitions can range in difficulty, and range in rewards too. Anywhere from doing a competition for fun or glory to an infinite prize pool. At launch, our largest prize pool will be $500. However, we expect this to increase rapidly as we grow. Not only will the prize pool include money, but also products, such as iPads, gift cards, and much much more.

Anybody can create a competition, and set their own prizes; however they will be responsible for marking all submissions. This task does sound tedious; but alas, with our elegant system in place, marking and commenting on code couldn't be easier! And our algorithmic way of determining who wins the rewards allows us to have a much simpler interface.

Each competition starts with a story, which gives a brief overview to the project. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, will then be revealed; and your timer begun. You are marked on multiple criteria, which includes, but is not limited to, the time taken to complete the tasks and upload your source code, the simplicity of the code, the functionality and being able to stick to the task.

Most projects will allow multiple languages to be used, for example, if the task was a simple webpage (very unlikely). You wouldn't be penalized for using PHP over ASP or vice versa, both are usually accepted, however this is down to the competition runner to decide whether or not to limit language availability.

To finish your submission, you must upload all your relevant code. But what if you forgot a file? Fear not, there is a 5 minute countdown from the moment you begin your upload, which gives you the ability to submit any changes to any files you've made, should you realize you've made a mistake. This countdown will not affect your overall time for submission, unless you do submit a change. But after this 5 minutes is up, your entry is submitted and then it's just the waiting game.

After the competition has ran it's course, the submissions marked, the winner will be announced, and their winnings released to them. And don't worry, before a competition can begin, the funds must be stored in escrow.

Should, in the unlikely event, a competition not get marked, there will be two options, depending on causality and ability, we can assign markers to the competition (this however, will require the authors consent, which may not be accessible) or a full refund will be distributed to all participants, and the funds in the escrow distributed also, as compensation.

I hope you're as excited as we are with this project. We feel it's something thats been missing from every programmers bookmark list, and we wish to change that.

Thank you, and Good Luck with the Competitions of the future.

Note: The image shows one small feature of the website. A marker will add comments to help improve your coding.