Coders compete for kudos, cash & Cairo

Henry ‘model-T’ Ford once said that, “Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.” But given the rise of the ‘consolidated’ corporate IT behemoths around us, are we at risk of losing our competitive edge in software application development?

Back in the days before the ‘global economic slowdown’, Microsoft used to host fancy parties atop London’s Telecom Tower to celebrate its student developer competition known as The Imagine Cup. The competition still runs in 2009 with finals in Egypt this summer, but with slimmer budgets to go round there may be less of a fan fare this year.

So while I’ll be more likely to go to Egypt with Thomson Holiday’s than Microsoft this year, I had a look around for other developer competitions this weekend. Magic Software’s web site lists April 6 as the launch date for a competition to develop a Rich Internet Application (RIA) using its own uniPaaS application platform, which uses metadata rather than hard code.

Given the typical developer mentality of (how can I put this politically correctly?) feeling that their own latest achievement negates the development of other similar competitors and pretenders, I would have thought that these contests would be very popular.

By a strange twist of fate, the developer who does win the aforementioned competition will receive £1,500 worth of Thomson holiday vouchers. So if you’re desperate to see the pyramids and fancy developing a “basic” RIA application using Magic Software’s uniPaaS Discovery v1.5, it is free to download from this link right now.

Oh, almost forgot to say, the closing date for entries is 30 June 2009, you have to be 18 and your home is at risk if you do not keep up repayments on a mortgage or other loan secured on it etc.