Today we’re announcing the start of our 5th installment of our coding competition, Codegeist. This year we’re upping the ante by giving away the best prizes yet, including the biggest single cash prize ever: $15,000 for the grand prize winner! We’ve lined up a total of $30,000 in cash, along with more prizes we’ll announce in a few weeks. The basic idea is you build a cool plugin for an Atlassian product, submit it, win a t-shirt just for submitting, and possibly win a bunch of cash if your plugin gets picked as a winner.
New Technology
Along with Codegeist we’re introducing two new developer previews, Speakeasy Extensions and ActiveObjects. Speakeasy is a new super easy way to extend Atlassian products. Extensions are built entirely client-side, in HTML, Javascript, CSS, etc., and they’re enabled on a per-user basis. ActiveObjects is an ORM that ultimately makes plugin data access and storage significantly faster and more efficient. Each of these new technologies have an associated prize category. Take a look:
Prizes
- Best Overall Plugin ($15k) – Whether you build an extension or a traditional plugin, this prize will go to the overall best plugin built
- Best Speakeasy Extension ($7.5k) – Speakeasy is a new simple, shareable extension framework we’re working on. It allows the products to be modified with nothing more than HTML, CSS, and JS. Anyone can write a Speakeasy Extension, and anyone can install one. The best new Speakeasy Extension will win this prize
- Best use of ActiveObjects ($7.5k) – ActiveObjects is a a brand new data storage framework for plugins. It greatly improves the way plugin authors can store and access data, allowing you to do more than you ever could before. The best use of ActiveObjects will take home this prize
Winners will be judged by Atlassian. We’ll take a look at how awesome each plugin is, and we’ll also use community votes as an indicator of greatness. So be sure to create an awesome video for your plugin and do your best to get as many community votes as you can. Anyone can vote, so send people to your entry on the contest page.
Getting Started
Getting started hacking just takes a visit to codegeist.atlassian.com, which has all the information you need to learn about the contest, understand submission guidelines, get developer resources, understand judging criteria, and anything else.
Much More Coming
We have a few curveballs we’ll throw your way, which we promise will make Codegeist even more exciting. So get started building, and stay tuned for more big news about Codegeist soon. Shoot us a comment if you have any questions about the contest.
Update: we just announced $15k more in prizes!