Today, I watched the playoff rounds of Coudal Partner’s Layer Tennis. All four designers / artists were incredibly talented and each “volley” / round over the course of the two and half hours (15 minutes each, 10 rounds) brought on an even better show.

How can this be applied to programming or building an application / plugin?

For designs and visual media, this tournament was a smart idea. Have the public vote on the progression of pieces or which pieces affected them more. However, if this tournament or concept was to be brought to CodeIgniter or Wordpress, for example, how would people vote or how would we judge the competitors? We can’t judge by the “beauty” of the code… or by the final product because it wouldn’t reflect individually the developer. Installing the application after each round wouldn’t be convenient either. How do you keep the pressure of keeping up with your competitor while still allowing for the public to vote?

My proposal is CodeIgniter by Parts. This would be a series of matches between CodeIgniter developers – perhaps in a tournament style or in a league style or just single matches.

Each match starts with a concept – for example, build a lifestream application with the ability to read from 3 feeds. This one concept is required in addition to an installer for the application. The developer can work out a basic installer or any other code before the match but he will not know the concept until the beginning. The rest is up to the developer to extend as far out as he/she thinks is necessary to win the public’s votes. Each match would be over a 2 1/2 hour period. Every half hour the developers would be required to check in their code to a repository. The developers would then have to response to the changes: should I mimic the feature the other introduced? Should I go on with my big feature? Meanwhile, a live twitter feed would be ongoing where users can suggest what they would like to see added.

At the end, the public can vote on who they believe is the winner by installing the applications on their server.  They will have one day to vote. On the following day, the winner is announced and will either move on the next stage (if it is a tournament) or be satisfied with the fame and glory. All projects will be released as open source under the GNU General Public License.

What do you think of this idea?

As you can see, the website is still in progress but I’ll continue working on it until I get it just the way I want it.