Congratulations to Programmers.SE. We just finished our first contest, and we’re still rolling. For those of you who want to know a little bit more about the contest, here we go…

The Beginnings

To develop this contest proposal, we first opened up the chat room (Contest Consipracy room). We did a little bit of talking and chatting, bouncing ideas off of one another, but we didn’t get too far. So, we decided to post this: Programmers.SE Contest: New Proposal. In this Meta post, we asked for ideas as to what the contest should be about. Whatever idea had the most upvotes would win. This way, the general community as a whole would be able to decide what they wanted their contest to be like, because that’s how it’s supposed to be. This is your site, powered by  your questions and answers we’re talking about here. We had a winner.

Developing the Details

Basically, after the contest structure itself was picked, we had to pick what tags we were going to use, and what prizes we were going to give. For that, we went back to Meta, and posted Books for Programmers Contest. There were two things wrong with this:

1. This meant that all you could get was books.
2. People were choosing (and upvoting) books that most (or at least a lot) of users already had.

So we went back to the chat room, talked to a few SE employees, and came back with a new idea. This idea was that you were allowed to pick any programming related thing(s) from Amazon, as long as your total was less than or equal to $50 (about €40). Cool right! After we got that situated, we went to Meta again, and finally posted the following: Programmers.SE Contest: The Complete Outline. This was the final outcome of the communities work.

The Winners

I’m not going to go into too much detail on this, as full results can be found here. But here are all of the winners of the contest:

The Aftermath

After the contest, we asked the community what we did right, wrong, and for good old feedback. What we got was just that, great feedback. I don’t mean everybody said that we did everything right (I can assure you of that), but it was very good constructive criticism, and that’s exactly what we were looking for.

Conclusion

All in all, I think the contest was a great event for our community. And I love the fact that we were able to do it. Now, you may be asking, is this the last contest we are going to have? Well, as long as we get enough community support, of course not. Heck, maybe you’ll be the one to propose the contest next time. Did you know Programmers.SE’s birthday is December 16th? Maybe we can have a birthday celebration. Who knows?

What we do with the site is up to the users. Without the users, there would be no Programmers (and that would be very sad). So if you have an idea, make a Meta post about it, or drop by The Whiteboard and see if others would be interested.

I hope everybody had an enjoyable time with the contest. Next time, we’ll make it even bigger and better!

Welcome to the Programmers Stack Exchange community blog!

One of the great things about Stack Exchange is the way the community works. There are several ways that we try to bring our community together such as chat and Meta, as well as several community events. The next logical step was a blog, and here we are!

So what’s this blog about?

This blog is about:

• What’s happening on Programmers Stack Exchange
• Things Programmers like to talk about including: algorithms, design patterns, development methodologies, etc.
• New developments and technologies.
• And anything else that fits!

Which means there are going to be a lot of interesting things posted here. How do we know the community will like it? The community is writing it!

How did the blog begin?

The first thing we did, was bring it up in Meta. This made the community as whole aware that we were interested in getting a blog. It actually took 3 months before anybody mentioned the blog again, but this time, we had ideas. After deciding what the blog would be about, we tried to get contributors, the people that would power the blog, and write the posts. At that point, we had 8 people say that they were at least interested. So, we went on from there. We got the blog in action, writing and editing posts.

Anybody that was interested in contributing would say so in the Blog Chat Room. We gave them an account to our Trello board, and access to our WordPress dashboard. From then on, we began writing posts and had a very active system. This slept for a while, but finally came back to power. After putting everything together, we got to this point.

And then what?

Well, this is what! We launched the blog, and we are still going (at least at time of writing). If you’re reading this, I hope you read regularly, and maybe even contribute!

Where can I learn more?

About the blog:

• Stop by the blog chat room, and ping either Dynamic or World Engineer
• Take a look at our about page.