See my intro here:

http://www.okctalk.com/introductions-welcomes/10166-introduction-actionman-your-service.html

I own Focus Consulting and we are very much into the web (Windows and Unix/Linux) and windows application development area. We are already developing applications at the Federal and Commercial level. Now I am growing my company by trying to learn what Tinker, FAA and the state are doing and seeing what contracts are coming up .

We (Focus) are planning on opening our first office downtown in the next couple of months. At the same time I have some ideas as to how to make people more away of the technology capabilities and skills we have available.

I am plannng on sponsoring an OKC application development contest. Please let me know if you or anybody at your company would be interested. The goal is to get companies to compete against each other to see who has the best developers.

Feel free to shoot me any questions or Google Talk me at patrick.allmond at gmail.com.

heh... sounds like that could be fun. -M

I could be fun if people got into the spirit of it. A friendly competition between companies to see who has the best coders. If it turned out good I'd do it every year. Every year whichever company won would get to keep some coveted prize for the entire year. I would also make sure there was a cash prize for the winning team.

Do you mind if I ask which company you work for? Do you think you could find a group of people there that would be interested ?

sorry... i didn't mean to come off as sarcastic... i dig a little friendly competition so it really does sound like it could be fun. i'm not sure if our it team would have the time to compete, though. we keep pretty busy.

i am curious... so how do you see such a competition being judged? were you thinking on the lines of judging on speed, optimization and elegance of solution?

-M

I didn't even pick up on anything sarcastic. You are cool!

Accuracy would be the first criteria. Here are the requirements. You get 3 hours in this room with everybody else. Go build it. Then time would be the 2nd criteria. I'd bring the 5-10 teams together in the same area. Workstations and manuals would be provided. Still working on that one.

I could see throwing some real world wrenches in there. Like specs changes in the middle. I can think of some other things... but don't want to reveal them because then they are not surprises !

of course, of course... accuracy would be #1. throwing in some monkey wrenches is an interesting twist. i'll toss the idea around on tuesday after the holiday and see if there are any takers... it does sound pretty cool.

-M

Thanks. It would be on a weekend.

I'd like to get 5-10 companies and maybe three man teams. Every team/company would pay an entry fee. Nothing major.

I would not restrict it to any particular platform/OS/etc. I build these solutions all of the time and I can tell you that the technology does not matter.