We Got Skillz - Get Into Badges With VMware and CloudFoundry

CloudSpokes loves awarding developers money for creating beautiful code and solutions. Yet, we know it all starts with humble beginnings. As a result, we also want to help developers build their skills with real world development problems. So we are launching a series of badges that demonstrate your skills with specific cloud technologies -as well as those that recognize your contest prowess with them.

Contests that award badges instead of money give you a chance to learn and be recognized for your accomplishments with a badge of achievement. Our first "skillz badges" will be related to VMWare's Cloud Foundry.

Cloud Foundry is a VMware hosted, managed and supported service that provides a multitenant PaaS from VMware that runs on the industry leading vSphere cloud platform. Initially, CloudFoundry.com supports Spring for Java apps, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby apps, Node.js apps and apps for other JVM frameworks including Grails. Cloud Foundry also offers MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB data services.

Cloud Foundry launched to great acclaim and getting into their private beta has accordingly, been very difficult. Yet, we are happy to announce, VMware has agreed to move our first 100 registrants into the Cloud Foundry Skills challenges into that exclusive beta !

You can register for any one of three challenges:

• Apprentice - This level one challenge has you build a twitter integration on Cloud Foundry.
• Journeyman - The level two challenge has you follow a Cloud Foundry tutorial and use several different data stores.
• Blacksmith - This third level challenge requires you build a social networking publisher (complete with oauth)

While these first challenges are for badges (and coveted registration spots), its only the beginning of the challenges we will run with Cloud Foundry. We are excited to work with VMware and the Cloud Foundry team to run a series of additional contest and incorporate it as a major platform in working on a broad cross section of paid CloudSpokes challenges.

For more information on what we are doing with Cloud Foundry, watch the presentations from GlueCon 2011 and the key panel on developer ecosystems.