Length of Time to Score

Earlier this year, we noticed a trend in our scoring practices that needed some correcting. We would like to give an update to our members on this issue and how we have addressed it and will continue to address it.

Every CloudSpokes challenge has three important dates - the (1) Start Date, (2) End Date, and (3) Winner Announced Date. Each date is set manually at the start of a challenge. The only one that has a healthy level of discretion involved is the Winner Announced Date.

The Winner Announced Date is clearly a prediction, but it's a prediction that we need to be very aware of when it comes to judging and scoring challenges.

What we were noticing in the system, and noticing from our members, was that we were either incorrectly predicting our Winner Announced Date or not getting our challenge reviewers to judge and score challenges within their allotted timeframe. We do not want to set a practice of "missing deadlines" with the community.

In May we set up the below dashboard and began to measure how we were managing the scoring of challenges after the end date. The result of this focus is that over the last couple months, we've improved greatly on both our Winner Announced Date predictions as well as our time to score. Back in April, we were averaging around 5 days behind our projected Winner Announced Date to actual announced date - which isn't good. And today, we're proud to announce that we're now averaging about 1 day before our projected Winner Announced Date for our actual: 

As CloudSpokes scales and grows, we'll definitely experience growing pains and have areas for improvement. Listening to the feedback from the community and addressing it as quickly as possible will always be a priority. Thanks to all the community members who surfaced this concern earlier in the year, and your trust that we would address it. 

For future feedback, join us on our community forum.

Code Your Way To Dreamforce - International Winner

Hot on the heels of our Code Your Way To Dreamforce - US Winner announcement yesterday - we have our International winner all wrapped up.

This was a tight race from the start, with ngabrani, avidev9, and cloudchallenger all making a run for the ticket. While we still have one last challenge left to finalize for the ultimate final score, we've received word that avidev9 cannot make it to Dreamforce - meaning that ngabrani is our International winner!

(the *almost* final leaderboard - tight as tight gets):

Naveen entered the most challenges of all, and took the competition by storm. Another huge congratulations from the CloudSpokes team on an equally amazing effort! Here's a list of the challenges he won or placed in to give him the necessary points to sweep the International ticket:

• Chatter Sweeper: place 1, points 500
• Chatter Files Related List Component: place 1, points 500
• HTML5 Embedded Tab for Salesforce Mobile Lite: place 2, points 300
• Build a Force.com App with eSignature REST API & Get a Job at Docusign*: place 2, points 300
• Visualforce CSV Uploader Component: place 2, points 300
• Implement Custom Tagging Interface: place 2, points 300
• Mobile Event Attendance: place 3, points 200
• Mobile Customer Data Vault: place 3, points 200
• The Right Content at the Right Time: place 3, points 200
• Convert Apex REST Service to JSON: place 4, points 150
• Mobile Chatter Polls: place 3, points 200
• Salesforce Data Dumper Tweaks: place 3, points 200
• First In First Out Case Assignment: place 3, points 200
• More Trigger Love for Asset's: place 3, points 200

The performances by logontokartik, ngabrani, and avidev9 all deserve recognition. So while we're making sure Kartik and Naveen come and experience all there is to see at Dreamforce 2012, we're going to be sending Avinava $550 directly from the CloudSpokes team, to help him fund a fix/replacement for his current broken laptop and cover the wire transfer costs - it's the least we could do for his incredible performance.

Congrats to all our competitors, and stay tuned for our next "Code Your Way" competition in the near future!

Code Your Way To Dreamforce - US Winner

We can't wait any longer.

While the international race is still underway and undetermined, even down to the final eligible challenge, we feel obligated to confirm what many already know... logontokartik has crushed the US competition and is our first winner for our Code Your Way To Dreamforce competition!! It's a feat of epic proportions, in an extremely tight and tough race.

To give you some idea of what Kartik really accomplished, here's a list of the challenges he won or placed in to give him the necessary points to sweep the US ticket:

• Approval Rules Manager Application: place 1, points 500
• Fair Wait-list System on Force.com Redux: place 1, points 500
• Convert Apex REST Service to JSON: place 1, points 500
• Build a Force.com App with eSignature REST API & Get a Job at Docusign*: place 1, points 500
• Implement Custom Tagging Interface: place 1, points 500
• The Right Content at the Right Time: place 1, points 500
• Chatter Sweeper: place 2, points 300
• Asana Toolkit for Salesforce: place 3, points 200
• First In First Out Case Assignment: place 3, points 200
• More Trigger Love for Asset's: place 4, points 150

This is a massive accomplishment. Huge congratulations from the entire CloudSpokes team for an amazing effort! Once we have the international ticket determined, we'll post the entire final leaderboard as part of that announcement on the blog tomorrow!

Merge Database.com Ruby Gems!

The Database.com gem grew out of an open source project started back in 2005, and through the contributions of the Ruby and Force.com communities, has evolved to become the main REST client for interacting with the Force.com platform from Ruby-based apps. Now there's a new kid in town, the databasedotcom-oauth2 gem, which has some very cool authentication features.

The nice thing about these open source projects is you are free to fork and merge them, which is exactly why we've launched the Merge Databasedotcom Ruby Gems challenge, so the community can have all the great features of these two gems in one convenient package. If you've been looking for an excuse to dive into composite Ruby/Force.com apps, this is a great opportunity to learn all about them and maybe even have your submission rolled into the official Database.com gem!

First Time Submitter Challenge - July Winners!

Last month we launched our inaugural First Time Submitter Challenge, and it was unlike anything we had ever done before. While most CloudSpokes challenges contain very detailed directions, clear and concise goals, and a very specific end result, the First Time Submitter challenge does not.

This series of challenges, will continue to be outside the norm, allowing only those members who have never submitted on a challenge before to be eligible. An array of challenges where you the developer, have full creative control over what you want to build with very simple instructions. For July, those instructions were to use Javascript or JQuery, and upload a demo video. Easy enough, right?

However, while the instructions may have seemed plain or elementary, the results were far from simple. With such awesome apps submitted, grading the submissions was not only fun, but very difficult. Each submission had it's own selling point, and was clearly a candidate to win it all.

There was one submission however, that just stood a little bit taller than the rest of the competition, and really exceeded our expectations. That submission came at the hands of franklovecchio, who built app-mq. App-mq is a basic, open source version of Heroku using matt, a lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport protocol. It runs on top of an EC2 instance using github as the repo host. The most amazing part... the framework is all written in coffeescript using node.js and redis! Pretty slick right?Make sure to give his video a look and see for yourself how cool it really is!

Congrats to franklovecchio for winning the inaugural challenge, and as always, congrats to the rest of the winners, and keep an eye out for August's results as well!

franklovecchio Place: 1 Money: $750

rohit1290 Place: 2 Money: $250

alexfetisov Place: 3 Money: $100

Leaderboard 08/10/12 - Code Your Way To Dreamforce

And folks, it's that time for the third Code Your Way To Dreamforce leaderboard! This is the last one before the grand finale. The last one before we start confirming hotel rooms and buying plane tickets!

ngabrani and logontokartik are holding strong as our two leaders (one US-based, and one International). We should have a few more eligible challenges in the next few days, so stay tuned, and good luck!

Asana Toolkit for Salesforce Winners!

Here at CloudSpokes, we absolutely love Asana for managing and collaborating on shared tasks, and use it religiously to communicate with each other as a team. Well, a couple of months ago Asana released an API, so we spun up this challenge, and asked you write a toolkit for Salesforce that allows you to manage tasks in Asana.

Per usual, you all went above and beyond what was asked, showing your inner Tim "The Toolman" Taylor, and made some truly "Binford"-esque submissions. We even had a tie for 1st place between chetanpg59 and ammonia, which cloudchallenger closing up shop with a silver medal!

Make sure to check out the submission videos below, and snoop around Asana if you aren't already familiar with them! As always, congrats to all who participated!

If you are looking for the toolkit code, we've released it under MIT and you can find it here.

chetanpg59 Place: 1 Money: $500

ammonia Place: 1 Money: $500

cloudchallenger Place: 2 Money: $250

Video – Salesforce.com Primer for New Developers

I actually shot this video about a month ago to help out new CloudSpokes members that don’t have a Force.com background. It’s useful to anyone that needs a quick overview on the Force.com platform so that they can start developing quickly.

Some of the topics it covers includes:

• Setting up a new Developer Org
• Tools, docs, etc. at developer.force.com
• Overview of the Setup section including, session tokens, personal setup, classes, visualforce pages, profiles, field level security, etc
• Setting up Remote Access to get OAuth tokens
• Overview of Standard objects and sample data
• Creating Custom objects and managing records
• Overview of the Workbench
• Using the Workbench to query records with SOQL with a brief overview of relationships

Leaderboard 08/03/12 - Code Your Way To Dreamforce

Here's the second leaderboard for Code Your Way To Dreamforce! ngabrani is now out in front after a flurry of wins and leading the race for the International ticket. logontokartik is not only a close second overall, but is leading the race for the USA ticket!

We're about halfway through the competition, feels like time is flying by...