Programming contest comments

I get excited about the MATLAB Programming Contest that we run at The MathWorks because it’s such a cool and compelling window on how groups of humans work together to build complicate things. As such, it’s a sort of greenhouse model for some important trends in the modern infosphere, including open source programming and wikis. I keep telling people about this contest and I keep hoping they’ll get as excited as me. A few years ago I wrote a paper about the contest, which I’ve mentioned here before, but I’m happy to report that the paper recently caught the eye of a gentleman named Ben Hyde, and he was kind enough to say some nice words about it. What’s particularly gratifying about this is that Ben is a key contributor to one of the most successful open source projects around, the Apache HTTP Server project. So when he talks about Open Source, he knows whereof he speaks. He closes his comments with the words “There must be hundreds of places around the edges of open source projects were these techniques could be tried.” Hey, that sounds like fun!