On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new post from Remi Woler, a perspective of his experience as a judge for the Eurpoean WinPHP contest.

I figured the judges would be busy as hell in the time between the end of the contest and the announcement of the winners. Seeing all those great contributions, I was actually starting to fear my days of DPC would be filled with application reviewing. It did not exactly turn out that way...

He lists out some of the major pros and cons he saw when reviewing the applications for how they met the goals of the project and tips for future participants in the event (ten of them):

• Don't have all business logic in a third party application, and only write a nice GUI on top of that.
• Comment your code
• Collaborate
• Contribute to the community
• Do not ignore the existing wisdom
• Write manuals and how-tos
• Do not dishonor yourself when giving up
• Be original
• Make it work
• Participate

Lots of these tips can also be applied to any kind of software project out there and can only make them better in the long run.