In a new post to his blog Chance Garcia talks about a new event that's happening in Bloomington, Illinois in September - a "Dev Derby" as a part of the The Combine.

This is a one-day programming event which challenges teams, representing different programming languages, to build a web-based application for use by non-profits. The code will be released as open source, giving it life after the day has ended. There will be 5 teams competing. My suspicions say that there will be a Rails team and a CF team in addition to the PHP team.

He includes some of the details of the event - how the teams are set up, the structure of the competition, the panel accompanying the event and, of course, the prizes. If you'd like to help out the team with PHP-related swag or a better team name, let him know!

Microsoft is back with another round of their Ultimate Coder Battle for Canadian developers wanting to create Windows-based PHP applications for some great prizes (like a Dell computer makeover or a Dell notebook).

Now's your chance to put those skills to the test, going toe-to-toe with Canada's best and brightest web developers during the FTW! Coding Competition. Choose your weapon...ahem...language and platform to develop the next great Canadian Web App. Walk ten paces, turn, and…dazzle the country with your incredible new app!

You can get the full details about the competition from the FTW Coding Competition site including information on the rules, what kind of platform your application needs to run on and what kind of data it needs to use. The deadline for signups is April 20th, 2010 so get those ideas in and get started developing!

The PHP Women have announced the winner of their "I am..." competition - an entry coming from a user of their forums going by the name Rowd.

We're delighted to announce the winner of our "I am" competition. Entrants were asked to complete the sentence "I am a PHPWoman because..." Rowd wins a $50 gift certificate to spend over at php|architect - if you want to read the other entries then check out the competition thread in the forums.

So what was Rowd's entry? Short and sweet: "I am a PHPWomen member because...I enjoy coding in PHP and discussions with people who know what being a woman in IT means."

As a reminder, if you haven't gotten your entry in for the PHP Women article competition you only have a few days left - the contest ends on the evening of July 31st.

Not sure what the contest is about? Here's the rundown - to enter all you need to do is write up a best practices type of article and post it to the forum. That's it! You'll be entered to win fabulous prizes. The best two entries (as judged by the PHP Women themselves) will be awarded licenses for their very own copies of Zend Studio for Eclipse as well as one year subscriptions to Linux Pro Magazine. One of these two winners will also get a bonus prize - to have their submission featured on the Linux Pro Magazine's website.

So what are you waiting for? Write up your article and submit it - time is running out!

The PHP Women have started up an article competition of all of those aspiring technical authors out there. All you have to do to enter is whip up something for their Best Practices section:

To enter the competition all you have to do is submit a short article to our Best Practices forum before the end of July 2008. This area of the site is dedicated to little tips and pointers of how to improve your PHP coding - here is a good example which covers using constants. The competition is open to everyone, regardless of gender, age, location, or any other criteria I haven't thought of.

At the end of July, they'll take their two favorites out of the articles that've been submitted and hand out perpetual licenses for the Zend Studio for Eclipse software to the winners. Remember, you don't have to be female to participate - they're happy to take in content from anyone and everyone. Just sign up and add your topic to the Best Practices forum to submit - it's that easy!

Nick Halstead has posted the winner of the PHP programming competition - Todd Pinel:

Where do I start with my praise for Todd's entry? So much effort has been put into this entry its amazing. As a starting point you should first go have a look yourselves, Todd has helpfully already hosted it here. Let the praise begin..

Nick goes through the presentation of the application, the documentation provided with it, some sample code of the main portion of the app (a priorityQueue class) and the rankings that each judge gave it.

You can download your application and try it out for yourself.

Second place has been revealed in Nick Halstead's programming competition - and the 2nd place mark goes to Evan Chiu.

So second place, more drum rolls.. goes to Evan Chiu. Evan's solution revolved around a well implemented breadth first search which was wrapped up in a neat class. It was also quite well presented and the HTML was all w3c compliant.

In Evan's solution, he opted for a single "solve" method to handle the heart of the transition - an implementation of the "Breadth First Search method. If you'd like to see the full code, you can check it out here.

As previously mentioned, Nick Halstead will be revealing the top three places in the results from the programming competition he was hosting. Today starts the top three list with third place - an entry from Karol Grecki:

I was really impressed with Karol's entry and if it was not for the fact that it did not 'run out of the box' it would have been a close cut thing to be the winner. The fact is that because it was a pain to get running the two other judges only gave it 1 point each.

Karol's website or just download the code and play along at home.

Nick Halstead has posted the runners up in the PHP programming competition he conducted:

Finally we have a result, it has taken weeks of judging and lots of hard work. The scores are ready and today I will first announce the runners up from the Top 6. I will then tomorrow announce the 3rd place, then day after that second, you get the idea. The scoring was based upon a point system in which each judge had to rank the top 6 in order. The points from each judge were then compiled and the final scores calculated.

The project was to write a script that helped a user find the shortest "distance" between two words by replacing one letter at a time. The three that were the runners up were created by:

• JB
• Maurice Fonk
• Rob Haynes

Come of the judges comments are also included in the post to get a feel for the thinking behind the rankings.

For those of you anxiously anticipating the results of the PHP programming competition put on by The Programming and Management blog, Nick Halstead has posted an update to help keep you up to date.

The judging of the PHP competition is taking a lot longer than I first thought! I started with 40+ entries which I reduced down by trying them one by one (very slow!) some of them quickly stood out and I got the list down to 12 entries. [...] I then went through those top 12 and re-tested more thoroughly trying out further words/dictionaries plus quick checks for robustness and quality of presentation. This then left me with 6 entries which I would then email out to the other Judges.

The final judging of these last six is dependent on how each of the judges rank the applications overall. Nick also includes some of the comments made by the judges already about the applications they're reviewing.