Katy_Price_-_Topcoder_the_anatomy_of_a_challenge.md

Katy Price - Topcoder: the anatomy of a challenge

• Topcoder breaks problems down in smaller challenges. They propose these challenges to their community to see how the community would architect or solve the problem at hand. All these crowdsources solutions are actually composed into a real application that, for example is used by NASA astronauts in space.
• Topcoder is all over the world, there are almost 900.000 people working together and a couple of million dollars are payed out to the community. You can work on a lot of different problems, platforms and languages.
• When a challenge is created the team decides on a spec and a price. Then a couple of people can compete and the winner is payed the most. Second and third place are also payed. So it’s attractive to compete. In late 2014 they came up with the challenge to build Pong in Swift, it had to be unique and fun and you could win $750. In 5 days there were actual ideas built and submitted. Every submission gets a review so you know how your code can improve.
• The whole idea at topcoder is that they don’t do any work. The reviews are also done by the community and they pay people to do this as well.
• Three of the most valued perks we want from employers are feedback/learning, flexible hours and cash bonuses. Which is what topcoder provides so being part of the topcoder community should be very attractive. Learning is one of the core propositions topcoder offers. A lot of big clients come to topcoder, even NASA.
• Question: Is it okay to use your own private library and you don’t provide source code for that?
• No, everything you submit has to open source or visible code.
• Question: What happens if you use something like Parse, that’s not really open source?
• Well, 9 out of 10 times something like that is fine. Depends on the client, really.
• Question: Do the clients pay for the work?
• Yes, we turn the projects clients fail to build themselves or want to crowdsource into challenges. So all we really do is push the money our clients pay through to our community.