Introducing DEV Challenges

We are starting something special. It’s called DEV Challenges, a new way to participate in the community, build your DEV Profile, earn special badges, and have fun.

The first challenge will be a Frontend Challenge, which will be announced next Wednesday, March 20th – follow #devchallenge today so you don’t miss the launch:

What are DEV Challenges?

DEV Challenges are like miniature versions of our Hackathons, designed to be a bit more flexible with plenty of opportunities to take part.

Challenges will be broken into different domains, i.e. “The Frontend Challenge”, “The AI Challenge”, etc. and provide an opportunity for you to build up experience using new tools or to publicly show off your best skills to the community, potential employers and more.

Each DEV Challenge will run for about two weeks, and then the challenge will start over if there’s interest from the community — sometimes with the same prompts, and sometimes with new ones. Each prompt will be small and approachable, but provide an opportunity to show off your skill and creativity.

We may start and stop certain challenges depending on participation and enthusiasm, and we’ll look to introduce new technologies and partnerships when they are available to us if we believe they’ll be beneficial to the challenge participants and community as a whole.

What does it mean to enter a challenge?

Entering a challenge is done in the form of creating a new DEV Post and using the tag associated with that particular challenge. We will provide post templates as part of the submission process to make it easy to enter.

What are the prompts?

Challenge prompts will vary based on the domain, but typically we will ask you to flex your creativity with a small demo, or provide specific guidelines for a post format. Sometimes it will be a prompt to build, sometimes it will be a prompt to share your learnings — and either way we’ll be rewarding your creativity and enthusiasm.

Example prompts that could make their way into the Frontend Challenge any given week:

• Wow us with creative CSS art
• Create a unique, useful and beautiful UI element

Those are very general. Sometimes we will make the prompt more specific:

• Make a unicorn with CSS
• Make a loading animation

We may sometimes have goofy prompts:

• Make the worst possible date selector imaginable

What about prizes?

Prizes will vary on a challenge-by-challenge basis, and sometimes even on a prompt-to-prompt basis. All details related to prizing will be clearly outlined in the specific challenge post.

Prizes will always include DEV Profile badges which are unique to the challenges.

While the badges will make your DEV Profile a bit more beautiful and distinctive, we will also be working to make these badges more useful as a way to open doors professionally for participants. While part of this is “just for fun”, we believe that participation in and winning challenges could help certify your skills in a specific domain. We will be seeking to partner with organizations who can help make your DEV participation go further.

Beyond badges, prizes will also include shop coupons and other partner-driven prizes as we line them up.

Partners, you say?

Challenges will not be strictly-partnership-driven as our community-wide hackathons have typically been, but some Challenges will feature partnership components which may come with special giveaways.

We hope to work with partners to sponsor certain challenges both in terms of prizes as well as free/discounted credits to build in their ecosystems.

Some challenges, and prompts within the challenge, will have a strong partnership dynamic, while some challenges will not have partners at all.

Rules and FAQ

Rules for challenges will be laid out as clearly as possible in the instructions for each individual challenge. Some rules apply to all challenges, and some will be challenge-specific. While all rules will align with our general terms and code of conduct, here are some points that stand out:

No plagiarism… But forking and riffing on open ideas is allowed

Riffing on open source code and borrowing and improving on ideas will be encouraged, but anything deemed to be plagiarism will not be eligible for prizes. Incidental plagiarism may simply result in your disqualification from the challenge. Egregious plagiarism will result in your suspension from DEV entirely.

When does riffing become plagiarism? It will depend, but transparency is important, license compatibility is important. It should be clear to the judges what you added to the project in terms of the code and conceptual inspiration.

AI is also very much allowed as long as all other rules are followed. We want to give you a chance to show off your skills in realistic development scenarios. If you use AI tools to help you achieve your submission, all the power to you.

Repeat participation is allowed. Building on past ideas is allowed

We will sometimes have repeat prompts and sometimes have new prompts. Either way, folks are encouraged to participate in every challenge event. Participants are also welcome to build on past submissions if they qualify for the new submission.

If you are building on a past submission, you must be transparent on what you’ve done since the last submission to improve the entry, and you will be judged based on the criteria of the current challenge. We want these challenges to be an opportunity to continue enhancing your existing projects while providing a fresh place to showcase that work.

Judging is subjective, you must be a good sport

We will have a few rules of thumb where we judge, and we will try our best to make the competition as fun as possible, but you must understand that there is no perfect way to judge an entry.

We will try to be transparent around a few rules, such as: If it is super close between a prior winner and a new participant, we will favor the new participant.

This is just an example of some rules and clarifications, and we’re trusting that the community embraces the spirit of friendly and inclusive competition.

For the future: Self-paced challenges

In addition to everything laid out already, we will be offering the opportunity to participate in challenges in a self-paced manner. That is, instead of submitting on a strict timeline and trying to win that specific challenge alongside the rest of the community, you’ll have the opportunity to complete the challenge on your own time and still earn a badge.

We’ll provide more details on the self-paced path once we’ve rolled out the first few challenges.

Last Thing

Challenges is one of a few new initiatives we are launching this spring to make DEV an even more full and vibrant ecosystem for the community. We hope there is something for everyone here, and look forward to sharing more with you all soon.

Questions?

If we did not cover anything here, please feel free to ask a question in the comments. Otherwise, stay tuned, and we hope to see you join the fun when we launch the CSS/Frontend challenge on March X. You can follow the tag now to ensure you don’t miss the post.