The Quru LeapHack contest - February 29th 2008

Every four years we are blessed with a leap year and with it an extra day. For a few of us it's a great day (i.e., those who were born on February 29^th) but for most of us it passes more or less as just another day, trudging off to work, to school or whatever. in 2008 decided to do something different.

We continually need to learn and to push the envelope of what we do as individuals. Inspired partly by what was an annual MacHack contest, we held within Quru the LeapHack contest. We also followed some of the calls of the environmental movement and closed our office on this special day, forcing everyone to do this at home.

Rules of LeapHack

• You must learn to do something new using the tools that you use everyday
• You must produce something that has no commercial value whatsoever but must clearly illustrate what you have learnt
• You must work a normal working day - if you finish before then, add something else relevant
• You must not start work prior to the 29th February (but there is nothing to stop you thinking a little about it...)
• You must not continue working after midnight on the 29th February
• You must demonstrate what you have done to your colleagues on the next working day who will each provide their own ranking of projects (1 being the most impressive considering the ability of the entrant, (the number of entrants - 1) for the least so) - they can't include their own and neither bribery nor favouritism are allowed.
• The rankings will all be added up
• A moderator (in our case, CEO Roland Whitehead), who is not allowed to win the contest but must still take part, will add points, entirely at will, for:
  1. Doing something too close to what you have done before
  2. Not being ambitious enough
  3. Being too ambitious and not achieving what you set out to do
  4. Being too commercial
• The winner is the one with the lowest total ranking

The winner is to be awarded a suitable prize - for this first contest it was an iPod Touch (well, the iPhone 3G wasn't out then).

The contestants

We had a small but varied range of entrants in this inaugrial competition including

• An USB mouse trap complete with block of cheese but don't click too hard or you might have clicked the last time!
• A set of shell scripts to absolutely nothing but tell a short story
• A mobile phone application for the Android platform that play's different user-configurable sound-bites on each key
• A diesel/petrol pump alarm to trigger your car's alarm if you are about to put the wrong fuel in
• A Mac OS X command-line tool to keep track of your friends' and contacts' birthdays (and those of a few people that you might never heard of until you looked them up on the net) which you can download here.

If you want to join in and so something similar in your work-place next time or if you want to know why the embryonic soundbite playing Android application won this competition, then please contact us using the contact form

Happy hacking!

Barry Flanagan's Large Leaping Hare, sold at Bonhams in 2007.
Bonhams use bespoke enterprise software written by Quru.