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$250 AWS Credit & a Netbook? Build a Twilio App by Midnight on Sunday
- marcusestes 17y agoWhich values an hour of our development labor at, what, $10?
- ShabbyDoo 17y agoAnd, the prizes only go to the winner.
- noodle 17y agoalthough you might be undervaluaing the PR you get from winning or possibly even just participating in the contest. may or may not re-balance the equation, but its still something of value not necessarily being considered.
- johns 17y agoI won the contest (with a project I had already built and was paid for) and won the netbook (which I love) but it didn't get me much PR. Granted, I wasn't selling anything or promoting a service, but the traffic increase to my blog was negligible.
- jcapote 17y agoDoesn't anyone hack for fun anymore?
- fishercs 17y agoall the hackers have grown up and work desk jobs. if you're not contracted out to test for vulnerabilities and exploits then there better be some other incentive involved since you're no longer living in your parents basement.
- catch23 17y agoIt's more fun if we aren't restricted to some company's application platform.
- dandelany 17y agoI don't necessarily agree - sometimes restrictions and boundaries actually spur the imagination, and deadlines definitely keep one's ass in gear and productive. I took a photography class in college so I could get access to the darkroom - expecting to hate the assignments for 'boxing in' my artistic spirit. Instead, they just gave me ideas. All my favorite photos and prints were made in that class. Regardless, no one's restricting you to anything... This is a hacking contest, not a real job, so the choice to just not participate costs you nothing. To me, however, the challenge of building a cool app on a new & innovative API on a very short timeline sounds kind of intriguing actually.
- pavs 17y agoThis is a contest not a paid job. You are volunteering your time on something with a possibility of getting something in return. I suppose you don't do anything for fun, just code for money?
- randallsquared 17y agoFor some of us, things are more fun if there's no possibility of money at all; bringing money into it means a cost/benefit calculation, whereas doing something for fun doesn't usually involve that. I like playing WoW, but if I were paid for playing WoW at $5/hr, I would do less of it.
- calambrac 17y agoReally? You'd pay WoW less if you were paid (and there were no other difference)? That makes no sense. Saying "I like to hack for free" is not the same as saying "I like to hack twilio apps on a deadline for free." If twilio were saying, "sign up, do whatever hacking you'd be doing otherwise, and we'll pay you some", it's just stupid not to. But that's not what they're asking. They're asking you to write demo apps for them on spec. That's why it's a little insulting.
- randallsquared 17y agoI'm not going to argue that it makes sense, exactly, but it's a feature of how my preferences work. If I get paid to do something, it short-circuits the "is this fun" logic in favor of "is this worth doing monetarily". They're not really additive.
- mediaman 17y agoThis is a common feature of how humans work and it is backed by volumes of research. Motivation consists of two types: internal (or intrinsic) and external. External is what you do because somebody will reward you, usually with money. Internal is what you do because you love to do it. In this particular respect, motivation in most people is a zero sum game. If you do something because you love it, and then someone starts paying you for it, the degree to which you do it because you love it must decrease. That's why many people who love to do something so much they decide to go get paid for it gradually find themselves not liking at all what they used to love to do.
- dmorrill 17y agowell, the netbook is worth around $250 and then there is the $250 credit --- so if you take 50 hours to build your submission then it is about $10 an hour. doubt it would take that long though.
- durana 17y agoAnyone have any ideas for apps they want to share?
- Barnabas 17y agoYou can get some ideas from the previous contest winners: http://www.twilio.com/contest/netbook/ http://www.twilio.com/contest/netbook/
- sanswork 17y agoI was going to use twilio for our nagios alerts but ended up going with tringme.com since they allow for international calls.
- dmorrill 17y agooh bummer, I guess we'll just have to launch international - get it on hacker news before you can get it anywhere else. Pricing http://www.twilio.com/international-calling-rates http://www.twilio.com/international-calling-rates Account Configuration http://www.twilio.com/user/account/international http://www.twilio.com/user/account/international International FAQ http://www.twilio.com/international-faq http://www.twilio.com/international-faq There you go!
- kitcar 17y agojust a tip to all startups that have a blog separate from their main website - please include an "about us" page link on the blog, or a 2 sentence summary of what your company does somewhere in the sidebar. Or at least a link to your company's product page. (took a surprising amount of time for me to figure out what exactly Twilio offers, as I had never heard of them before...)