Granted, there will be growing pains, and even baby steps. We were hoping for the best, but preparing to react to the worst situation. That's why it's just going to be a "coding space" this time. Live... learn. Work from home is always a possibility, especially for hardware-based challenges. But since part of this first challenge was basically to use original system programming resources, instead of modern IDEs, having every participant in one location helps keep people honest amongst their competing peers. :) Still, one of the purposes of these events is to bring people together under a common goal. On-site events will always fit the bill in that capacity. Thanks, Jeff Salzman On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 3:38 PM Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
A long time ago we tried something like this and it didn’t get a lot of traction then either. My suggestion is to keep all as is, maybe just allow people to work from home. On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 2:39 PM Jeff Salzman via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 4, 2025 at 1:31 PM Andrew Diller <dillera@gmail.com> wrote:
Won't just one person be disappointed?
Also, what turned it off for me was seeing that massive wall of text with the announcement and the rules- I think the entire even was way over thought- especially for a first time.
I'm a firm believer in putting everything up front. First time or not, it's always good to set a precedence for how the event will be run. Posting all the rules and details beforehand is prudent as a reference for others to continue to reference before the date of the event.
Just give a date and ask people to show up and code for a day. Say what the prize is. It should fit on 80x24 screen. More than that and perhaps other people just tuned it all out.
That was never going to be the nature of the event. Perhaps if it was just part of a local computer club activity, that would be fine. People were invited to this event from far away. I'd rather they be as fully informed as possible what to expect, then to have them travel for hours, only to be disappointed over something they weren't expecting. This was to be a coding challenge, not an ad-hoc coding session. Since a prize was involved, the parameters of the challenge were thought out, defined, and adjusted to create a level of fairness given the disparity of the systems, and needed to be posted beforehand in order to prevent any surprises.
The survey is open to you if you want to provide additional input.
My thoughts,
I appreciate the feedback.
We also understand this may be disappointing news, especially for
those
who
were looking forward to showcasing their programming skills and creativity in the world of vintage computing. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
p.s. this was also another huge wall of text, do I smell a LLM behind this?
I should submit some of my college papers to you and you can decide if that's my style of thinking and writing, or AI. My papers were written LONG before AI, and tend to be as thoroughly and overly detailed and just as long-winded as my email. The number of times I had to write 5000 words about a miniscule topic went a long way in training my brain to fill in "huge walls of text" as you put it to meet those requirements. Some habits are hard to shake. What I'm notoriously bad at is deciding where and how to define and summarize a TL;DR 😉