Are you passionate about helping other developers learn about your favorite technologies and APIs? If so, this event is for you!
In the hack.guides() 2016 Tutorial Contest, you'll have the chance to share your experiences & best practices by writing tutorials on this site. Here are some benefits of getting involved:
- have the chance to win cash prizes
- build your personal brand by writing
- learn about new and interesting APIs
- educate other developers with useful knowledge and best-practices
- contribute and give back to the developer community
- make a meaningful impact to open-source knowledge
Check out our full mission statement here.
Our collective aim is working together to educate the world while improving our knowledge. Think of this as a "Wikipedia for technical guides and tutorials", or "Medium.com for developers" as another analogy
We love Open-Source. The tutorials on this site are open-sourced on Github, which we use daily and love.
We use Markdown (rather than WordPress), a simple file format. This is a simple text-based file format that takes around 60 seconds to understand. It's easy to make things bold, italics, code blocks, etc. Markdown is used in many places, such as Github README files.
Your technical guides are stored in Github as open-source, and you retain 100% ownership of your content. With the Github API as a storage backend, hack.guides() tutorials can be forked, improved, and merged as easy as a pull request. That way we can help each other create better, useful content. Even this article is stored in Github, and you can help us edit and improve it :)
Feel free to write about any technology that you're passionate about. Generally speaking, one of the following:
- Tutorial on programming with X (where X is a technology or API you’re passionate about)
- Top 10 things you probably didn’t know about X
- Guide to what’s new in the latest version of X
- Advanced guide to programming with X
- Top 10 tips when programming with X
...or any other ideas you might have.
Tutorials/articles ideally range from 1500-3000 words, including code blocks, to be a 'definitive guide' on a technical subject. Here are a few examples of articles written in the past, that could serve as inspiration for you.
Note: If you're interested in qualifying for sponsor prizes, then you'll need to incorporate one of their APIs into your tutorial (this is similar to how sponsored hackathons work). There are lots of creative ways to do this. For example:
- You could write a tutorial on the API itself
- You could write a tutorial on a related useful topic, and use an API as a building-block to create your tutorial
- You could write a tutorial on building a sample application on a framework or programming language, and use the API as part of that sample application
We are extending the contest for extra 30 days! Enter your tutorial between June 8th - Aug 30th, 2016 to qualify for a chance to win prizes. Winners will be announced on September 15th, 2016 based on following reviewing criteria:
- 1/3 of your score is based on the number of hearts (or "likes") that your articles receive on this site from your peers
- 1/3 of your score is based on the number of legitimate social shares (Facebook/Twitter/etc) of your articles
- 1/3 of your score is determined by a panel of our API judges, who gauge your writing style, communication ability, effective use of their technologies/APIs, and overall quality
The hack.guides() team will be solely administering the contest and prize distribution of the $500 prizes. No payment nor purchase is required to participate. Eligilibility of prizes is open to all participants who use a sponsored API in their tutorials. In the highly unlikely case of a tied numerical score for two articles on the same API, the winner will be determined by an API judge panel vote.
We've teamed up with some of the best companies with cutting-edge technologies and APIs. Our sponsors are:
- Amazon Alexa
- Fanout
- HelloSign
- Horizon Cloud
- Ionic Framework
- Keen IO
- LigaData
- Pluralsight
- PubNub
- Pusher
- RethinkDB
- Sauce Labs
- Tierion
- Twilio
- Uber Developers
Want to join as a sponsor? Please email Prateek at Prateek-Gupta@Pluralsight.com. (sponsoring is great, since you're helping to spread useful developer knowledge, while also achieving your developer relations goals by having written content that uses your APIs!).
| Sponsors | Prize | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Alexa | $500 | Best tutorial using Alexa Skills Kit |
| Fanout | $500 | Best realtime app using Pushpin or Fanout Cloud |
| HelloSign | $500 | Best use of HelloSign API |
| Horizon.io | $500 | Best tutorial using Horizon cloud |
| Ionic Framework | $500 | Best Ionic App shipped on Market |
| Keen IO | $500 | Best tutorial building a Dashboard |
| LigaData | $500 | the best tutorial using Kamanja |
| Pluralsight | $500 | Best Software Practices |
| PubNub | $500 | Best realtime app using PubNub |
| Pusher | $500 | Best tutorial using Pusher.com platform |
| RethinkDB | $500 | Best tutorial using RethinkDB |
| Sauce Labs | $500 | Best Selenium Testing Tutorial |
| Tierion | $500 | Best Blockchain tutorial using Tierion APIs |
| Twilio | $500 | Best tutorial using Twilio |
| Uber | $500 | Best Uber API Tutorial |
Please check out our Tutorial Contest FAQ page.
Join our Slack Community.
Or email us at Prateek-Gupta@Pluralsight.com.