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Tobias Weltner: http://www.powertheshell.com/scripting-games-task-2-commentary/
Jan Egil Ring: http://blog.powershell.no/2013/05/08/2013-scripting-games-learning-points-from-event-2/
Voting for Event 2 is going strong, and you’ve got several more days in which to vote and (most importantly) add comments. Hopefully, you’re also considering the judges’ notes and adjusting your approach for each event.
I thought I’d mentioned this last time (tap tap, this thing on?), but maybe not: don’t format the output of your functions. The minute a function includes Format-*, you’ve trapped me into on-screen display, a text file or piece of paper modeled after the on-screen display, or not a lot of other choices. If I want formatting, I’ll pipe your function to my own Format-* command of choice. But if I want CSV, or HTML, or XML, I’d like that option. Thanks.
This is not a favorite technique of mine:
I continue to be amused by folks’ reactions to the Games this year.
There’s been some buzz on Twitter this morning from folks who feel some of their comments - and the corresponding low scores - aren’t warranted. In a couple of cases I’ve looked at, they’re right - their entries are being downrated for reasons that are actually not best practices; by following the best practices, these entries are getting lower scores.
This reinforces a point I keep trying to make: The Games aren’t about YOU. They’re about US. ****
Let me put it another way: if you’re getting comments from folks whose opinions are founded in a misunderstanding or misconception, that’s an opportunity to educate. Not to attack that commenter - which is why commenter names aren’t shown - but to educate the community in general. The community took the time to give you comments, and although some of them might be misguided, you can take the time to offer a productive counterpoint and perhaps lay some misunderstandings to rest.
That’s the point of the Games: to learn. Maybe not for you to learn, but maybe for you to help someone else learn. Or to put it another way, I haven’t received Microsoft’s MVP Award for ten years straight because I got a good “score” on something. I got it because I look for teachable moments and try to offer explanations. Being able to teach something shows that you really know it.
Think of your Games entries as a honeypot. If you can attract some folks who don’t quite get what you’re doing, then through the comments you’ll spot broad areas of educational opportunity, or what I call “teachable moments.” Seize on those and help bring the community as a whole to a higher level.
Does that mean the educational opportunity has to come at the cost of you getting a lower score? Yup. Will that score in any other way impact your life? Nope. It’s not going on your permanent record. Human Resources will never know. It won’t affect your salary, or your ability to choose which movie you will see this weekend (Iron Man 3, BTW). Thicken up that skin a little - every vote isn’t a personal attack on you. Every “unqualified” comment is not a stain upon your honor.
I really wish I could use some of the cooler interjections from Spartacus here, but none of that stuff is suitable for a professional environment :(.
In short: Cool yer jets. Take the opportunity to educate. Not on Twitter. Man, you guys with the tweets. You don’t have a blog, drop me an e-mail and I’ll give you authoring permissions right here on PowerShell.org. Help us, as a community, educate each other.
And hey, remember not ALL of your comments are non-constructive. Learn from the ones you can, tune out the rest. Like watching CNN. Ever notice how, on a slow news day, the talk about Atlanta’s traffic? Exactly.
We’re pleased to announce the winners for Event 1 of The Scripting Games 2013!
Winners: You can log into The Scripting Games Web site and go to your Profile page to see your prize. You will be given a prize redemption code and either a URL where you can redeem it, or an e-mail address of the prize provider (they will need the redemption code). All prizes must be claimed by the end of July 2013. I will list winners by username; if you used your e-mail address as your username, then a portion of that will be truncated for your privacy. Anyone can log in and check their Profile page to see if they’ve won a prize.
Aaron Hoover, one of our Summit attendees, was kind enough to record via webcam the sessions he attended - and he’s posted about 13 hours of video on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.
What I’d like to know from you, if you don’t mind dropping a comment below, is what you think of these. If we offered this KIND of recording in the future, would it be helpful? This is something we can do easily and is affordable from a technical perspective; there’s obviously a production quality compromise. We can do more… but it costs more, and someone’s going to have to pay for it. So… where do you sit on this kind of recording?
Event 2 has closed for submissions and will open for voting later this evening. Good luck! And voters: remember that quality comments will vastly increase your chances of winning a prize!
Right now, I’ve got the Scripting Games Web site built to only make comments visible to a entry’s author. Some of the comments have been a little snarky, and I don’t want to create an online argument forum.
I’m curious what folks think we should do as a next step.
I could, for example, make comments visible to everyone once voting has ended for an event (I don’t want to make comments visible while we’re still accepting comments, because it’ll run a big risk of creating a discussion, which isn’t the intent).
We do have a plan to dump all the entries into static files for long-term reference; I could insert entries’ comments at the end of each entry, in a PowerShell comment block.
Or, we could just leave comments visible to the entry’s author. That provides a learning experience for the author, although not for the public, and only until we purge the database for the next event.
Thoughts?
Folks, as we dive into Event 2, I want to offer some advice based on the comments I saw for Event 1.
Remember, these aren’t my guidelines - this is what I’m seeing in the comments that I’m reviewing, and wanted to pass them along as a sense of what the community seems to favor and disfavor.
Event 2 is scheduled to open this evening in The Scripting Games - remember, all times on the Scripting Games Web site are GMT. You will need to adjust for your local time zone.
Voting on Event 1 is scheduled to end on May 7th, so you still have 5 days to earn pointlets and leave comments for your colleagues. As of right now, we have over 330 entries, and an astounding 4,900 votes - an average ratio of more than 14 votes per entry. Folks, that’s seven times more than we’ve been able to provide in the past by just having “expert judges” voting.
Those experts are now being put to better use, providing the learning experience we so much want to deliver. They’re posting in their own blogs (list) as well as here on PowerShell.org, and there’s a lot to read. I’m delighted that we’ve been able to provide so much commentary before Event 2 starts, since that’ll doubtlessly help everyone do better.
The average CrowdScore is 2.551 per entry - obviously there’s everything from 1-point entries to 5-point entries. Folks are being pretty critical, and identifying things they don’t like, as well as things they do. With more than 1800 comments (that’s an average of more than 5 per entry), hopefully competitors are starting to get some take-aways from the community as well.
On Mighty Panel of Celebrity Judges will start awarding first, second, and third place in Event 1 very soon, and that process will take a few days. Keep in mind that their decisions are in no way connected to the community-based CrowdScore. Instead, they’re exploring entries on their own, stating with the ones “favorited” by our expert commentary judges.
Also, I’ve heard some concern about people trying to “cheat” the system by simply dropping in random votes in order to rack up pointlets and win prizes. We’re watching for that - we log IP addresses, vote times, and a lot of other data. We’ll be filtering the votes before awarding prizes, so there’s just no value in cheating. You won’t see that filtering - we’re doing it on an offline copy of the data so that there’s no chance of accidentally deleting anything valuable - but you’ll also be happy to know that, right now, there’s very little in the way of anything suspicious, and nothing that’s been confirmed.
I want to re-emphasize that the CrowdScore activity doesn’t become a true learning experience until after the Games are over, which is when we can start mining that data and divining some crowdsourced best practices and patterns - creating our own community sense of “right and wrong” in PowerShell. I also want to point out that, after the Games, we’ll be posting all entries, and their comments, into easier-to-download archives (I know the Web site doesn’t make copy n paste super-easy; that’s largely an artifact of what we need to do to display things properly; we’re not offering downloads at this time mainly to control server load).
Enjoy Event 2!
Jan Egil Ring weighs in with his thoughts on Event 1: http://blog.powershell.no/category/2013-Scripting-Games-Judges-Notes/feed/
