The heat is on! (note actually, I’m freezing right now, our office air is on, and it’s 50 degrees outside). But I digress… The HEAT IS ON! I have initiated a code challenge at work this week. I work for a software company in Dallas that is in the medical field, and I serve as the Lead Software Architect. Part of my job, aside from governing coding standards and leading architectural design sessions, is education. Our business is very hectic and fast because the business rules are changing… daily. So it’s pretty easy to get stuck in a rut doing the same types of coding tasks daily.

In an effort to spur a bit of creativity I have called for a code challenge. All too frequently we as web developers are handed a task to code, a server with TONS of RAM and hard drive space, a big-bad database server, and told “go to town”! If that’s all you know then you’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with coding for embedded systems, or mobile devices, or any other limited hardware device. So here’s the challenge.

I have presented our engineering team a scenario where they have a fictional device with limited memory and disk space. The device has ColdFusion and Apache embedded on it. No SQL database, no fancy Java components, just CF 8 and a web server. ColdFusion is configured to run JRUN at a maximum of 32MB of memory.

The engineer must create an application that allows the user (at a minimum) to view a list of contacts, add a contact, edit a contact, and remove a contact. The data that is stored/tracked must contain the contact’s first name, last name, address, city, state, zip code, phone number, and email address. All pages created must have a display space of 240px x 400px. The final criteria: you only have 32KB of disk space to store your application. Pages, database, components, whatever… 32KB.

Code will be judged on a number of factors. Code must be clean and well organized. It should demonstrate some type of re-usability. No, this is not an excercise in OOP, frameworks, or any other type of design pattern. You can use CFCs, custom tags, or good ole’ functions, as long as the code is organized and thought out. The submission demonstrating that they meet the requirements, as well as creativity in solving the problem wins. Yes, there is a prize, but only if you work on our engineering team. If you don’t I’m not giving you a gift card, so don’t ask. :)

I have about 5 participants at this time, and hope more are interested. I look forward to submissions! (And yes, I’ve done it already).

Happy coding!