[Event] Calling out all aspiring developers, the inaugural Plugfest Competition wants you

Inspired by the reality TV show “The Voice”, the inaugural Plugfest International Programming Competition (IPC) is calling out to all tertiary students and individuals to compete against each other by thinking out of the box and creating complete web applications using publicly available datasets from the Singapore Government through data.gov.sg

The competition, which is initiated by the Google Developer Group (GDG) Singapore and IEEE Computer Society Singapore will also be a good platform for participants to receive valuable coaching from experienced, Information and communications technology (ICT) mentors to help them work through their app creation process.

“The rationale behind the competition is to motivate both budding and established software developers to build scalable web apps that work on mobile devices. With access to data from the Singapore Government, we look forward to the interest apps and projects that come up.” says Dr Krishnan SPT, co-founder of the Google Developer Group Singapore.

The competition would be divided into two categories: PlugFest IHL for undergraduate students studying at any Institute of Higher Learning (IHL) and PlugFest Open for individuals from postgraduates to working professionals. The mentoring process for all participants will start from 15 February till 15 March 2013, during which teams will work closely with their mentors to improve their web apps. The top 20 percent of each category will be selected as finalists and asked to return on 3 April 2013 to present to a panel of judges which will include prominent members from the ICT industry, investment community (Angel Investors & Venture Capitalists) as well as educators.

Participants are also encouraged to join the various web app development workshops scheduled over the weekends from January 2013 to early February 2013. The workshop is free for all participants and will cover topics like available datasets from the Singapore Government’s data.gov.sg portal and selected mobile and cloud technologies such as Android, App Engine and Amazon Web Services.

Registration is open from now till 8 February 2013. So to all aspiring developers out there, this competition is not only a great learning opportunity but also a good testing bed for all the ideas that you’ve never had the time to validate.