Want to hone your mad C coding skills? Try your hand at the Underhanded C Contest. It poses two challenges: to solve a semi-interesting programming problem, while hiding something devious in the resulting code. Sound fun?

Here’s a contest where 28 photographers post-processed a mediocre image in different ways,¹ showing that nudging and interpretation are most of what makes up quality in art. I think that this same principle translates to software aesthetics, in that quality is a matter of tweaking the visual properties, to find a better balance of purpose.

1. Be sure to read through each interpreted photo link, each one talks a bit about what/why ↩

The 2007 Intellivision programming contest. Sounds like fun.

Seven Lessons from the ICFP Programming Contest, a summary of lessons learned from the famous coding contest. Some of the principles even apply to larger projects.