I finally almost finished listening to the latest podcast on my drive down to London this morning and shared Dick's frustration with the Google I/O ticket process this year. Last year I didn't anticipate the problem and had flight and hotel bookings but no ticket; fortunately I was able to get one through eBay at a price that wasn't eye-watering.
This year was the same again, no ticket (but with the foresight of not booking a flight or hotel!).I did luck in last week though - I entered the Google I/O code jam sprint that happened on Thursday and although I didn't quite get into the top 100 (I was close) it was a fun way to compete for a ticket and, of course, because Google had a bug in their official solution we all ended up with a ticket anyway. Less than 300 people competed for 100 tickets, which I found surprising. Google should consider going down the code jam route for more tickets. Anybody clever enough to get a ticket through code jam is far more likely to use the ticket themselves than either sell it or agree to compete on somebody else's behalf. Maybe put 20% up as 'corporate' tickets up at a corporate (read expensive) rate and then the remaining 80% at a lower developer price through various waves of code jam. Of course a simple two-question test could suffer from people passing solutions around, so Google could randomly allocate two questions to each applicant from pool of a couple of dozen. They'd probably have to do some statistical analysis and tweaking to level out the results as some problems will end up being slightly easier to solve than others. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
