So this is a bit of a wild thought, but hear me out... There are a variety of sites out there that have a community built around solving brain teasers (kata) in popular languages like Python, JS, Ruby, etc. (For instance see http://www.codewars.com/). I think it would be very valuable to have a similar community site for Julia oriented around bite sized challenges on writing performant code for simple tasks in Julia within an interactive web REPL. Competitions could be built around common benchmark domains like sorting, numerical analysis, matrix and array processing, etc. The Julia runtime itself would run on the backend in some sort of a virtual instance on AWS, etc...
>From a broad perspective it would provide two major benefits to the community: (1) Increasing mindshare and awareness of Julia and its capabilities, and (2) collecting anonymous crowd-sourced statistics from the benchmarks which would shed light on Julia's performance in various computational domains as well as which methods and approaches to optimization work best. Of course, there are several challenges as well, such as (1) the security and reliability of the backend instance, (2) effective sandboxing of benchmarks such that that performance of an individual trial isn't affected by traffic (3) Client/server communication, and so on... Thoughts?
