The folks over at Pusher (the real-time push notification service) have announced a contest they're holding for developers (not just PHP either) to enter for a shot at a MacBook Air and a ticket to the Keeping it Realtime Conference - the "Pusher Challenge".

We believe you can massively improve the user experience and engagement of your existing applications by making them realtime. Pusher lets you do that quickly and simply with our hosted API. In the Pusher challenge, we want to see the innovative ways you can turbo-charge your apps with a sprinkling of Pusher magic.

Pusher uses Websockets to handle the notifications. You can sign up for a developer account to get the development ball rolling but the deadline is midnight (GMT) on October 16th (just five days away!) so dive in and get realtime quickly for your chance to win!

Recently Microsoft sponsored a contest where the entries were PHP applications built on the Windows Azure platform. Brian Swan has posted an interview with Ben Waine, the latest winner of the contest who created an application called the "Twitter Sentiment Engine" that analyzes the sentiment towards various search terms on Twitter.

I recently had a chance to catch up via e-mail with Ben Waine, winner of the 2011 PHP on Azure contest. [...] I only followed the contest from a distance while it was happening, but after hearing that Ben had won the contest (I had the good fortune of meeting Ben in person at the 2010 Dutch PHP Conference) and after reading a bayesian filter he developed to help filter out some of the twitter spam.

The Ibuildings techPortal has announced a contest today where they're giving away a free pass to this year's Dutch PHP Conference.

I'm wildly excited to announce that we have a ticket to give away for the Dutch PHP Conference 2011!! The conference is entirely English-language (although you will hear many languages spoken in the hallways!), and takes place in Amsterdam between 19th and 21st May 2011. The schedule is online now, and it promises three days of really excellent technical content from some of the leaders of the PHP Community from Europe and beyond. The tickets are on sale already; bookmark this link in case you don't win the ticket.

Entering the contest is simple - just leave a comment on the post with an email address and the winner will be picked from the group. You'll have to leave a comment before March 18th, though or it won't count towards the contest!

Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post today talking about the latest contest being put on by Microsoft - writing an application with PHP on Azure - and why you should get involved.

So as you might or might not have noticed yet, PHPBenelux is organizing a new contest in collaboration with Microsoft: The PHP on Azure contest. The idea is simple: Build an application in PHP that runs on the Windows Azure platform. I think it's a great idea to participate, let me try to tell you why.

He suggests a few reasons including that you'd get to work with cool new technologies (well, the 99% of you out there that don't host on Azure), you have the chance to win some great prizes and, of course, to have fun in the process. Development's great, but if you're not going to enjoy it, there's not much of a reason to try.

On the php|architect site today Beth mentions a contest that's being put on by the WestHost hosting group is putting on to find the best function - custom bits of functionality that are the most impressive and do their job the best.

Submit your entry by March 15th to win one of the above prizes. Winner's will be selected from a panel of judges reviewing the top rated PHP functions / code based on utility, creativity, efficiency, and readability. Make sure to get the word out about your submission in order to get votes to have a chance to win.

The submission form lets you fill in your contact details and copy & paste in the function. You can use any version of PHP you'd like and even the framework of your choice (just be sure it include instructions on its use).

Eran Galperin has posted a last call for entries into the Binpress programming contest with the final ten days looming on the horizon.

Have you been developing custom solutions for the web? pick your best feature, module or UI component that can be packaged and re-used and publish it on Binpress. Binpress is a marketplace for source-code, where developers can sell and buy source code from each other. We are looking for high-quality code from professional developers. If you think you have what it takes, please go over our submission guidelines and join the contest.

There's over $40,000 USD in prizes for the winners of the contest in categories for "best submission" and "best submission per language" (you can submit PHP, ASP.NET, Python, Java, Ruby or Javascript).

Binpress has announced a new contest they've put together to try to find the best of the best programmers out there. The contest offers over $40,000 USD worth of prizes in three different categories going to the best code submitted to the Binpress site.

Have you been developing custom solutions for the web? pick your best feature, module or UI component that can be packaged and re-used and publish it on Binpress. Binpress is a marketplace for source-code, where developers can sell and buy source code from each other. We are looking for high-quality code from professional developers.

If you're interested, check out the submission guidelines and or just jump in and join the contest with your own submission. The grand prize winner will receive a $17,000 USD award, second and third will receive $13,000 USD and the winners of the "best submission per language" awards will all receive $10,000 USD.

Maarten Balliauw has posted a new announcement to his blog today - a new contest that Microsoft is hosting surrounding building PHP applications on the Azure platform.

The PHP on Azure Contest is a coding competition run by the PHP Benelux User Group supported by Microsoft. Windows Azure is Microsoft's Cloud platform with tools and support for PHP. Participate to win a ticket, airfare and hotel to visit MIX2012 in Las Vegas, a Windows Phone 7 or other great prizes! The contest runs from February 1st 2011 to May 15th 2011.

Participants will build their application, blog about the progress and talk about what they think of the Azure platform as they go. You must enter before February 28th and have the application completed by May 15th - the winners will be announced at this year's Dutch PHP Conference. Other prizes include an Samsung Omnia 7 (Windows phone), a Microsoft Kinect sensor for Xbox 360 and another Samsung Omnia 7 for the top blogger participant.

On the Zend Developer Zone there's a recent post about a contest they're running to give one lucky winner a free pass to this year's Zend/PHP Conference in November in Santa Clara, California.

Summer is upon us, which means that the annual Zend/PHP Conference (ZendCon), the world's largest gathering of the PHP community, is drawing near. Preparations are already in high gear, and you can make an impact on what fellow PHPers will wear in Fall of 2010! Submit your cool t-shirt designs or just cast your vote. The winning design will be used for the new 'official' PHP t-shirt. Every ZendCon attendee (and some others) will be getting the free t-shirt, and you get a free pass to the conference!

Besides the ticket to ZendCon, there's also two other prizes for the runners up - a free pass for a Zend Certification Exam (5.3) and a pass for a Zend Framework Certification Exam. There's about seven weeks left to submit your design and are currently eight entries on the list, so get your design in early to give it the best chance for the most votes. The submission round will end September 30th, so get your designs in soon!

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today Ivo Jansch has announced the winners of their latest programming contest (a class to satisfy a given test case, a sort of TDD challenge).

n May and June we ran another one of our PHP coding contest. We love to play with PHP and offer people a chance to show off their coding skills in exchange for prizes! This time the contest revolved around creating a class that satisfies a given unit test case. The test case contained tests for 7 mathematical operations. The contestants did not only have to guess the actual operation, but also provide a class that implements the operation in as few lines as possible.

The contest this time actually had two mini-contests - one for the smallest solution following coding standards and the other for the smallest code size. There were three winners, one in head of the categories: David Frame, Piotr MŁoeck and Luca Lancioni. Congrats to all three!