We're happy to announce our new programming competition, the Ada/SPARK Crate Of The Year Award! We believe the Alire package manager is a game changer for Ada/SPARK, so we want to use this competition to reward the people contributing to the ecosystem.

Why “Crate”? This is the name the Alire project uses to designate a software project, library or executable written using the Ada and/or SPARK programming languages and contributed to the Alire ecosystem. The word comes from the Cargo package manager.

How does it differ from our previous competition, Make With Ada?

• Make with Ada was only for embedded projects: this competition has a prize dedicated to embedded, but the other two prizes are open for any kind of software project. So you can go wild with the topic of your submission.
• You can submit a project that you started years ago: it doesn’t have to be developed from scratch during the competition.

Timeline

The competition is starting today and ends on Friday December 31st 2021 at 23:59 CEST. We'll announce the results in January 2022. As mentioned before, you can submit projects you started before the competition, months or even years ago. The only thing that matters is that your crate has to be available in the Alire community index by the end of the competition.

How to enter?

The competition is hosted on GitHub. To enter, participants must open an "issue" on the competition repository using the provided template. Read the terms and conditions for more details.

Prizes

This competition has 3 prizes of $2,000 each, for:

• The Ada Crate Of The Year Prize, for best overall Ada crate;
• The SPARK Crate Of The Year Prize, for the best crate written in SPARK and/or contributing to the SPARK ecosystem;
• The Embedded Crate Of The Year Prize, for the best Ada or SPARK crate for embedded software;

Getting started with Alire and Ada/SPARK

You can have a look at the Alire documentation to start your first crate. If you don’t know Ada/SPARK programming, we recommend starting with our interactive online courses here.

We also recommend getting in touch with the Ada/SPARK and Alire community. Here are some links that you may find useful:

• Gitter Alire chat room
• Gitter Ada chat room
• Reddit r/ada
• Telegram Ada channel

Of course, you should also have a look at the existing Alire ecosystem to see if your awesome project idea already exists or to see which existing crates might help in your endeavor.

Have fun, and happy hacking!