I sat at the head of the table, an unconscious choice. I wasn’t feeling powerful. In fact, I was intimidated. It was my first time in this type of event planning meeting, and the chairperson was efficient and poised. I sat quietly, taking notes, until I heard these words: “We need someone to do the lane matching.” I burst out, “Oh, I want to do that! I’ll put it in Salesforce and write an algorithm. It’ll be fun!” I was soooo wrong.

The event was Mother-Son Bowling, and I was in a meeting with PTA volunteers and the PTA co-chair. I was trying to be a good parent and participate at my son’s school. I thought that matching families that wanted to bowl together was an easy way to add value. It was a technical task, not organizational, so it played to my strengths. In the end, it was fun (mostly), but also really hard. And, well, I did it wrong.

I’ll tell you that story, but first I want to give you the chance to write the algorithm yourself.  Today, I outsourced the challenge on TopCoder, and you can win some $$$ if you solve it!  It includes the data model as an AppExchange package and all of the detailed requirements.

Who’s in? Trust me, it’ll be fun!

Looking for me on Twitter? I’m @rockchick322004, and I tweet about the Salesforce1 Platform and Women in Tech.