New: Custom Blocks Contest with $100,000 in Prizes 🙌

[Michelle_Valent]

If you haven’t had a chance to test out the developer preview of the Custom Blocks SDK yet, now’s the time to give it a whirl. The platform team is offering big prizes for the best blocks in three categories:

• Blocks for Business Teams (5 winners)
• Blocks for Education or Non-Profit (2 winners)
• Wildcard (2 winners)

With a handy UI kit at your fingertips to make polished interfaces a breeze, a CLI that lets you leverage your favorite developer tools, built-in hosting, and real-time that just works - all working in concert with the user-facing Airtable interface you already know so well - we think you’ll find working with Custom Blocks to build powerful apps fast, easy, and delightful.

We’ve even included some use cases to help inspire your blocks! With more than 170,000 organizations powering mission-critical workflows on Airtable today, there’s a tremendous opportunity to expand the functionality of the Airtable platform and help teams around the world achieve more.

The contest runs until July 6, 2020, so head over to Devpost now to get all the details and register: https://airtable.devpost.com/

[Kamille_Parks]

My hunch is Creator. If they’re going to test our code, they are probably going to test if we’ve safeguarded against tables/fields being added/deleted.

[Michelle_Valent]

Kamille is correct. In case you’re curious, we’ll be accessing the base using our @airtable.com email addresses, so it won’t impact any credits / charges for those that are on a paid pro plan.

If you’re reading this after the deadline (July 6 @ 10am PT) and are worried that you granted the wrong permissions, do not worry! We can also release another version of your block by remixing from the github link in your submission. It will save us time and better position your use case to evaluate the block in your desired base though!

[kuovonne]

Thanks!

How will commits to the GitHub repository after the deadline be handled?

I plan on having my block fully functional finished by the deadline, but I will want to go back and polish up the documentation and comments after the deadline.

[Michelle_Valent]

The assessment will be focused on the block you released in the base and the answers provided in the submission. We’re not judging the quality of your documentation (see judging criteria), but always helpful to have clear documentation. Excited to see your block!

[kuovonne]

Michelle_Valentine:

We’re not judging the quality of your documentation (see judging criteria), but always helpful to have clear documentation.

Thanks for this info. Regardless of the outcome of the contest, I will be updating the documentation and comments because I believe that quality of documentation is important. I just wanted to make sure that future commits to my repository won’t cause a problem with my entries. (If they would, I can wait until after the hackathon is over before pushing them.)

[Widgetic]

Same here! :slightly_smiling_face: We’re cautious to touch the code we submitted before the deadline, and now updates are pending.

[kuovonne]

The winners of the contest were announced yesterday. You can see them on the submissions tab.

I’d like to express my appreciation to the judges. Going over all 105 submissions must have been tough work. There were lots of great entries!

If anyone is code-curious, I recommend checking out the entries. Many of the entries (including winning entries) were submitted by people who had never used React before. Many were created in a very short period of time. Some entries were even submitted by people who had never even used Airtable before. Several entries also started life as scripts written for Scripting block. Most of the blocks also have links to their GiltHub repositories, and all of the entries are opensource, so you can see and use the code for yourself.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

Congrats to all the winners!

I’d especially like to call out @Kamille_Parks for creating a very nicely designed scheduling block - it was deserving of the prize!

And @kuovonne for giving the judges a run! They just couldn’t bear letting your submission go unnoticed! Nice work :slightly_smiling_face:

[Kamille_Parks]

I really do love that @kuovonne’s was so good they added a new prize to give it its due credit!

[kuovonne]

Thank you @Jeremy_Oglesby and @Kamille_Parks. Kamille, congrats on your block being a winner! It is beautiful and polished. There are some areas of my block that I didn’t have time to polish. Those darn CORS errors and authentication/authorization/security issues took up so much time. It was wonderfully generous of Airtable to create the new prize for my block.

I love how community members inspire each other. Jeremy’s “Schedule conflicts” script inspired your block. Your questions about color palettes on this community inspired me to add color to my Keyword Counter block. @openside’s BuiltOnAir community supported both of us in our block creations.