There are two contests going on in the WordPress community right now. If you’d like a chance to flex your WordPress skillz and perhaps win a prize and lifelong fame, you should consider dropping your code in the hat.
The first is the Sandbox Designs competition, which is like a theme competition, but working only with CSS and the highly semantic Sandbox theme. They already have a thousand dollars in prizes, so check it out.
Second our friends at Weblog Tools Collection are running a WordPress Plugin competition. They have a blog to track all the entries, but if you’re participating don’t forget to submit your code to the Plugin directory.
Both competitions require entries to be under the same GPL license that WordPress is, so regardless of who wins they’ll make the entire community much richer. (Remember, WordPress itself was written on the base of existing GPL code!)