I agree, I think it would be best to branch off all things that aren't practical programming questions into categories of their own, if we are to allow them.

Maybe we could have a broader discussion about which categories that make sense to have overall? Some suggestions: Code golf, Code review, Program design, Database administration.

@Lundin personally, I wouldn't make program design or database administration their own categories, but that's just me. Feel free to make a suggestion post of your own and see what others think.

My reasoning is that the mentioned category suggestions all have their own sites in the SE network, so they might eventually end up like that here as well.

We don't need to emulate the structure on SE. We should do what makes sense to the community here. Think of categories as different kinds of content, not just different subjects. For example, contests or challenges aren't regular Q&A; it makes sense to separate those. But design is part of software dev, for example, so why separate it? There'd be edge cases (is this question about patterns more code-y or design-y?). Also, beware too many categories - cognitive load and UI overflow.

Speaking as someone who has a lot of experience on codegolf.SE: writing a good spec for a challenge is hard. There's a reason that PPCG has a sandbox in meta and strongly encourages everyone to use it. And while there's obviously "real world" professional value in learning how to write a watertight spec, I'm not sure that the benefit-to-effort ratio of a challenges section is worth it at the moment.

@Monica From SE we can get a very good idea which categories that are likely to turn out to be high traffic ones and become independent sites in the future. Code review, databases etc.

So far +5 and none against, so I suppose we should implement this unless someone can make a strong argument against it. I think we need to draft up guidelines for how to post these though. Other questions that fit in with this category might be obfuscation and tasks with artificial requirements ("write code for addition without using the + operator").