And the winner is…

A few days ago I announced that I was going to give away a free ticket for the first Professional Ruby Conference, organized by Obie Fernandez and Addison-Wesley, to one of my readers.

Each person who took the survey, received a discount code for the conference valued at $200. More excitingly, every eligible participant in the survey was added to a draw for a free ticket. Many replies came in, but of them only 30 were eligible to participate, as they answered “yes” to the question “will you be able to attend the conference if you win?”.

You might think that I used some sort of script to come up with the random winner, perhaps using the Roo gem (for Google Spreadsheet). But I didn’t. I used a Rhombic Triacontahedron, or in layman’s terms, a 30-sided dice. Without further ado, I’m here to announce the winner.

The lucky winner is: Nick Quaranto, from the US.

Congratulations Nick! I’ll get in contact with the conference organizers this morning and provide them with your info, so that you can claim your conference pass. Should you not be able to attend the conference and therefore claim this prize, please get in touch with me immediately so that a second draw can be made.

I must really thank everyone who provided feedback. It’s incredible what you can learn from a survey like this and I’ll be sure to incorporate many of your suggestions into this blog. In fact, you can still take the survey and provide me with further feedback (as well as take advantage of the $200 discount code). The only difference, of course, is that there won’t be a further draw for another free ticket.

Disappointed that you weren’t the winner? Let me bring a different type of contest with plenty of prizes to your attention (this one is organized by IBM). It’s the XML Challenge, which includes 5 programming related contests/challenges, with prizes like 17″ laptops, Nintendo Wiis, MP3 players and so on. Aside from the chance to score some neat goodies, you also get to show IBM and the world your coding and XML-fu.