I'm not sure if I picked that title because I'm half-way watching Shrek at the same time as I'm writing this, or because I was picked.
So right now there are two kinds of people reading this - there's a group of people who know exactly what I'm talking about, and a group of people who have no clue and want me to post new baby pictures. Yeah, I've got a backlog of those to upload and finally got some of them up last weekend.
So for those of you who don't know what I got picked for, you should take a glance at the Pick Me Contest rules. And if you want to skip to the good stuff, you might check out the results.
I've actually known I was the winner (or one of the winners) for this contest for about a week now (and if it weren't for Yahoo!'s spam filter, I would have known earlier). It's a challenge to keep something like that in for a week; TopCoder just likes to torture me, that must be why I can never hit the legendary 2200 rating line.
Once the results of the contest were FINALLY announced, the TopCoder community took the chance to discuss the winners and the winning entries. The community seems to have unanimously congratulated me so far, which is refreshing, although I expected enough from this fine set of people. More talk has been around the other two winners.
The main comment is that the other two winners (at least under these handles) have never competed, have never participated in the community, and appear to have just registered in order to enter into this contest. Sure, they have great credentials, but they aren't us :-) Now, TopCoder doesn't have the kind of community that hates people for not being them (there are other communities for geeks who want to feel 1337 without actual programming skillz). But in this case, the community specifically expected one of them to be chosen. The goals of TopCoder the company seems to have been to have fair and impartial judging.
In fact, one of them said (in response to questions from the community), "most identifying information (as much as possible) was removed from the submissions prior to voting." I'm more than just a little curious what my submission looked like with identifying information removed. Perhaps Mary Beth was referring to my entry when she said "most". My entry was 500 words of self-identifying information. My best guess is they could remove most identifying information by removing most of the 41 links from my entry before passing it on. Actually, they could leave in about 1/3 of them. But the main point is that I wrote my entry in such a way that the identifying information could hardly be removed without lessening the impact of the essay. I was, however, confident that either my identity or my writing style gave me a chance to win.
Another branch of the discussion on the other winners is the similarities of their entries - both had a sort of top-list countdown style (one of them counted down from 100 to 1 in binary, the other from 5 to 1 in some base >= 6 :-) ). Both put their considerable writing credentials on display without saying anything about why they want to attend the event. Both had the same number-one reason they should be chosen (that they are "fun"). And I'm pretty sure it's more than coincidence that they both go to the same school.
Well, enough about the community response, since there's plenty in the thread linked earlier to get most of that. I also promised in that thread that I'd take a minute to explain my entry from my point of view, and I thought I'd do that here.
First of all, my environment - Almost my entire entry was written in a version of Microsoft Word 2007 that's somewhere in between Beta 1 and Beta 2. The biggest advantage to using Word 2007 is that the status bar has been redesigned (getting rid of the useless stuff that used to be on there and putting stuff you might actually care to look at), and it now displays your word count there. If TopCoder is planning on putting word limits on stuff we write at the TCO, I may have to consider putting a Beta 2-ish version of Office on my laptop before I go.
Second of all, timing - I was probably just about the last entry they received before the deadline, sending my email with about half an hour left before the deadline. I'm living on the edge! Ok, so I just put it off until the day before the end of the contest. Either way, I just barely got it in.
When I started writing it, I'm not sure why I decided to write it like a blog post. For some reason it just came naturally. And I couldn't allow myself to type the word hyperlink without linking it to SOMETHING. That would seem almost hypocritical! Also, I'm not sure how I decided to say that a "hyperlink is worth a thousand words," it became apparent to me looking around the web that I probably coined that phrase right then.
In the second and third paragraphs, I phrase my statements in the general form of guessing what TopCoder is looking for in a winner. I said what I wanted to say, but let hyperlinks explain what I meant. One challenge in this kind of writing style is coming up with stuff to link to, and while I generally had a pretty good idea what to link, one of the links I had the easiest time thinking of was one where I didn't have anything appropriate to link. What made me think of that page? Not sure. Maybe the inappropriateness? Maybe just the complete lack of relationship with what I was talking about. I also found an opportunity to mention some of my contributions I'd made to TopCoder and the TopCoder community in this section, so many of the links are to stuff involving me, including one to a thread I hijacked in the forums that morning.
Following the barrage of 24 hyperlinks in those two paragraphs, I promised to cut down the hyperlinks as I started the final "phase" of my entry, which was appealing specifically to as many specific groups of people as I could. I made the promise to cut down the hyperlinks, ironically, one paragraph before linking to different pictures of my now nearly 6-month-old daughter in 15 consecutive words. Well, it should be obvious what I do besides TopCoder.
So I leveraged the baby to appeal to the first focus group, which was "people who like ultra-cute babies". This group has a high correlation with "people who are female." I've seen evidence of at least 5 or so females working at TopCoder, and I think it's likely that there are several more behind the scenes, so it seemed like a good group to get a few "votes" from.
The next group was "people who coordinate travel", which may be a subset of "people who are female" as well, but I left it in because it was easy to think of.
The next group was people who like good grammar and spelling. I caught myself being every so slightly politically incorrect in that section, so that seemed like a good chance to appeal to the people who have legal interests in my writing.
Finally, I stated that I'd be great to have at the TCO finals just as a spectator, and from a technical and cultural aspect, I'd understand what's going on.
Finally, at the end, I had just enough words left to make one more joke. Maybe that put me just over the line.
