Update 2019-11-10: Winners' Announcement
Belatedly, here are the winners (also I changed the category names a bit, and added one, but hey, this is not terribly formal). We thank all who participated in the sprint, as well as all contributors to the Wolfram Function Repository. Since it was announced in a blog by Stephen Wolfram, over 40 % of submissions have been from outside the company. We are quite happy to see this trend. As for the sprint, I believe we received over 120 submissions during that time frame. Suffice it to say that reviews had to be amped up just to stay afloat.
The prizes are tee shirts designed specifically for the WFR. If you won an award and were not present to receive a prize, please reach out to us so we can ship a tee shirt to you (and let us know the size you would like). We will of course attempt to reach all winners ourselves, but sending us a note could expedite matters...
First an honorable mention to Bob Sandhenirich and Rick Hennigan (generally known hereablots as "Bobrick") for all the work they put into the WFR infrastructure. They created the authoring notebook, the review notebooks, and most of the publishing system is their doing as well. Also we poached them, so to speak, to be submission reviewers. Which has proven to be quite helpful in terms of keeping the quality of published functions high.
The awards and winners:
Aster Ctor - for volume of external submissions during the sprint
Dennis Schneider, Sander Huisman, and Seth Chandler - for overall volume of external submissions (we made no effort to count carefully...)
Carl Woll and Jesse Friedman - for volume of internal submissions during the sprint. They were both in the teens, one apart, and I don't recall which had that one extra. We announced them as a "virtual tie". If you tell me there is no such thing as a virtual tie (as one person tried to do following the awards announcements), I will simply put on my vampire fangs and bite your neck.
External contributions, top three in quality:
- Anton Antonov (RandomMandala)
- Dennis Schneider (SectionPlot3D)
- Mark Greenberg (ImageKaleidoscope)
Honorable mention:
- Aster Ctor (PolyPainting) and Jessica Shi (DNAAlignment -- I have pilfered code from that one)
Internal contributions, top three in quality:
- Michael Trott (RiemannSurfacePlot)
- Jon McLoone (DynamicViewPointSyncghronize)
- Jesse Friedman (GeoGlobe3D)
Best Newcomer:
Special honorable mentions:
Sascha Kratky - for a submission that was flawlessly formatted despite our lack of documentation on how to go about that, which we hope to address in future.
Mark Greenberg - for an excellent submission called ScansionDiagram based on summer school work shown in Community. We are unable to publsih it until some OS-specific bugs at our end get fixed.
Alexey Popkov and Jan Mangaldan, for managing to format submissions despite not having access to version 12. Some day the Wolfram Cloud will fully support this. But that day has not arrived.
Also: I believe Jesse and Jessica are both 18 years of age. Pretty phenomenal, what they can do already. I'm not sure if I should be happy or scared (we announced the awards on Halloween, so maybe both).
Competition Discription
A few months ago we opened the Wolfram Function Repository to contributions from users outside the employ of the company. We have received quite a number to date, with most making their way into the set of published functions. This has been quite encouraging, so we thought we would go a bit further (1,2). The following has been announced to registrants for the 2019 Wolfram Tech Conference. This competition is open to all comers, however; one need not attend the conference in order to compete.
Prizes will be awarded in several categories to authors of Wolfram Function Repository functions. Eligible submissions must be received between September 27 & October 13. Categories include (and may be expanded):
Best in-house submission (function repository team members excluded from this one).
Best external submissions (top three, based on function repository team votes)
Most functions published from the time frame of this sprint (open to all comers)
Most Prolific - most functions published from date of inception of function repository
Best Debut - best functions published by someone with no more than three submissions before the sprint begins.
Winners will be announced at the conference and subsequently posted here on Wolfram Community. Where feasible we will ship prizes to those winners not attending the WTC. Depending on content of functions submitted, we may opt to add prize categories.
Footnotes:
- Read: make more work for ourselves.
- Which is a good problem to have.