--- title: Winners of 'the contest' teaser: tags: news,web author: Matt Jankowski published_on: 2007-12-05 --- ![''](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2007-12-5-robo.jpg "Robots!") On November 13th, we announced [the contest](http://ui.thoughtbot.com/2007-11-13-the-contest) - a client story submission adventure with a [Pro ActiveRecord: Databases with Ruby and Rails](https://www.apress.com/9781590598474) book giveaway as the prize. ## Thank you Thanks to Rick Olson for posting this [on the rails blog](http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/11/20/new-activerecord-book-and-a-contest) and to Peter Cooper for [posting on ruby inside](http://www.rubyinside.com/win-a-copy-of-pro-activerecord-651.html) (Hey look, he even started his own [contest](http://www.rubyinside.com/3-copies-of-troubleshooting-ruby-processes-to-win-664.html) a few days ago!)- and thanks to everyone who sent in a ridiculous story, of course! We received a decent number of entries, and - using a pretty [advanced tallying mechanism](http://images.thoughtbot.com/ui/2007-12-4-votingprocedures.gif) which we implemented in C++ for speed - thoughtbot voted internally for the three best. Here they are... ## The Winner I think we all enjoyed the contradictory goals in this winning entry - especially considering the client was the Italian government!... > Request ~ We have to expose these data by law, but we don't want to do so > (because they think that transparency may be "risky"). Please publish them in > a non human-readable and non machine-readable format, but the solution must > validate according to w3c specs and it must be AAA accessible. > > Result ~ "WTF?"? ## Second place Ah, the sales department. The bane of many a big-organization-developer's existence... > Request ~ I once worked for a company where the salesperson sold to a very > large retail client of ours that we had the ability to genderize Asian names > that resided in Canada. To this day, I can remember when that came to light, > my partner and I were reading the SOW > separately and when I came across that gem, I had to read it 4 or 5 times in > shock of such a concept. A few minutes later my partner came into my office > with SOW in hand and said, "Craig there is something in this that I don't > think we can do", "I'm betting it has something to do with Asia, Canada and > genderization". Several conversations with the salesperson led to other > conversations because he swore that such technology already existed within our > company which wasn't locatable before our kick-off meeting. Needless to say, > the salesperson didn't want to lose face with this major client so I broke the > news that such a function didn't exist and that since a name from China could > have a separate gender than a name from Japan, there was no way we could > systematically do it with the data we had available. > > Result ~ The senior lead from the Company had a big grin and said "Yea, I > thought it was pretty incredible that you guys could do that, I was planning > on finding out how you did it because I wasn't sure it could be done" The rest > of the project was completed with great success, the salesperson was never > allowed to make another commitment to a client with a technical sign off again > and I eventually left the company for greener pastures. ## Third place Clients and their proprietary algorithms are also quite the pasttime... > Request ~ In designing a doggy dating service, the client wanted to reproduce > the eHarmony algorithm for use with dogs. She had developed this convoluted > algorithm for determining the compatibility between dogs based on their breeds > and their personalities. > > Result ~ It took us quite some time to implement this and I'll never forget > this project. ## Prizes Thanks again to everyone for your submissions. Winners will be kept anonymous to protect their clients - but will be contacted soon to confirm shipping details for the books.