GitHub Contest Winners
The results have been tallied and the curtains have closed. The 2009 GitHub Contest prize of a Large account and a bottle of 20 year Pappy Van Winkle goes to…
The results have been tallied and the curtains have closed. The 2009 GitHub Contest prize of a Large account and a bottle of 20 year Pappy Van Winkle goes to the Hintly Ensemble team of Daniel Haran (danielharan) and Liang Xiang (xlvector).
Daniel wrote about the contest results on his blog. To find out about how they tackled it, the post points to the winning projects README.
The secret sauce?
More data equals better results.
Congratulations to Daniel and Liang. I hope they can find some way to split the Pappy.
GitHub Community Spirit Prize
A second, secret prize is also being given to Jeremy Barnes (jeremybarnes) for his entry. Jeremys entry came in second place in the contest overall, but we were impressed with his openness during the contest. His results always included all of his source code and he went to great lengths to document how he was approaching the problem in his README. This is in contrast to the scores of entries that only included thier results.txt file and nothing else.
Since Jeremy so completely embraced what I envisoned as the spirit of the contest, we’re giving him a Medium account and a bottle of 23-year old Pappy.

(Glasses and cigars not included)
Congratulations to our two (three) winners, and thanks to everybody that participated!
Written by
Related posts
The new identity of a developer: What changes and what doesn’t in the AI era
Discover how advanced AI users are redefining software development—shifting from code producers to strategic orchestrators—through delegation, verification, and a new era of AI-fluent engineering.
Your stack, your rules: Introducing custom agents in GitHub Copilot for observability, IaC, and security
Use partner-built Copilot agents to debug, secure, and automate engineering workflows across your terminal, editor, and github.com.
The ultimate gift guide for the developer in your life
Finding the perfect gift for your favorite developer is easy with our top tips.