And the winner of Alexis Ohanian’s Macbook Air is…

It’s complicated…

We had a metric f-tonne of entries. Thank you. We decided to award the prize to the person that had the most actionable idea that had a chance of scaling. There are two entries that we thought expressed particularly good ideas.

Some guy called Dharmesh(?):

Every great programmer should help two other developers just get started writing code. The sooner the better.

https://twitter.com/#!/dharmesh/status/129223285467660288

Richard Mitchell, who is an employee of Red Gate Software:

Make the world suck less by not giving me a mac book air – I don’t need it – give the money to a school instead

https://twitter.com/#!/richard_j_m/status/129285498467393536

Now Dharmesh don’t need (or want one), and Richard don’t want one neither so…

We thought we could combine the two notions. We will award the prize on behalf of them both and donate the Macbook Air to a public school in Melrose, just outside Boston. Why Melrose? Well Melrose is where Noel Clarke, a BoS attendee this year, lives and he got in touch and offered to help some kids learn programming. He also said he would donate an iPhone to the cause. I thought that exhibited the characteristics of awesome. Thank you.

We will then give two tickets to BoS2012 to two kids from the school that learn something in the next year. I am sure they will really enjoy it. Look out for them and be nice.

So I got in touch with Alexis with the new plan, this is what he said:

“So awesome! Love the plan. If we find a classroom, let’s ask what they need… or we could find a donors choose classroom in MA looking for programming related projects….(if only bc one air can only go so far) either way, very happy to price out an air and donate the 2k or so it’d have been 🙂 very awesome indeed.”

Great idea. Noel, thank you for being such a willing volunteer. If you can identify a school and work out what they need, lets make this happen. Thanks Alexis, thanks Dharmesh, thanks Richard and thank you Noel. If anyone else wants to get involved, I will put you in touch. Let us know how it goes and we look forward to seeing some new coders at Business of Software next year too.