Bugzilla 800,000 Bug Sweepstake Results

Milestone bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 800,000 was filed on 2012-10-10 at 09:11 ZST by Gregory Szorc. The title of the bug was initially “Buy Firefox developers some beer”, but has since been changed to “Buy the Mozilla community some beer.” This may seem a little familiar; that’s because it’s a clone of bug 700,000, which had a very similar title.

The winner of the sweepstake to guess the date and time is Josh Matthews, who guessed 2012-10-10 18:51:17 – only 9 hours and 40 minutes out. This is an improvement even on last year’s margin, which was over 20 hours. As it happens, Josh’s entry was precisely in the middle of the list of submissions, ordered by date. However, that’s including two entries which guessed dates which were already in the past at the time of the competition…

Josh writes:

I’m a Canadian, a recent university graduate, and I’ve been involved in the project for more than three years. Half my time is taken up writing code for Firefox and Servo (the prototype browser in Rust), while the rest is spent leading our efforts to make more effective use of our coding community and being more deliberate about getting new contributors involved. You might know me as the author of tools such as whatcanidoformozilla.org and Bugs Ahoy!. Outside of Mozilla, I sing in a barbershop quartet, tap dance, and take harp lessons.

The two runners-up are Scott Johnson (2d 13h 34m out) and Gordon P. Helmsley (3d 17h 16m out). Scott writes:

My name is Scott Johnson. I’m a developer for the layout team at mozilla. I haven’t been developing for mozilla for that long – only a little over a year. In that time, though, I’ve learned so much from the brilliant developers working on Firefox. My hope is that I can contribute as much as I’ve learned, since I have a real passion for free software (and mozilla software specifically, of course). The free web is important to me, because I believe that creativity is limited by the tools one has on hand. If we can take away the limitations of expensive and proprietary tools, and make it so that everyone can mold their tools to the way they create, our world will become brighter and better for everyone.

Gordon writes:

Greetings, Mozillians!

My name is Gordon P. Hemsley, but you might know me better as GPHemsley. I’ve been a user of the Mozilla codebase since the Netscape 4 days, and I filed my first bug (against ChatZilla) in 2004. I was involved in the Bespin project during its formative years, and I later helped out with Mozilla.org web development. More recently, I’ve been spearheading the effort to improve BCP 47 support in Firefox, which will help level the playing field for endangered and minority languages on the Web. In addition, I like to spend my time being an all-around bug wrangler, closing or otherwise following up on neglected and forgotten bugs.

I believe in the Mozilla mission to promote the Open Web, and I look forward to bug 900000.

All three winners will get some Mozilla swag just as soon as gear.mozilla.org is back up and running.

3 thoughts on “Bugzilla 800,000 Bug Sweepstake Results

  1. What happened to my guess of 2012-10-08 19:07:30? 47 hours early, which puts me in second doesn’t it? :-(

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