Cartoon Caption Contest Winners!

Many thanks to the SCN community for an amazing 300+ entries to the first cartoon caption contest! After a slight delay caused by the sheer volume of entries that kept pouring in, I’m now happy to announce the contest winners:

Gold

Goes to Caroleigh Deneen for this entry, with 33 votes:

Appropriately enough for this community-fueled experiment, Caroleigh is part of SCN’s Collaboration Team and blogs regularly on the SCN member of the month. Caroleigh is also an excellent cartoonist, as you can see by going to her currently-in-development website. Caroleigh’s entry was nice and simple, yet tells a universal truth that many technical folks obviously identified with. As she explains:

“I’ve read my fair share of poorly written requirements. Volumes of pages that don’t actually give the developers answers to the questions they need. Even if you’re agile, if your team is dispersed then well-written specifications that define every condition and every interaction had better be outlined somewhere. If not, you’re going to see the twists and turns and unexpected outcomes you illustrated. Maybe something like the neural networks of a typical developer’s brilliant brain.”

Silver

Goes to Jamie Oswald for this entry with 25 votes:

Jamie’s day job is working on innovative projects such as using SAP HANA to improve patient care and in his spare time he’s a regular contributor to the excellent DSLayer podcast that covers topics on SAP Analytics. I asked him to share how he came up with the caption:

“It doesn’t feel like it should take a rocket scientist to make an application know who is logged onto the computer running that application, but it more often than not requires a lot of back-end complexity to build a “simple” user experience, especially when you’ve got existing systems and protocols in place.. I’m guessing personal experience with that pain helped get me some votes from SCN members.”

Bronze

Goes to Christopher Solomon with 19 votes:

Christopher has been working with SAP for 20 years, and is specialized in HCM, so perhaps knows more than most about the new opportunities of moving to cloud-based solutions such as SuccessFactors! (and another of his entries came in at #7 — see below…)

Some worthy runners up:

• Mark Richardson, whose entry “…as requested, the new Platform is integrated with all of your Legacy systems…” scored 19 votes
• Michael Fruechtl, whose entry “And then I said to the Engineers: If you don’t like the new coffee machine feel free to build your own” scored 18 votes
• Gretchen Lindquist, whose entry “This new release is fully integrated with mobile technologies and big data analytics, solar powered, and, as you can see, much simpler.” scored 17 votes
• Christopher Solomon, whose entry “I know this is what we asked for, but it’s not what we want.” also scored 17 votes

And many, many more — you can see many of the other higher-voted captions in this post: What We Can Learn About Technology Complexity From A Cartoon Caption Contest!

Keep tuned for the next caption contest soon!