A big THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the free t-shirt giveaway!
I was so blown away seeing 400+ participants that I decided to double the giveaway and spend at least $1 per participant. I’ll be shipping out 20 t-shirts to winners all over the world!
How to find out if you won:
BONUS: I will also send a t-shirt to the first person to correctly identify all 20 names. Post your list in the comments section – deadline is March 13th! Existing winners excluded. This is NOT easy!
(Bonus is claimed! Congrats Sam for solving this! See comments for his brilliant methodology!)
D U O H U O H C E N N A Z U S
N A N N E P A G F Q N V F A E
E U V R A H K O R T W J O B L
B E N I T I N H G E A I S J A
A T S R D U Q U I L D I V A D
R A J I V L I O A P Z R N C L
E D A G J B I E L F K K Q I A
U U R S A O N T D K I P A B E
E F E H R S M H T T X L Y N H
F T D D I N S E J O Y E S A C
A C E R V A C A X Y N O D L A
N J H V N A I K R A T S Y A R
C C E I K N W B M H I J W U H
G Z V L W M L I N P A W S V I
T A W A H K E H S M A T I R P
M E A G A N D I E G E L M A N
If you’re a winner: You’ve received an email from me with details! If you’re having trouble finding the email, email me directly!
Winners (plus a few others) I haven’t heard back from (don’t worry, I’ll give you a few weeks):
How each winner was chosen: I have no idea! I showed the list to my wife and told her to choose 20 names. She was slightly less mad at me for blowing $500 on this post!
If you didn’t win: don’t worry, there will be more chances. I made a commitment to give back a portion of my earnings from the Apex Academy course back to the community!
Thanks for playing!
David
R A J I V
“slightly” being the operative word! LOL
You missed my Name (Pritam Shekhawat) .
When will be the next Apex session.. We are waiting…. David
My name can never come in such puzzle’s
1.Suzanne Chouhoud
2. David Litton
3. Anne
4. Rokha
5. Nitin
6. David Liu
7. Rajiv
8. Ankit Jain
9. Racheal Dales
10. Casey
11. Ray Stark
12. Chris Neal
13. Jared
14. Feuerabend
15. Dawn
16. Viraj
17. Swapnil
18. Avinash
19. Pritam Shekhawat
20. Meagan Diegelman
Sweety you got them all right! You are not the first though unfortunately, Sam barely beat you to it!
Steps Taken:
1. Scrape comments for names to create a list (did this in excel using assumptions of date conventions) – simply select all on the post David linked and paste into excel. Then remove formatting.
2. then I put the word puzzle in excel (delimited by ” ” to get every character into a different cell)
3. then I concatenated horizontally, vertically, diagonally left to right, diagonally right to left, giving me four lists
4. then I used the reverse string function from http://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/1146-excel-reverse-string-word-order.html to get all of the reverse strings and all possible valid combinations for a total of 8 lists which I then combined into 1 list
5. Use wildcard vlookup – =VLOOKUP(“*”&A2&”*”,GridResults,1,FALSE) to see if the array of all valid combinations contained any of the scraped names.
Final Results:
1. Ankit
2. ankit jain
3. Anne
4. Avinash
5. Casey
6. Chris Neal
7. David Litton
8. David Liu
9. Dawn
10. feuerabend
11. Jared
12. Meagan Diegelman
13. Nitin
14. Pritam Shekhawat
15. Racheal Dales
16. Rajiv
17. Ray Stark
18. Suzanne Chouhoud
19. Swapnil
20. Viraj
WOW!! Everyone in the room with me right now is impressed!!
Wow!!! What a great formula!!!
One name is missing. Name #1 is the incorrect one although it’s understandable why you have it there!
My hint is your formula won’t work on the last name, since the listed name actually has some extra characters that were removed. I hope you find this last one!
oh I just saw this! I caught my mistake!
Oops!! Missed it by a letter. Jared ->> Javed :D
Hmm
It looks like I have a duplicate of “Ankit.”
The last one is tricky because there was an “@” sign in his/her name.
Is the missing name “Rokha” (originally “Rokha(@RokhaOu)”)?
WINNER!!! WINNER WINNER WINNER!!!
Very impressive Sam, love your methodology!! Not only happy that you’ve won but also happy that you won in such a creative way! This is the way of the programmer!!
You’ll be receiving an email from me soon!!
David
That was impressive! man I’d better try my luck next time (:
I thought I won XD hahahah
I’m so excited! I showed all my family that I won! Please post more puzzles like this! (rewards help :D)
Why tricky ? lol Rokha and @RokhaOu is the same and unique person. Any way so happy to got an email from my Hero … :) Can’t wait to have the T-SHIRT to go outside and take a picture near the Eiffel Tower
hahaha, got many but not all! Names have to match exactly with those displayed in comments, and many have last names too!
I noticed that David was on there twice – perhaps you’re partial to that name?! Thanks for the opportunity.
I included 20 unique names here:
David (twice)
Anne
Jared
Chris
Mavin
Nash
Megan
Vira
Neiman
Andie
Elman
Rust
Casey
Neal
Racheal
Dawn
Dale
Suzanne
Alan
Vila