Some time ago, we held a bit of a contest that we dubbed the International GlusterFS Scale-out Community Contest. We tabulated results and even selected a winner. And then something happened. A big something - like an acquisition by Red Hat. Not that they stopped it, rather there were suddenly a lot of things to deal with, and the community contest went to the back burner, where it stayed - until now! As I was gearing up to do the next contest iteration, I realized that we kind of need to do the big announcement of the last contest's winners before really proceeding with the next one. So, without further ado - here goes.

The results of the community contest were extraordinary. We ended up with a series of fantastic technical blog posts that I dubbed "The Straight Tech", which you can find on this blog under the tag "thestraighttech". There were three individuals who distinguished themselves, all of whom are well-known in the GlusterFS user and developer community: Joe Julian, Jeff Darcy and Louis Zuckerman (aka "semiosis"). Joe Julian quickly established himself in the pole position, which was no surprise to anyone paying attention to our community. We're sending all of them fabulous prizes, and I'm going to post a series of profiles on them in this blog, starting today.

In the meantime, if you catch any of them on #gluster on Freenode, gluster-users or gluster-devel mailing lists, or community.gluster.org - please thank them for their time and effort that make the GlusterFS community the friendly place that it is.