Title: ACCU 2004 Article Writing Competition

The nominations have been collected, the votes counted, and (since it all happened during this year's conference) the judges have sobered up and still agree with their decisions. What am I talking about? The 2004 ACCU article writing competition, of course. Every year we provide a little gentle encouragement to write for the ACCU journals, with the lure of a free ACCU T-shirt and untold acclaim (well, acclaim within the ACCU at least). This year we have awarded three prizes: to the best C Vu article, the best Overload article, and the best article by a new author.

It's been quite a difficult task for the judges, since the quality of articles has been particularly high. Every awards ceremony makes this kind of glib claim, but it's true - there was plenty of material this year to set our judges an arduous task. There was more than a little discussion before the winners were decided.

Congratulations to the winners and our sincere thanks to all those who have taken time to write for the ACCU this year. These articles are the lifeblood of the organisation, so why don't you consider whether you could pick up a pen and submit something? It's nowhere near as frightening as it seems, and there is a group of nice friendly people who'll help get your article through to publication.

Without further ado, here are the results:

Winner:

'An Introduction to Programming with GTK+ and Glade in ISO C and ISO C++' by Roger Leigh.

Honourable Mentions:

'Code in Comments' by Tomas Guest

'Professionalism in Programming' series by Pete Goodliffe.

Winner:

'A Mini-Project to Decode a Mini-Language' by Thomas Guest.

Honourable Mentions:

'Where Egos Dar'e by Allan Kelly

'Efficient Exceptions' by Roger Orr

Winner:

'An Experience Report on Implementing a Custom Agile Methodology' by Aspironi et al.

Honourable Mentions:

'Garbage Collection and Object Lifetime 'by Ric Parkin

Please consider giving some feedback to the authors you read in these pages. It's great to see your name in lights, but once the novelty wears off, it can be quite lonely to write something and get nothing in return. If you enjoy an article, let the author know!

Thanks to the judges for taking time to get this year's competition sown up in a timely fashion. Good luck for next year's competition!