Laravel Holiday Giveaway

It’s that time of year again!

For the past five years, I’ve tried to run a giveaway to give back to this incredible community around the holidays. I cannot say enough about the fantastic, vibrant, diverse and supportive Laravel community.

Previous giveaways have all hinged around community members and companies providing prizes for us to give away. This giveaway would not have been possible without the incredible products and services donated. Last year, for example, we received over $20,000 in prizes, products, services, courses and books.

This year, the Laravel Giveaway will be a mixture of prizes provided by our sponsors as well as cold hard cash to give winners a shopping spree to purchase anything they choose. In total, there will be twenty-eight (28) $100 USD cash prizes and another twenty-eight (28) $50 USD cash prizes.

Fourteen (14) of each will be given daily via the Lottery campaign and another fourteen (14) of each will be away via @Laravelgiveaway on Twitter, so make sure you follow us there.

Again, all of this is made possible by the financial support from all our sponsors.

#Platinum Sponsors

Sentry.io for me, this is the hands-down best error and performance tracking service out there. I have been using Sentry for over five years and counting; there is no better option out there, and I say this from experience.

Linode an incredible hosting company that provides VPS and dedicated services that I’ve also used since 2012. They once hosted and powered a cross-Canada Black Friday giveaway of over $120,000 in prizes over 10 days and handled all the resulting traffic.

Laravel PHP and Laravel Forge Yes, “THE” Laravel and the man Taylor Otwell who has been the most supportive person anyone can ask for, allowing me to give back to this community year after year, and would always be the first to say “yes” to support the giveaway.

ContestKit (My product and company) that has powered every giveaway and this year paid for one of the grand prizes, the PS5 console.

The Laravel Giveaway is also running on a Linode instance provisioned by Laravel Forge and is being monitored for performance and errors by Sentry.

#Gold Sponsors

• Vursion: Track Laravel, PHP, NPM and composer dependency versions across your projects.
• Laracasts: Screencasts for the modern.developer;
• LaraJobs: The official Laravel job board
• Codecourse: Practical screencasts for awesome developers.
• BeyondCode: Save time and boost your productivity by adding Beyond Code tools to your daily
• Spatie: We craft web applications, courses & open source packages in the Laravel ecosystem
• Eloquent Performance Patterns: Learn how to drastically improve the performance of your Laravel applications by pushing more work to the database, all while still using the Eloquent ORM
• Make VS Code Awesome: Make VS Code Not Suck workflow. It’s time to transform the way you work.

### OK. The important parts…

This year's giveaway will be a lottery. Think Super Ball Lotto. Yes, the odds of winning the lottery are not great, but this lottery is different.

If you are not familiar with a lottery, A lottery is a game that involves drawing numbers at random for a prize. You get to pick six numbers, between 1-45, as a single ticket that represents your "guess" as to what the random number selected will be. If you match all six digits, the ones you pick against the ones chosen at random at the time of the draw, you win big!

For 14 days starting December 6th, there will be an incrementing jackpot starting at $200 and growing by $200 each day. You all will be able to select your lucky numbers for ten tickets (a ticket is your pick of 6 numbers between 1-45) every draw and gain more tickets daily by referring others. If you participated in the iPad giveaway, you will start with 20 tickets a day and get in a day early.

Each daily draw starts at noon EST and closes at 11:59 AM EST. The winning six numbers will be announced at the closing time. Also, every ticket submitted into the draw will double as a ballot for random draws for the prizes we are giving away every day.

The tickets are not accumulative meaning that you will get your daily allotment of tickets at the beginning of every draw day. Also, the more tickets you submit over the campaign's life, the more tickets you have in the final draw for the grand prizes. So make sure you play all your tickets every day.

#Daily prizes

• $100 Shopping voucher and an additional $100 given away via Twitter.
• $50 Shopping voucher and an additional $50 given away via Twitter.
• Sentry Swag, Sentry socks and stress hotdog
• $150 in Linode Credits suitable for existing and new customers.

#The Sponsored days

Each day is sponsored and adds prizes to the above list, along with the above daily prizes.

• Day 1, December 6th Laracasts
• Day 2, December 7th Spatie
• Day 3, December 8th Laracasts
• Day 4, December 9th Eloquent Performance Patterns
• Day 5, December 10th Make VS Code Awesome
• Day 6, December 11th CodeCourse
• Day 7, December 12th CodeCourse
• Day 8, December 13th BeyondCode
• Day 9, December 14th Version
• Day 10, December 15th LaraJobs
• Day 11, December 16th Laracasts
• Day 12, December 17th CodeCourse
• Day 13, December 18th CodeCourse
• Day 14, December 19th Laracasts

#The Grand Prize(s).

Once we’ve closed out the draw for Day 14, and the $2,800 has not been won, we will select a two (2) ticket (from all the tickets played during the whole giveaway) as the winners of two $1,400 grand prizes.

We will select an additional ticket, at random, as the winner for the PS5 console. This console will be shipped anywhere in the world to the winner.

Rest assured, all the prizes will find a home this year, and the more you participate over the 14 days, the better your chances are of winning big!

#All the prizes

• 1 $2,800 USD Grand prize Shopping spree! OR 2 - $1,400 USD Grand prize Shopping spree!
• 1 - PlayStation 5 console complete with 2 controllers, courtesy of ContestKit
• 28 - $100 USD Shopping sprees (14 will be given away daily via Twitter)
• 28 - $50 USD Shopping sprees (14 will be given away daily via Twitter)
• 14 - Swag packs from Sentry (Sentry socks and a stress hotdog)
• $150 credits for new or existing customers for Linode
• 5 - licenses for Tinkerwell app
• 4 - One year subscriptions to Laracasts
• 2 - 1 year subscriptions to Vursion for 20 monitors
• 2 - licences for Invoker app
• 1 - license for Eloquent Performance Patterns
• 1 - license for Make VS Code Awesome
• 1 - license for Expose Pro
• 4 - One year subscriptions to CodeCourse
• 3 - licenses for Testing Laravel
• 3 - licenses for Ray
• 3 - licenses for Mailcoach
• 3 - licenses for Front Line PHP
• 3 - licenses for Media Library Pro one application
• 3 - licenses for Laravel Package training
• 3 - licenses for Laravel backup server
• 3 - licences for Flare
• 1 - iPad Min already given away

#Some rules…

Since this year, the prizes are a winner’s choice prize; we want to ensure that the audience participates in the Laravel and developer communities. The shopping spree prizes that winners select must be approved and fall within this general categorization. In no case can the prize be transferred as cash*; the prize money must be used to purchase a prize(s).

Below is a list of prize suggestions to give you an idea of what you can select.

#Pay it forward

Sponsor your favorite open source project or developer.

#Products

Apple iPad Air Apple iPad Air.

Apple AirPods Pro Incredibly light, noise-cancelling headphones, AirPods Pro block out your environment so you can focus on what you՚re listening to.

Apple HomePod Mini room-filling, 360-degree sound. Place HomePod mini speakers around the house for rich multi-room audio and features like Intercom.

Keychron keyboard Keychron K2 Wireless mechanical keyboard has included keycaps for both Windows and Mac operating systems.

Nintendo Switch Nintendo Switch is designed to fit your life, transforming from home console to portable system in a snap.

BEHRINGER Audio Interface BEHRINGER Audio Interface

Podcasting microphone Technica AT2005USB Dynamic Microphone

#Applications

F-Bar license Manage your Laravel Forge servers from your menubar.

Mailcoach App license Mailcoach is a self-hosted email marketing platform that integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Postmark or Sendgrid to send out bulk mailings affordably.

Media Library Pro license UI components for laravel-media library.

Laravel backup server license Laravel Backup Server backs up one or more servers that use either the ext3 or ext4 filesystem, which is the default file system for many Unix-like distributions.

Git Tower app licenses Over 100000 developers and designers are more productive with Tower - the most powerful Git client for Mac and Windows.

TablePlus Licence Modern, native, and friendly GUI tool for relational databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite & more

Laravel Nova License Nova is a beautifully designed administration panel for Laravel.

Invoker license Invoker is like an admin panel for all your Laravel applications. Open local applications or remote sites, and access Eloquent models plus their relationships without building a GUI.

HELO Licence Painless local email testing for web developers.

Tinkerwell license Run any PHP code available for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Windy Transform every element on any website into Tailwind CSS.

#Services

Snapshooter Take up to hourly backup and snapshots for DigitalOcean and all providers. Scheduled and simple, allowing fast recovery.

One-year thenping.me pro accounts Running the thenpingme:sync command as part of your deploy process will ensure all of your changed, added, and deleted tasks are kept up to date.

Laravel Shift The automated way to upgrade Laravel applications. Upgrade Laravel applications all the way from Laravel 4.2 to the latest version of Laravel.

PingPing subscription Get notified by the simplest uptime monitoring service in the world when your website is down or your certificate becomes invalid.

#Courses

Laracastssubscription Push your web development skills to the next level through expert screencasts on Laravel, Vue, and so much more.

MakeVSCodeAwesome - Wizard We’re going to make VS Code awesome, then teach you how to be insanely productive in it.

Package Training course Having produced over 200 packages with more than 75 million downloads in total, the Spatie team knows what they’re talking about.

One year Vue School 1 year subscription Learn Vue.js and modern, cutting-edge front-end technologies from core-team members and industry experts with our premium tutorials and video courses.

Mastering Nuxt subscription The complete guide to developing and deploying fast, production-ready Nuxt apps.

Adam Wathan course You choose one of Adam Wathan’s courses.

Laravel Core Adventures PRO Explorer Package A real adventure doesn’t need snakes, giant spiders or rolling boulders. Explore the Laravel core from the safety of your home.

Codecourse Practical screencasts for awesome developers.

Eloquent performance patterns course Learn how to drastically improve the performance of your Laravel applications by pushing more work to the database, all while still using the Eloquent ORM.

BaseLaravel course A field guide for streamlining Laravel applications to craft less complex, more readable code.

Laravel Beyond Crud Course Learn how to build larger-than-average Laravel applications and maintain them for years to come.

Wes Bos course Ready to learn and up your game as a web developer?

Desktop apps with Electron Course Learn how to build desktop applications as a web developer.

PHP Package Development course The video course teaches PHP developers how to reuse code in multiple applications.

#Books

Learn Laravel Queues book Learn how to utilize their power to make your applications faster and more reliable while reducing running costs.

Docker for PHP developers (book) Learn how Docker can simplify your PHP development setup and make it simple to share your environment with others. You will learn how to set up, manage, and deploy Docker applications with confidence.

Front line PHP course dive deep into PHP 8 and learn its new features in practice.

#Conferences

Laracon Online Tickets Laracon Online is an annual online gathering of people who are passionate about building amazing applications with the Laravel web framework.

#Conclusion.

That’s it! Make sure you sign up to play your tickets every day! Tell everyone you know about it and make sure you say thank you to everyone that made this possible and most of all, think about what you’d want to get as a prize because you never know when the odds will be in your favour.