It is that time of year again. Just hear those sleigh bells jingling, ring tingle tingling too (ring-a-ling-a ding-dong-ding!). Ahem, anyway.
Once a year, Yaz, otherwise known as Mr. Ninja, runs his famous Laravel Holiday Giveaway – but what is it exactly? Some say he is like the Laravel Santa, others say he actually works for the big S man himself. Either way, the generosity is remarkable – and the prizes are always impressive.
Starting in early December, you can join in with the chance to join in this festive merriness, by joining the list. Not the naughty or nice list, the Laravel Holiday Giveaway list. Unfortunately, no coal is available for those who don’t win prizes – these fuel prices have meant cutbacks in Yaz’s workshop.
Once you have joined and gained access (the access is granted on a whoever joined first basis), you can have a go at the first challenge to have a chance to enter! I know for one thing, if it is a RegEx challenge, my stocking will be empty this year!
The challenge will be super fun and involve digging and playing around with Laravel code on the fly. Make sure you grab a copy of Tinkerwell if you can, as it will make your life 100% easier with this type of challenge!
Once you have completed the challenge, you will receive a unique code, allowing you to join the festivities two days before it is due to start! Think of it like a Wonka golden ticket if you are as old as me …
You can share your unique sign-up code for more chances to win, so make sure you get your friends to join too! However, if you sign up with someone else’s code – that person gets an extra entry into the giveaway.
Each day you will receive five digital scratch cards to scratch at. You will also start with five ballots for the grand prize draw at the end of the event. However, if you join using someone else’s code, you will only get one scratch a day and only one ballot for the final prize draw.
It is important to remember that if you want to be eligible for the twelve physical prizes this year through Twitter retweet giveaways, you must have registered for the main giveaway and verified your email address! This is due to the number of physical prizes available this year.
This year’s event will involve twelve Twitter retweet giveaways and the main scratch-and-win events. During each of the twelve days of the Twitter event, one Laravel elePHPant will be available – so make sure to pay attention!
📣 Quick update 🔥
All 24 elePHPants have been packed and sealed. A few have @laravelphp stickers but 1 has rare Laravel socks.If you win an 🐘 during the giveaway & you find the 🧦 in your package, you win one more secret prize come January.
🎫 🧦 🎁🥷📅🎁#GoldenSocksTicket pic.twitter.com/86djM7hz84
— Laravel Giveaway (@Laravelgiveaway) November 28, 2022
This is the seventh year of Mr. Ninjas’ generosity – going from 2017 to date, he has given away more prizes than the actual Saint Nick. So make sure you show him some appreciation for bringing the holiday spirit to our community again and again.
The main sponsors for this year’s event are:
Laravel
Statamic
Sentry
Health Care Logistics
Relay
ContestKit
Laravel, if you didn’t know, is more than just an excellent framework we all use. It is also a company that offers some fantastic products – some of which I use daily. From Laravel Forge and seamlessly deploying to cloud service providers to Laravel Vapor and deploying your serverless Laravel application. To Laravel Envoyer for a zero downtime deployment approach and Laravel Spark for a SaaS starting point for your next big idea.
Statamic is not your typical CMS. It starts as a flat-file platform so you can skip the database and version control everything. As your site grows, you can use the static site generator, switch to the Eloquent driver and scale those entries and users up with Postgres, use it headless, or even build your custom data layer. Never be stuck in a rigid system again.
Sentry, because we all get errors. Sentry is an excellent bug-tracking application that will allow you to track errors in your application and mark them as resolved as they build up. Not only are they a fantastic tool giving you an insight into when things might go wrong, but they also have an Application Performance tool which is invaluable. I recently did a bunch of refactors at work based on the information I found in this part – and saw a speed increase of over 67%, which was mindblowing.
Since 1978, Health Care Logistics has been a healthcare industry leader specializing in manufacturing, packaging, and distributing unique and hard-to-find products. Complete customer satisfaction is at the heart of everything we do. HCL guarantees an unmatched inventory of unique and hard-to-find items that includes compounding and dispensing products, infection prevention supplies, unit dose packaging materials, and many other lines. They stock more than 8,000 products from 22 unique lines.
Relay is a next-generation Redis client for PHP that’s a drop-in replacement for PhpRedis — except 100x faster. Yes, two orders of magnitude.
ContestKit is the go-to application for your marketing and lead generation needs. It provides a fun and interactive experience that makes your audience want to engage more. This tool is easy to set up, straightforward, and downright addictive to use!
Not to mention the following amazing community sponsors:
Two Peaks
Larajobs
Laravel News
Marco Rieser
Stephen Samra
Beyond Code
Joel Clermont
Laravel IO
Andres Santibanez
Program With Gio
Erin Dalzell
Thomas
Daniel Ferguson
Over Sky
Boris Lepikhin
There are more prizes than you could dream of shaking a stick at, from Laravel ElaPHPants to MacBook Pro M2s. I will leave a complete list at the end of this article.
The Laravel Holiday Giveaway is powered and run on ContestKit, which is a fantastic way for your brand to increase its social engagements. I have followed the Laravel Holiday Giveaway for the last few years, and it is enjoyable to join in! I may not have won yet, but the techie inside of me enjoys the experience. Also, the knowledge that something this cool is powered by tools I love and use daily.
As a mind-bending fact, the Laravel Giveaway was built entirely using Statamic and used Laravel Forge to provision its servers. It is deployed with Laravel Envoyer and monitored using Sentry. So not only is this something for the Laravel community, it is built and managed in a 100% Laravel way!
I will, of course, enter again this year, as I recommend you do too! But I also want to say a massive thank you to Yaz for all of his hard work in making something like this possible for our community. Having run things somewhat similar, I know exactly how much work would have gone into this. Not only does he provide top-notch memes on Twitter and help a lot in the community, but he also goes out of his way to make sure we all have something fun to do each year around the holidays.
Make sure you read the rules on the website and enter on time! Thanks again, Yaz!
Hey all, just wanted to see how everyone was doing? Hope you’re all doing well?
Just wanted to share something that I’m hoping can add some joy today.
What do you think? #LaravelGiveaway2022 pic.twitter.com/TWdBccEe61
— Laravel Giveaway (@Laravelgiveaway) November 25, 2022
The (not quite full) Prize List:
1 x 13′ MacBook Pro M2
1 x AirPods Max
3 x iPad Mini 256GB (WIFI)
3 x Airpods Pro (2nd Gen)
3 x HomePod Mini
24 x Laravel elePHPants
6 x Sentry.io Hoodies
6 x Sentry.io 2 months business plan credits ($160 value)
2 x Laravel Nova Single licenses
3 x Brand new, never seen before Offical Laravel Merch Packs
1 x Laracon US conference ticket
3 x Tailwind UI Licenses.
2 x Statamic licenses + SEO Pro
3 x Mastering Laravel
3 x Advanced Inertia
3 x Apline Componentslicences
2 x Make VS Code not suck
3 x Expose Pro Licenses
3 x Tinkerwell Licenses
2 x Singlestore for Laravel
1 x Year Subscription to Fathom Analytics
3 x Observer for Horizon licences
4 x Showcode licences
2 x PEST Driven Laravel licences
1 x Aarond Francis 🥷 sox