Eternal and Undying Fame

In 2005, Peter-Paul Koch launched a small JavaScript con­test. The con­tes­tants re-im­ple­mented an addEvent() func­tion orig­i­nally writ­ten in 2001. As a prize, PPK of­fered “eternal and undy­ing fame” and as­serted, “your name could be­come a house­hold name”. The win­ner? John Resig, who the fol­low­ing year wrote jQuery (the world’s most pop­u­lar JavaScript li­brary) and went on to be­come the most well-known JavaScript de­vel­oper in the world.