Is it a pure ballot, or do they balance the the agegroups and genders? Still would think they just need to run the algorithm and send the emails.
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Ive no idea. But yeah surely all the data goes in a database and a bit of code selects who is in.
Could knock something up to do that in a couple of hours
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I would guess that there’s an algorithm that gives the desired mix of gender and age and a spread of finish times
Yep, the maths on this, no matter how clever the mix they’re looking for ain’t going to be a huge challenge for any decent dev…. not even volumes of data that would be a big technical challenge… a few quid’s worth of Azure or AWS db, a small amount of Jav, C#, etc, and it would be nailed…. it’d even be childs play easy to output that to a templated email, or a csv for a mailling house… so unless we’re missing something really obvious, given they’ve almost certainly had the input data for some time, i’m struggling to see why its taking so long.
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Any idea when the 2023 ballot is likely to open?
I know it used to be straight after the race in the past but with it going back to April next year that doesn’t give them too much time
Go on then.
I challenge you to do it.
~460k ballot entries.
~17k entrants.
I’d say we can assume the entry list is representative of those entering the ballot, so you could just take 27 lots of last years results as the whole of ballot entries.
Give each entry a surrogate key, then pick the mix based on finishing time (estimated) age and gender
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Can you raise a JIRA ticket first
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I could, but I can’t pick you as an assignee???
Could you fix my Kerberos auth, too?
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Im dev, that sounds like a job for techops
October half term I believe
Or it was with the last couple of races
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…and checking the GFA and Champ place evidence from those entries, plus those which have to be checked against the virtual, and HM times, those rolling their entry till next year, those who are not.
Piece of pie.
API into PowerOf10 / RunBritain
Like he says, it’s a job for one day.
Plus four days of documenting.
Then a week of peer review.
Two of QA.
A week of sign offs.
Should be with you in three months.
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I disagree. If they are balancing the demographics in the ballot results I bet you are much more likely to get in as an old women than a middle aged man. Similar to Kona slots, old and young get 1 slot regardless of how many in the agegroup, could be 50% of those racing. A lot less than 50% for the middle agegroups.
Then is there any geographic selection? More London places? or proportionally less then the rest of the country?
And do they balance before or after all the club and championships places have been allocated? Wat about charity places?
@GRamsay is right, requirements far to vague as you have written them.
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Plus losing a few hours each week to get the PM up to speed on progress because he cant follow a sprint in JIRA
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I’m going with less places for Londoners - you’ve got to keep the local businesses happy with stats about the number of visitors that the race brings in to offset any disruption caused by the road closures 
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I’m just going by the one time I ran it, I always seemed to be next to someone who was running through their local borough and had neighbours out shouting support.
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Nah, internet says;
The ballot often closes in 24 hours or less, and winners are chosen randomly .
YEAH RIGHT 
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I always say, software is like a gas, it expands to fill the resources available. Both the hardware being used and the time available.
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A pseudo-Parkinson’s Law 
Fully agree.
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I am not in. Again.
For the millionth year running.
I know I’ll hate it (not a fan of crowds) but it’d be nice to experience the event.
Also, £28 to run a “virtual” marathon 
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