Q:

What did you think of the contest?

Our contest ended a few hours ago, the winners should be getting their prizes soon(ish). Hopefully you've all enjoyed the contest as much as I did, and we can organize similar events again in the future.
What did you think? Did you like it? What could we have done better, and what should we be more careful with in the future?
To get an idea of how the contest was organized (it was no simple task), you should check out all the contest questions and the contest chat room.

A:

Unfortunately didn't notice there was a contest until I noticed this thread.
Maybe a more prominent in the right-hand menu could have helped. If the target audience was new users, then maybe have a custom banner warn them during their first visits, or ads on external sites.
Even as a normal user, while I usually do strongly mind "unusual" and unrequested deviations of notification systems, I wouldn't have minded too much to get an extra banner showing up at the top of the page like the ones warning of newly earned badges.
I'm late to the party, but were there any features to allow the contest to be broadcasted/shared to others?

A:

I think there were a few flaws in the contest. That doesn't mean it wasn't fun (it was), but it wasn't perfect. For example:

The tags were not perfect. history produced some really good, constructive, awesome questions. But it also produced crap, and we don't want crap. Now, I'm not saying that I didn't expect crap. But, next time we need to find a way to get less of it.
People were not aware of the contest. Honestly, I have no clue why. I mean, think about it. It was in the Community Bulletin since a week before the contest, there was a whole chat room about the contest, there were several Meta posts about the contest, and there were even alerts in the sites main chat room. We're not Gaming.SE. We can't just change the whole site design for the contest.
There were complaints about the way the contest was run. During the contest. I think this is what bothered me the most. A few users were basically complaining about how the contest was set up, during the contest. Come on guys, we made the setup public. No chats were made private, and anybody who could chat could join. There were several Meta posts on the topic. I mean, I'm not trying to rant or anything (really I'm not), but seriously.

OK, enough complaining, let's see what we did right:

Timing. I think 1 week per tag is perfect. You really don't need the whole week to get views. Most of the time, if you have a popular question, you get the bulk of your views within the first 1-2 days.
Prizes. Prizes were awesome! I mean, $50 to get whatever Programming related thing you wanted. Pretty cool...
Everything else... I know I missed something, but if I didn't think it was bad, it was probably right :P.

Conclusion
I think the contest in general went great! Next time, I think we will be able to do a lot better (I'm going to push that next time won't be too far off). Hopefully the community as a whole will show more support for the dirty work of the contest next time (we could've used a little more input this time). But, all in all, IT WAS AWESOME!

A:

I would have liked to see each contest tag go a little bit longer, since I felt that you had to ask a question towards the beginning of the week to maximize your views. Perhaps Tuesday through next Saturday or something like that.
I think the contest did a good job at attracting new users to the site, as seen by some of the contest questions with high view counts, and it was nice to see a lot of on-topic questions being asked instead of the newest question list always being half full of closed questions. I also enjoyed the fact that mods were a little more relaxed with question closures, and let the community take care of the on-the-fence questions.
As far as what we could do better with in the future, I think we could do a better job at picking tags. The history was probably a bad idea in hindsight since it did promote some off-topic questions, although overall it didn't go as badly as I thought it would and I learned a bit from the questions asked.
I really enjoyed the data-structures and algorithms contests since they gave me some interesting puzzles to think on, but wasn't overly fond of documentation since I hate documentation as it is, so spending time reading about documentation is not my idea of fun :)

