Rookie of the year (answer)

Awarded for the best answer by a user who had not posted an answer before 2016. Note that the user may have posted challenges before 2016. SEDE query for such answers, ordered by score.

Nominations:

#Golf you a quine for great good by udioica

Nominated by DJMcMayhem

Not a lot of people on this site golf in vim, so I used to think I was the king of vim-golf on this site. I wrote a 17 byte vim-quine and challenged anyone to outgolf me, thinking I was safe. Boy was I wrong.

Udioica noticed the challenge, and rose to it, golfing a whopping 6 bytes off of my solution on the first day they ever used PPCG.

Domino Golfing by NonlinearFruit

Nominated by isaacg

This challenge told people to golf all of the 16 binary logic gates. NonlinearFruit went somewhere completely different and brilliant with their answer. They programmed all of the gates using dominoes, and displayed the results in picture form. I loved reading this answer, and thinking through how each of the creations worked. While it's not clear whether these sorts of answers will be accepted in the ong term, I'm really glad it happened at least once.