16.11.2015 Poland has the world's best programmers and here's proof
Poland is already known for its coding talent, but the country’s successes in international programming competitions and tournaments have lately solidified this image.
Let’s examine the top competitive programming events in the world, such as TopCoder, Google Code Jam and Facebook Hacker Cup, as well as Capture the Flag (CTF), which is a type of programming competition focused on security in which teams solve specific tasks.
Competitive programming has exploded in recent years and Poland is doing very well at it. What is competitive programming, though? Pretty much what it sounds like: competitions that aim to find the best programmers, developers, engineers, designers and teams, which are held both online and in offline events around the globe.
The TopCoder Open
The biggest and probably best-known programming competition in the world is TopCoder, with 272,348 members from over 200 countries. It features three categories (graphic design, software development and data science) and these are further broken down into six “tracks” in the TopCoder Open: algorithm, development, information architecture (IA), marathon, UI design and prototype. The Topcoder Open (TCO) competition is a tournament that’s held online for an entire year, before the finalists compete in a live event.
It was the 2014 edition of the TCO that saw two Polish champions out of the six winners: Łukasz Sentkiewicz, better known as Sky, won the Development top prize, while Przemysław Dębiak Psyho, was the Marathon (data science) winner in 2014 as well as in 2013. Sky_ is currently already ranked first for Development in 2015, so there’s a good chance he’ll keep his title.
The coding Olympics
The International Olympiad in Informatics is another huge annual event. It’s aimed at secondary school students and has been going on since 1989, when it was first held in Pravetz, Bulgaria. The host city changes every year and the 2005 edition was held in Nowy Sącz, Poland, when Polish programmer Filip Wolski got 10th place and thus a gold medal.
The 2014 edition saw Jarosław Kwiecień take 24th place, which also qualified for a gold medal, silver and two bronze medals for Poland that year. Overall, Polish programmers have won 93 medals (33 gold, 33 silver and 27 bronze) since 1989, making Poland second overall in terms of medals, between China (103) and Russia (92). Considering Poland’s population relative to those two countries, Poland’s coders have done pretty well for themselves.
Facebook, Google and IBM search for the best
While some enter programming competitions for bragging rights or to make a living from the prizes, others want to impress prospective employers and one of the best ways to do that is to win their own competitions. While many of the world’s IT companies host various contests, here we’ll focus on three in particular, Google Code Jam, the Facebook Hacker Cup and IBM’s ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
Google Code Jam began in 2003 as a way to search for the best engineers to join the fast-growing search company. Poland saw its greatest success in the 2012 edition of the tournament, when that year’s winner,Jakub Pachocki (better known as meret) from Poland, beat 35,000 competitors, including second and third place Neal Wu (United States) and Michal Forisek (Slovakia).
Facebook’s cup began in 2011 and Poland is the only country to feature medalists each year. In 2014 and 2012, Tomek Czajka from Poland took home the silver medal, while in 2013 the aforementioned Jakub Pachocki won silver and Marcin Smulewicz came in third place. While so far the gold medal has eluded Poland’s programming talent, here’s hoping 2015 will be the year that changes.
IBM is the main sponsor of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), in which universities around the world compete to produce the best programming teams. Poland’s University of Warsaw has the most bragging rights, as they won the world championship in 2007. Last year, they won a silver medal.
Hello World Open
This last competition was launched just last year for the first time. The Hello World open took place on June 10th, 2014 in Helsinki, Finland. It was the Polish team called Need For C that beat over 2,500 other teams in order to be crowned the winners. The team is comprised of brothers Tomasz Żurkowski and Piotr Żurkowski and Wojciech Jaskowski.
Meet the Dragon Sector
Unlike the individual competitions listed above, Capture The Flag (CTF) is a type of programming competition. Poland’s Dragon sector, the CTF team that was ranked #1 in 2014 according to the CTF Time rankings, beat teams from the U.S., Germany and Russia. Gyvael Coldwind is the captain and Mateusz “j00ru” Jurczyk is the vice-captain of the team.
Author Anna Spysz
Editor / Journalist
web.gov.pl
Source: http://www.web.gov.pl/eng/670_1192_about-us.html
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