Ours are coming!

On February 11, the winners of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest for Young Programmers (GHOP) were announced.

The goal of the GHOP competition, announced by Google in November 2007, is to attract high school students to develop open source software. As part of the contest, Google has worked closely with the 10 largest organizations in the field of open source software development. These included Mono, Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla !, MoinMoin, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation and SilverStripe CMS, each of the organizations offering their own list of tasks for the contestants and choosing their own winner. The tasks were divided into the following main categories: software development, technical documentation, research, audience coverage, quality control, training, localization and user interface creation. About 400 schoolchildren from all over the world took part in the competition.

The list of winners can not but rejoice ...

It turned out that one of the Grand Prix winners was a fifteen-year-old Russian Danil Abramov, who performed the tasks for Mono (www.mono-project.com) the best. According to the jury: "Danil almost immediately developed a competent code based on a huge source base, competently using mostly not the most well-known programming interfaces (API's)."
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Danil, among other winners this year, will go to the awards ceremony at the head office of Google in Mautin View.

Here you can see information about the rest of the contest winners: code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/grandprize.html

Let me remind you that this is not the first time that Russian programmers loudly declare themselves at such contests. At the end of 2006, Peter Mitrichev won the prestigious Google Code Jam contest (in fact, the same as the GHOP, only for university students). Then the situation was interesting also by the fact that among the 100 finalists of Google Code Jam, about a third were from Russia. According to rumors, Peter has already found application for his talents at Google.

And who after that still doubts that Russia is the main source of talented programmers in the world?