Last Tuesday, September 13th, students from the Departments of Engineering in Telematics – Networks and Telecommunications- (ITEM-IRTEL) and Engineering in Information Technologies (ITI), of the Polytechnic University of San Luis Potosí (UPSLP), celebrated the Day of the Programmer, participating in a friendly contest through the OMEGAUP platform, which consisted of completing 5 programming challenges, which had to be sent completed and compiled correctly.

The students who were ranked of the 10 best programmers were: Miguel Zeferino López, José Eduardo Campuzano Corona, Juan Uriel Leija Rodríguez, Mario Oswaldo Rodríguez Torres, Elisa Alejandra Arellano Wratny, Saúl Cervantes Candia, Ana Karen Cuenca Esquivel, Miguel Ángel Loredo Martínez, Brian Issai Rivera Carreón, Ramón López Padrón and César Alejandro Cerrillo Domínguez, from the ITI Educational Program.

Programmer’s Day is celebrated on September 13th because it is the 256th day of the year. The choice of this number is not a random decision, but the most propitious date to honor all programmers in the world, since 256 is the number of numbers that can be represented with 8 bits or its equivalent, that is, 1 byte.

The initiative was proposed by Valentin Balt, a young Russian, to the Ministry of Communications of his country in 2002, while working for the web design company Parallel Technologies. On September 11th, 2009, the President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, authorized this date to be taken by programmers to celebrate his day. Since then, many other countries have joined in recognizing the day.

The Polytechnic University appreciates the enthusiasm, both from the participants and from the main motivators, the professors from the programming academy!

Liliana Gamez Zavala
Academy of Programming
Department of Information Technologies and Telematics