Our go!

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

The goal of the GHOP competition, announced by Google in November 2007, is to engage high school students in developing open source software. As part of the contest, Google 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, with each organization offering its own list of assignments for the contestants and choosing its own winner. The tasks were divided into the following main categories: developing program code, technical documentation, conducting research, studying audience reach, quality control, training, localization, and creating a user interface.

The list of winners cannot but rejoice ...

It turned out that one of the owners of the Grand Prix was the fifteen-year-old Russian Danil Abramov, who completed the tasks of the Mono company (www.mono-project.com) best of all. According to the jury: "Danil almost immediately developed a competent code based on a huge source base, competently using for the most part not the most famous programming interfaces (API's)."

Danil, among other winners this year, will go to the award ceremony at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View.

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

Let me remind you that this is not the first time that Russian programmers have loudly declared themselves at such competitions. At the end of 2006, Petr Mitrichev won the prestigious Google Code Jam contest (essentially the same as the GHOP, only for university students). Then the situation was also interesting because 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 this still doubts that Russia is the main forge of talented programmers in the world?