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Be a world champion programmer: Hello World Open now accepting sign-ups

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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The Hello World Open is world programming competition that takes the form of a virtual race, with teams participating from all around the world. Organized by Finland based creative firm Reaktor and game developer Supercell, the race will require teams to program an artificial intelligence to drive the race faster than the competition, hopefully without any serious crashes! [1] Teams can include one to three members from the same country, but the same person can only participate on one team. Sign ups are accepted starting today (as of 1900 JST), and will run until April 7th. The actual coding goes from April 15th to the 29th, with regional qualifying rounds to follow in May (see map below). Six teams will travel to Helsinki, Finland (all expenses paid) for the finals. I’m really hoping we can see many entrants here from Japan, but I have a sneaking suspicion that won’t be the case [2]. But the folks from Reaktor were kind enough to pass along a Japanese translation of their announcement, which you can find below. Please check out out and sign up if you think you can outrun the competition to the (ahem) Finnish line! ハローワールドオープン : 史上初のコーディング世界選手権への申し込み受付が始まります。 この春は、コード裏に隠れた未来のスーパースターを見い出すチャンスです。ハローワールドオープンでは、史上初のコーディング世界選手権にて、トップコーダー達が自国の名誉をかけて挑みます。 創造力に富んだテクノロジー企業…

The Hello World Open is world programming competition that takes the form of a virtual race, with teams participating from all around the world. Organized by Finland based creative firm Reaktor and game developer Supercell, the race will require teams to program an artificial intelligence to drive the race faster than the competition, hopefully without any serious crashes! [1]

Teams can include one to three members from the same country, but the same person can only participate on one team.

Sign ups are accepted starting today (as of 1900 JST), and will run until April 7th. The actual coding goes from April 15th to the 29th, with regional qualifying rounds to follow in May (see map below). Six teams will travel to Helsinki, Finland (all expenses paid) for the finals.

I’m really hoping we can see many entrants here from Japan, but I have a sneaking suspicion that won’t be the case [2].

But the folks from Reaktor were kind enough to pass along a Japanese translation of their announcement, which you can find below. Please check out out and sign up if you think you can outrun the competition to the (ahem) Finnish line!

hello world open

ハローワールドオープン : 史上初のコーディング世界選手権への申し込み受付が始まります。

この春は、コード裏に隠れた未来のスーパースターを見い出すチャンスです。ハローワールドオープンでは、史上初のコーディング世界選手権にて、トップコーダー達が自国の名誉をかけて挑みます。

創造力に富んだテクノロジー企業 Reaktor社およびモバイルゲームデベロッパーのSupercell社が企画するハローワールドオープンは、一風変わったコンテキストの中でプログラミング能力に国際的な脚光を当てます。まず、希望に燃える参加者は１～３名のトップコーダーによるチームを作ります。最高の人材がそろったら、各チームの課題はバーチャルカーレース用の人工知能を制作することにあります。申し込み受付は３月31日に始まります。

「コーディングのような掴みにくいコンセプトを簡潔化することによって、コーディングにアピール力を与え、一般の人々も楽しめるレベルに持ってくるのが意図です」と語るのはハローワールドオープンの主催者、Reaktor社の Ville Valtonenです。「我々の狙いはコーディングにおけるセバスチャン・ヴェッテルやジェフ・ゴードン、つまり尊敬に値する国民的スーパーヒーローを作り上げることです。観客の皆さんには自国の競合者に誇りをもち、勝利に向かって彼らを応援していただきたいのです。」

決勝戦は６月５日、フィンランドのヘルシンキにて、ケーブルファクトリーで行われます。当日このイベントの前には、Supercell
社が第２回年次ゲーミングサミットを開催します。

しかし、決勝進出チームがヘルシンキまでたどり着く前にはまだ長い道のりがあります。スポーツがいつもそうであるように、これら世界選手権でも観衆が大きな役割を果たします。誰もが何千というトップコーダー達の試合をオンラインで見守るチャンスがあります。

約１万チームが仮想バトルで競い合うことが予想されます。選手権は世界地図を３大地域に分けて行い、各地域で５月に予選が繰り広げられます。

最終的に６チームがヘルシンキでの決勝戦に進出します。決勝進出チームによるヘルシンキまでの渡航費用はすべて支払われます。彼らは自国を代表してその卓越したコーディング能力を披露し、総額１万ユーロという驚くべき賞金を獲得するチャンスを手にします。

申し込み受付は３月31日に始まります。あなたもエキサイトしてみませんか。

ハローワールドオープンの導入スケジュールは以下の通りです :

３月31日 – 申し込み受付開始。競技への参加は無料です。
４月７日 – 申し込み受付終了

オンライン予選ラウンド。試合をフォローするのは次のサイトです。 helloworldopen.com

  • ５月６日 – ハロー地域１
  • ５月７日 – ハロー地域２
  • ５月８日 – ハロー地域３
  • ６月５日 – コーディング世界決勝戦 : 世界で最もタフなコーディングチーム６組がフィンランド、ヘルシンキで出会います。

Reaktor社は2012年に初回フィンランドコーディング選手権を開催しました。目標はポンボット用の人工知能をコーディングし、卓球で他のすべてのチームを打ち負かすことでした。このイベントは大成功でした
– 200以上のチームが競技に関与および参加しました。選手権は24時間で百万人のフィンランド人に達しました – 人口５百万の国でありながら。

詳細は以下にお問い合わせください
Veera Voutilainen
Head of Communications
+358 50 343 8608
[email protected]

Reaktor 社について
Reaktor社は卓越して機能性に優れたサービスを生み出す、創造力に富んだテクノロジー企業です。250名のプロフェッショナルからなるReaktor社のチームは、サービスデザイナー、インタラクションデザイナー、アートディレクター、ソフトウェアアーキテクト、デベロッパー、コーチを擁しています。当社オフィスはフィンランドのヘルシンキ、および東京にあります。当社は世界でベストなソフトウェア会社となるよう日々努めています。Reaktor社に関する詳細は、次をご覧ください。 www.reaktor.fi

Supercell 社について
2010年設立の Supercell社はフィンランドのヘルシンキに本社を置くモバイルゲーム開発会社で、サンフランシスコ、東京、およびソウルにオフィスを持ちます。Supercell社のゲーム、クラッシュオブクランおよびヘイデイは iOS および Android デバイスでどうぞ。新作タイトル Boom Beach が間もなくiOS でリリース。Supercell 社に関する詳細は次をご覧ください。 www.supercell.com

  1. See what I did there?  ↩

  2. Besides this website, I’m not sure if there will be many ways for Japanese programmers to learn about this event, unless they read English news regularly.  ↩

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Popular Japanese code learning platform ‘Dotinstall’ launches premium service

Junya Mori Junya Mori
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See the original article in Japanese If you regularly read The Bridge, it’s not unlikely that you might be a programmer or have at least some peripheral interest in coding. You may have also heard of the Japanese website Dotinstall, where you can find many resources to help you learn to code. This service was launched by the well-known blogger, Gen Taguchi (@taguchi), who runs popular weblogs like 100SHIKI and IDEA*IDEA. Dotinstall offers short three-minute tutorial videos for beginners. The service is very popular, surpassing 100,000 members in October of 2013. Now two years since its initial launch, Dotinstall recently announced it that it will add a premium service as part of its monetization. This premium service allows users to read the text captions of videos and also to read and search through related source code. The differences between this and the regular service is described in the following table. The premium service comes with many benefits, such as the ability to overview contents without watching the entire video, or skip forward to key points. The monthly fee for the new service is 880 yen (about $9), which is lower than many similar services from overseas. We have previously reported…

dotinstall

See the original article in Japanese

If you regularly read The Bridge, it’s not unlikely that you might be a programmer or have at least some peripheral interest in coding. You may have also heard of the Japanese website Dotinstall, where you can find many resources to help you learn to code. This service was launched by the well-known blogger, Gen Taguchi (@taguchi), who runs popular weblogs like 100SHIKI and IDEA*IDEA.

Dotinstall offers short three-minute tutorial videos for beginners. The service is very popular, surpassing 100,000 members in October of 2013.

Now two years since its initial launch, Dotinstall recently announced it that it will add a premium service as part of its monetization. This premium service allows users to read the text captions of videos and also to read and search through related source code. The differences between this and the regular service is described in the following table.

new-table-no-errors

The premium service comes with many benefits, such as the ability to overview contents without watching the entire video, or skip forward to key points. The monthly fee for the new service is 880 yen (about $9), which is lower than many similar services from overseas.

We have previously reported (on our Japanese site) about a high school that provides programming classes. In Japan, as with everywhere else, coding can be a great asset to just about anyone.

If Dotinstall succeeds in the monetizing its premium service, it will be possible to add even more educational content. I am sure this will be a welcome service to aspiring programmers in this country.

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PyCon APAC: Nasty weather doesn’t constrict Pythonistas in Japan

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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Japan has seen some pretty bad weather this weekend, but that hasn’t stopped many in the Python community from coming out to the fourth annual PyCon APAC. For the previous three years, the event was held in Singapore, so this marks the first time that it has come to Japan, held at the Shinjuku campus of Kougakuin University here in Tokyo. I had a chance to visit the event on Saturday to check out some of the talks. There were a number of prominent speakers in attendance, from Japan as well as abroad. This included core developer and release manager for Python 3.2 and 3.3, Georg Brandl, who gave the day 1 keynote (see below); and Dropbox’s third employee Rian Hunter who gave the day 2 keynote. And with Monday being a national holiday here in Tokyo today, the extra day for the conference was devoted to development sprints Speaking as a perpetual beginner programmer, I was pleased to see that the conference had something to offer folks of all levels, and session tracks in English and Japanese. And there were a number of familiar faces from around the tech community lending their support, including sponsors CyberAgent, Rakuten, Google, KLab…

pycon apac 2013

Japan has seen some pretty bad weather this weekend, but that hasn’t stopped many in the Python community from coming out to the fourth annual PyCon APAC. For the previous three years, the event was held in Singapore, so this marks the first time that it has come to Japan, held at the Shinjuku campus of Kougakuin University here in Tokyo.

photo: apac-2013.pycon.jp
photo: apac-2013.pycon.jp

I had a chance to visit the event on Saturday to check out some of the talks. There were a number of prominent speakers in attendance, from Japan as well as abroad. This included core developer and release manager for Python 3.2 and 3.3, Georg Brandl, who gave the day 1 keynote (see below); and Dropbox’s third employee Rian Hunter who gave the day 2 keynote. And with Monday being a national holiday here in Tokyo today, the extra day for the conference was devoted to development sprints

Speaking as a perpetual beginner programmer, I was pleased to see that the conference had something to offer folks of all levels, and session tracks in English and Japanese. And there were a number of familiar faces from around the tech community lending their support, including sponsors CyberAgent, Rakuten, Google, KLab and others.

For those of you who didn’t have a chance to get out to the event – perhaps due to the weather – you can find the talks over on YouTube and I encourage you to check them out.

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Kobito for Mac lets you share bits of code with Japanese programming community [Video]

Rick Martin Rick Martin
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In the past we have featured Japanese code/knowledge sharing service Qiita. With over 20,000 domestic users (and over 220,000 monthly unique visitors [1]) the platform is an important hub for Japanese programmers. While many people that I speak to often refer to it as a sort of Japanese Github, sharing on Qiita is more akin to sharing a Gist on Github. As with Gists, any code you share can have nice syntax highlighting, and that’s really handy. Notes shared on Qiita are written in Markdown format, and the startup has also produced a handy Markdown editor for Mac OSX called Kobito that integrates with its service. So you can compose notes or explanations of code snippets you want to share, and post directly to Qiita for the app. The split screen Markdown preview is somewhat reminiscent of Mou or MultiMarkdown Composer. When you publish you also have the option to share to Twitter, or publish your note as a Gist as well. This latter option is especially handy since there is likely a huge overlap between Qiita and Github users. Qiita just published a new 1.7 release of Kobito today if you’d like to give it a try. Or check…

kobito
Kobito app for Mac

In the past we have featured Japanese code/knowledge sharing service Qiita. With over 20,000 domestic users (and over 220,000 monthly unique visitors [1]) the platform is an important hub for Japanese programmers.

While many people that I speak to often refer to it as a sort of Japanese Github, sharing on Qiita is more akin to sharing a Gist on Github. As with Gists, any code you share can have nice syntax highlighting, and that’s really handy.

Notes shared on Qiita are written in Markdown format, and the startup has also produced a handy Markdown editor for Mac OSX called Kobito that integrates with its service. So you can compose notes or explanations of code snippets you want to share, and post directly to Qiita for the app. The split screen Markdown preview is somewhat reminiscent of Mou or MultiMarkdown Composer.

When you publish you also have the option to share to Twitter, or publish your note as a Gist as well. This latter option is especially handy since there is likely a huge overlap between Qiita and Github users.

Qiita just published a new 1.7 release of Kobito today if you’d like to give it a try. Or check out our video demo below for more details.

  1. These numbers are from back in May of this year.  ↩

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Japanese knowledge sharing site Qiita could reach as many as half the nation’s programmers

Takeshi Hirano Takeshi Hirano
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See the original story in Japanese. Qiita is a knowledge sharing platform for programmers, a place where they can exchange information and code snippets in order to learn from each other. It has been growing well too, as Increments Inc (the company behind Qiita) announced yesterday that the platform has reached the 20,000 user milestone, boasting about 220,000 monthly unique visitors too. Coinciding with this announcement, the startup also launched brand new service called ‘Qiita Team’, which allows users to share knowledge among a closed group. Qiita was initially launched back in September of 2011, as part of the fourth batch of Open Network Lab incubation program. Of course on a global level, Github is the social coding community with almost 3 million engineers — but there is no overwhelming favorite in Japan [1]. Qiita is quite niche but is dominating this space for now. Interestingly, according to the startup’s designer and co-founder Tomoya Konishi, recent surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 programmers working in the Japanese IT industry [2]. Given that Qiita’s total monthly unique visitors is 220,000, that roughly accounts for 50% of the entire population of Japanese programmers. In addition to Qiita Team, the company has…

register-user-graph-en

See the original story in Japanese.

Qiita is a knowledge sharing platform for programmers, a place where they can exchange information and code snippets in order to learn from each other. It has been growing well too, as Increments Inc (the company behind Qiita) announced yesterday that the platform has reached the 20,000 user milestone, boasting about 220,000 monthly unique visitors too.

Coinciding with this announcement, the startup also launched brand new service called ‘Qiita Team’, which allows users to share knowledge among a closed group.

Qiita was initially launched back in September of 2011, as part of the fourth batch of Open Network Lab incubation program. Of course on a global level, Github is the social coding community with almost 3 million engineers — but there is no overwhelming favorite in Japan [1]. Qiita is quite niche but is dominating this space for now.

Interestingly, according to the startup’s designer and co-founder Tomoya Konishi, recent surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 programmers working in the Japanese IT industry [2]. Given that Qiita’s total monthly unique visitors is 220,000, that roughly accounts for 50% of the entire population of Japanese programmers.

In addition to Qiita Team, the company has also launched a job/talent matching site called ‘Qiita Carrer’. But how does the company intend to monetize all these services? Konishi explains:

Qitta Career is a gateway for our partner recruiting companies which might be a suitable fit for our users as they advance their careers. We’re currently exploring other business models too by adding some features.

If Qiita can reach half of the country’s programmers, the startup likely has a promising future.

qiita

  1. Although Github itself is certainly a favorite here too.  ↩

  2. The figure comes from a white paper on IT human resources in Japan by Japan’s IT Promotion Agency.  ↩

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