Source: Pixabay
On September 13, 2022, the world celebrates the annual International Programmer’s Day. In this blog post, we’ll tell you what this holiday is all about, which country it originated in, and how programming works at RWTH Aachen University.
The background
Programmer’s Day is an international holiday that actually has its roots not in the United States, but in Russia (Russian: День программиста). The original idea for the holiday dates back to programmers Valentin Balt and Michael Cherviakov in 2002. The two programmers were working for a software company at the time and collected signatures for a petition to establish a dedicated programmer’s day of honor. After the project also met with international support, the website programmerday.info was created.
Despite its international spread, Russia is the only country where this holiday is officially recognized and celebrated. There, Programmer’s Day belongs to the category of honorary days for professions, which have existed in Russia since Soviet times for many professional groups and skilled workers.
Since 2009, it was decided that the curious holiday falls on September 13. This date is the 256th day of the year and 256 is also the exponentiation of 2^8, which corresponds to the number of possible values of a byte. Furthermore, 256 also represents the highest exponent of two that is less than 365, which is the number of days in a calendar year.
If it is a leap year, the holiday falls on September 12.
Programming at RWTH Aachen University
RWTH Aachen University offers its students and employees many opportunities in terms of programming and computing on high performance computing (HPC). High performance computers such as the Cluster Aix-la-Chapelle (CLAIX) are essential for research and science as they help to understand and solve global problems.
Insights into projects made possible with the CLAIX computer can be found on the IT Center website.
Interested in high performance computing? Find all other info like user projects, support, events and much more on our HPC-website.
We wish you all a happy Programmer’s Day! 🙂
You liked the blog post? Then feel free to leave a heart! ♥️
Responsible for the content of this article is Arlinda Ujkani.
Zitat: “256 ist zugleich die Zweierpotenz von 28”
Ist euch beim Übersetzen in HTML ein Zeichen abhanden gekommen? Es muss 2 hoch 8 heißen, nicht 28. Weil 28^2 = 28 * 28 ungleich 256.
Hallo Michael,
vielen Dank für den Hinweis. Du hast natürlich Recht! Wir haben den Fehler nun korrigiert.
Einen schönen Tag noch und viele Grüße
das IT Center Blog Team