lRem's blog

A stereotypical coder works in a basement. Some admins happen to work in a nuclear bunker based datacenter. But it's still nothing... 105 programmers, 135 meters under solid rock in a salt mine. The real underground coding challenge. The KrakOpen team programming challenge took place this weekend in Wieliczka near Cracow.

The light was certainly too bright to code outside. But then, it was only a few seconds for this elevator to take care of it. The cold, dark shaft was a real contrast. Then, we made it to this big, dim lit room...

This really uncommon place hosted a fairly standard collegiate programming challenge. 3 persons per team, 1 laptop, 5 hours, 10 tasks. Sounds fun. The ranking top got dominated by teams from Cracow, with a team from Warsaw University taking second place.

Unfortunately, there were technical problems. All the laptops were working diskless, netbooting a Xubuntu system from a central server. Then, none of the switches was behind an UPS. So, after lights went out for one minute, calming the chaos took half an hour. But who told it would be easy?

Now, who's next to organize something on a mountain top? :)

Some more coverage.