| Programmers Day 2024 |
| Written by Lucy Black | |||
| Thursday, 12 September 2024 | |||
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Today, September 12th, is designated as Programmers Day, a tradition we do our best to uphold. We even designed a card!
According to the entry for Programmers Day on the Days Of The Year Website: Programmers Day offers a specific reminder to everyone that the world of computers and electronic devices only functions as smoothly as it does because a programmer is somewhere behind the scenes, making it happen! Some people, mainly in Russia celebrate a version of Programmers Day on January 7th, the original, but unofficial date for the celebration. In China, the date for Programmers Day falls on October 24, which can be written as 1024, a significant number in computer science as it represents. However, we'll stick with the official date - the 256th day of the year, which in most years is September 13th. But 2024 is a leap year and so it's on September 12th. Why this particular day? Well if you really need to ask you almost certainly are not a programmer. But for any casual visitor the answer is that 256 is the number of distinct values that that can be represented with an 8-bit byte, and 256 is the highest power of 2 that is less than 365, the number of days in a year. The programmers who came up with the idea, Michael Cherviakov and Valentin Balt, started a petition for a designated Day of the Programmer to the Russian government as early as 2002, but it took until 2009 for this to be acted on and it was September 11 2009 when President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree for professional holiday for programmers to be celebrated on the 256th day of the year.
Thanks to Mandi Walls, DevOps Advocate at PagerDuty who sent us a timely reminder of Programmers' Day with this comment: “Programmers, developers, and engineers work extremely hard and have powered the ongoing digital transformation we’ve experienced over our lifetime. Every facet of business and social life has been improved and transfigured because of the impact of software-driven technology. “However, only recently has real attention been given to the developer experience - supporting them to deliver higher quality work at the demanding pace business requires. Developers are at risk of burnout as they apply close attention to many variables requiring deep concentration. And if and when software conflicts and incidents arise, they work overtime to resolve and remediate them, doing a forensic job that comparatively few have the skills to do. “Businesses must ensure that their software teams have the right working and cultural practices, the right modern tooling, including automation, which allows them to do ‘deep work’. The industry wants to deliver software faster, with fewer errors, and to develop resilient systems that improve how our public and private sector organisations function. But it must respect the needs of this specialised, often stressful, and sometimes underappreciated role.” What are you going to do to stop Programmer Day 2024 slipping by unmarked? The original Programmer Day no longer exists, but it suggests, we should wear white - and, before the question arises, that is because 0xFFFFFF is white and clearly the all-ones value is a recurring motif on Programmers' day.
Here's are some of the traditional suggestions:
On the other hand you could try to promote programming by:
More InformationCocktails for Programmers on Github Related ArticlesDid You Know Today Is Programmer Day? Programmers Day - Why So Apathetic? Programmers' Day - Let's Celebrate It's Programmer Day - What Are You Going To Do? {loadpoistion signup} 
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 12 September 2024 ) |
