Poland has the World’s Best Programmers – and Here’s Proof!

Poland is already known for its coding talent, but lately the country’s success in international programming competitions and tournaments has solidified this image. We decided to examine the top competitive programming events in the world, such as TopCoder, Google Code Jam and Facebook Hacker Cup to see how Polish programmers stack up.

 
When it comes to competitive international sporting events, Poles rarely have much to brag about (other than volleyball lately). But when you start to look at non-sporting competitions, especially those involving computers, our country suddenly looks a lot more impressive. In fact, some of Poland’s teams and individual programmers have been named the best in the world.

Competitive programming has exploded in recent years, and Poland is doing very well at it. What is competitive programming, though? Pretty much what it sounds like: competitions that aim to find the best programmers, developers, engineers, designers and teams, which are held both online and in offline events around the globe. While there are some competitions in Poland, such as Marathon24 in Gdynia, most of them take place abroad, often with rotating hosts.

Below we look at several of these offline events, and how well Polish programmers and their teams have done in the recent past.

TopCoder

The biggest and probably best-known programming competition in the world is TopCoder, with 272,348 members from over 200 countries. It features three categories (graphic design, software development and data science), and these are further broken down into six “tracks” in the TopCoder Open: algorithm, development, information architecture (IA), marathon, UI design and prototype. The Topcoder Open (TCO) competition is a tournament that’s held online for an entire year, before the finalists compete in a live event.

It was the 2014 edition of the TCO that saw two Polish champions out of the six winners: Łukasz Sentkiewicz, better known as Sky_, won the Development top prize, while the Marathon (data science) winner in 2014 as well as 2013 was Przemysław Dębiak, or Psyho. Sky_ is currently already ranked first for Development in 2015, so there’s a good chance he’ll keep his title.

The coding Olympics

Another huge annual event is called the International Olympiad in Informatics. It’s aimed at secondary school students, and has been going since 1989, when it was first held in Pravetz, Bulgaria. The host city changes every year, and the 2005 edition was held in Nowy Sącz, Poland, when Polish programmer Filip Wolski got 10th place and thus a gold medal.

The 2014 edition saw Jarosław Kwiecień place 24th, which also qualified for a gold medal, and a silver and two bronze medals for Poland that year. Overall, Polish programmers have won 93 medals (33 gold, 33 silver and 27 bronze) since 1989, making Poland second overall in terms of medals, between China (103) and Russia (92). Considering Poland’s population relative to those two countries, Poland’s coders have done pretty well for themselves.

The Facebook Hacker Cup

While some enter programming competitions for bragging rights or to make a living from the prizes, others want to impress prospective employers, and one of the best ways to do that is to win their own competitions. While many of the world’s IT companies host various contests, here we’ll focus on three in particular, the Google Code Jam, the Facebook Hacker Cup and IBM’s ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.

The Code Jam began in 2003 as a way to search for the best engineers to join the fast-growing search company. Poland saw its greatest success in the 2012 edition of the tournament, when that year’s winner was Jakub Pachocki (better known as meret) from Poland, who beat out 35,000 competitors, including second and third place Neal Wu (United States) and Michal Forisek (Slovakia).

Jakub Pachocki, or meret

Facebook’s cup began in 2011, and since the start Poland is the only country to feature medalists each year. In 2014 and 2012, Pole Tomek Czajka took home the silver medal, while in 2013 the aforementioned Jakub Pachocki won silver and Marcin Smulewicz came in third place. While so far the gold medal has eluded Poland’s programming talent, here’s hoping 2015 will be the year that changes.

IBM is the main sponsor of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), in which universities around the world compete to produce the best programming teams. Poland’s University of Warsaw has the most bragging rights, as they won the world championship in 2007. Last year, they won a silver medal.

Hello World Open

This last competition was launched just last year for the first time. The Hello World Open took place on June 10th, 2014 in Helsinki, Finland. It was a Polish team called Need For C that beat over 2,500 other teams in order to be crowned the winners. The team is comprised of brothers Tomasz Żurkowski and Piotr Żurkowski and Wojciech Jaskowski, and you can read more about them in our earlier feature here.

Need for C

Polish dragons capture all the flags

Unlike the individual competitions listed above, Capture the Flag (CTF) is a type of programming competition that is focused on security. In 2014, the world’s top-ranking team was Dragon Sector from Poland, and we recently wrote a feature on the team with interviews with the captain and vice-captain, Gyvael Coldwind and Mateusz “j00ru” Jurczyk. You can read the Dragon Sector interview here.