1. As you may have noticed, the Google Technical Programs and Events blog looks different today. That’s because we—along with a few other Google blogs—are trying out a new set of Blogger templates called Dynamic Views.

    Launched today, Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that makes it easier and faster for readers to explore blogs in interactive ways. We’re using the Magazine view, but you can also preview this blog in any of the other six new views by using the view selection bar at the top left of the screen.



    We’re eager to hear what you think about the new Dynamic Views. You can submit feedback using the “Send feedback” link on the bottom right of this page.

    If you like what you see here, and we hope you do, we encourage you to try out the new look(s) on your own blog—read the Blogger Buzz post for more info.


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  2. Updated 10/3: The original post included the previously scheduled dates. We've updated the post and the correct dates are now listed below. -Yuko


    Code Jam is an annual programming competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time, using the programming language of their choice. This year, Googlers in the Tokyo office came up with a unique set of problems for the participants and prepared a fully internationalized contest UI, all in Japanese.

    Google Code Jam Japan, originally scheduled for March 2011, was postponed due to the earthquake in Japan's Tohoku and Kanto regions earlier this year. We are proud to announce that it will begin this week with a preliminary round this Saturday, October 1 promptly at 1:00pm JST. The schedule is as follows:  
    October 1st 1:00 pm JST* - Qualifying Round (6 hr)
    October 8th 1:00 pm JST* - Final Round (3 hr)


    *All times are Japan Standard Time (UTC+9).
    For more details, check out the Google Japan official Blog post or follow us on Twitter at@GoogleCodeJamJp. 皆さまのご参加お待ちしております!

    We are looking forward to an amazing competition in Japan!

    Posted by Yuko Chitani
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  3. We’re thrilled to be one of the Platinum Sponsors at this year’s Surge, the scalability and performance conference. This is our inaugural year at Surge, and we’re excited to join all the great minds within the scalability and performance worlds in Baltimore, Maryland, September 28-30. Surge has much in store for attendees, and of course, we’ve got a few things up our sleeve, too.

    Don’t miss Ben Fried, Google’s CIO, and the keynote speaker at this year’s conference. A few Google engineers will also be on hand to discuss emerging trends and provide you with an inside look on the types of projects they are working on: Max Luebbe on Running a Frontend Webservice at Google Scale, Jia Guo on Challenges in Building a Large Scale Crawling System and Raymond Blum on Solidifying the Cloud: How to Back Up the Internet!

    Visit the Surge schedule for a complete list of speakers and sessions.

    For those of you who won’t be at Surge but want to join in on the fun, we invite you to "hangout" virtually with these speakers as they host Google+ Hangouts from our booth on the exhibit floor. Join Surge attendees and these Googlers at the times below via Google+. To join the Hangouts, add Ben Fried, Max Luebbe, Jia Guo, and Raymond Blum, to one of your Circles on Google+. Check your stream or their profiles at the times below to join (more info on joining a hangout can be found here).

    Thursday, Sep 29, 2011
    1:00 pm - 1:30 pm:
    Keynote hangout with Ben Fried, CIO

    3:45 pm - 5:00 pm:
    Speaker hangout with Google engineers Max Luebbe, Jia Guo and Raymond Blum

    Friday, Sep 30, 2011
    1:00 pm - 1:30 pm:
    Life at Google hangout with Raymond Blum, site reliability engineer

    We hope to see you at a hangout, and look forward to sharing more on this blog about our time at Surge after the conference. Stay tuned.


    Posted by Emily Bedont-Industry Programs Outreach Team
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  4. “While visiting the planet Theta VIII, your team of space explorers is forced to participate in the plot of a badly-written book, which takes place in a hotel/casino called the Google Royale. In order to escape the Royale, you will have to make enough money from gambling that you can buy the hotel for V dollars and leave.”

    Since 2003, Google has been hosting Code Jam, Google’s annual algorithmic coding competition. This event brings together programmers from all over the world to solve the toughest problems we can think up—like the planet Theta VIII scenario above—with the added pressure of the clock ticking down in the background. Contestants competed in the programming language of their choice, using more than 60 different languages (though we aren't sure we'd recommend all of them, like Shakespeare and whitespace, for general use). This year the competition was fierce, with over 30,000 registrants representing a record-breaking 130 countries from around the globe.

    The Google engineers behind Code Jam teamed up to create a set of difficult problems, with diverse sets covering many different areas of mathematics and computer science, like combinatorics, simulation, theory of computation, dynamic programming, game theory and probability.

    The competition started with a qualification round in early May, followed by three online rounds. The 25 top finishers from the final online round were then invited to face off in person at the finals in Tokyo on July 29. The finalists represented nine countries, and included our past champions from 2008-2010: Russia's Egor (2010), and China's ACRush (2008 and 2009). Each contestant arrived hoping to earn the title of Code Jam Champion and walk away with the first place prize of $10,000.

    The room fell silent when the finals began, except for the sound of fingers pounding the keys of 25 keyboards. As the competition unfolded, all eyes were on the online scoreboard as problems were attacked—some solved, others not. Pashka from Russia was the first on the scoreboard, with a solution to a problem called A-small after only 25 minutes. The tension continued to build, with the leaderboard changing constantly as time went by. One minute, China's g201513 was the frontrunner; but then Poland's meret stole the lead. The competition was heating up. The sound of fingers typing seemed to be even faster now. A few of the finalists took turns pacing the room collecting their thoughts.

    After four hours, the competition was over; we had a new winner, and the title of Code Jam Champion went to Japan’s own rng..58.


    This year's Code Jam Top 25 Finalists gathered at the
    Google office in Japan for a thrilling code competition.


    Posted by the Industry Outreach Team
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