Did you realize that today is Programmer Day? No? So discover why it's today and what to do about it!

Hang on, we last celebrated Programmer Day on September 13, 2011 - so why has it come early this year? The answer, of course, is that 2012 is a leap year and Programmers' Day is the 0x100th day of the year, or the 256th day in common currency. With,  January 1 counted as 0 this makes Programmer Day September 13 if it isn't a leap year, and September 12 if it is.

We all like a good excuse for a holiday and, according to Wikipedia, Programmer Day is recognized as an official professional holiday in Russia after a decree to that effect was signed by Dmitry Medvedev on September 11, 2009.

This fact isn't recorded on the Programmer Day website which tells us that it is "the unofficial holiday for programmers" and provides the date of 2007 as when it started.

One part of the myth that we propagated last year - that programmer's wear white on this day - is no longer on Wikipedia. So what should we do?

If you are in Bielsko-Biała, Poland there is an event organized by Selleo at which programmers plan to:

network with friends and participate in Lightning Talks [in which] everyone will have a chance to provide some interesting insights about his/her work, life, development projects, company or anything he/she would like to share with the rest of the participants

Suggestions on the Programmer Day site are to:

• Speak in code (or pseudocode) all day
• Decorate a tree with zeros and ones to make a binary tree
• Have a contest for the best binary pun or programming joke

And here's a sample joke from the Twitter feed:

 

 

Feel free to share this article complete with our Programmer Day poem:

 

We would certainly like to hear your jokes and if you have any plans you wish to share do let us know, or Tweet with #programmerday.

More Information

Programmer Day

Related Articles

Happy Programmers' Day

 

blog comments powered by Disqus

 

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, install the I Programmer Toolbar, subscribe to the RSS feed, follow us on, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Linkedin,  or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

 

The Earth Has Many Faces 02/06/2013 While others are spending time worrying about privacy issues associated with face recognition, generative design studio, Onformative, has created Google Faces, an algorithm-based agent, to search Goog [ ... ] + Full Story

BBC Clock Inaccurate - 100 Programmer Days To Fix? 05/06/2013 The BBC home page has just lost its clock because the BBC Trust upheld a complaint that it was inaccurate. All it did was to show the current time on the machine it was being viewed on and not an accu [ ... ] + Full Story

More News Google Code Bans Downloads A Brief History Of Programming Languages Gmail Adds Actions - Do You Want to Use Them? Visual Studio 2013 Details Revealed Hi Tech Rubik's Cube Gets SDK SQL Server 2014 Preview Apple 1 Sold For Record Price of $668K Google Compute Engine Now Open To All Microsoft Meets Google Halfway Over WP8 App Opera Next 15 Released New Kinect For Windows - Next Year Foxconn To Make Firefox OS Tablet New Tools For Structured Web Pages