Last time I mentioned, that one of the winners of the 'best event for participants' competition was a girl, who offered participants to take pictures based on tasks like "take a picture of yourself and <description of other person> doing <description of setting>". Even though that is a really awesome event, very few people were interested in it, which was very sad.

TopCoder Open 2011 keeps going.

Yesterday we were supposed to hold a poker tournament with a grand prize MacBook Air. There were a lot of people willing to participate, which forced us to split the tournament into two elimination rounds and one final. Out of 16 people who registered for the tournament, 8 were russian-speaking, and all of them appeared to be in the same elimination round. Petr and MikhaelOK advanced from that round, while 7ania7 and theycallhimtom advanced from another one, which was non-russian-speaking. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the elimination rounds, however, we played more poker that day, in the same place, so this picture gives you pretty good understanding of how it looked like (during the elimination round it was a little bit more crowded though):


Last time I didn't publish any pictures of a hotel, except one view out of the window. The hotel is called The Westin Diplomat.


It is located in a Hollywood city. The city is in 20 minutes of driving from Miami, however it looks like a small village with a lot of palms. The hotel looks weird in such a setting, since essentially it is 36-storey skyscraper. It is located right next to the Ocean shore, such that the moment you leave the hotel, you find yourself on the beach.

Today I and Eric, CEO of MemSQL, went to Florida, to the Hollywood city, to visit TopCoder Open 2011, which we sponsor. Intel and Facebook are two other sponsors.
We left San Francisco at 8 AM. In SFO we saw Petr. That made us believe, that he moved to the Valley, which turned out not to be the case.
First thing you see in the hotel is TopCoder banner. Do you know the company, which is listed third in the sponsors list? :о


We went to a Ballroom, where we needed to install our booth. Intel has entire corner in the ballroom, while we and Facebook have small table and a screen. This is how it looks like:


When booth had been installed, we checked in to the room. According to what I heard from competitors, TopCoder provided them with rooms with no ocean view. Since we didn't have room provided by topcoder, for ourselves we got the one with the view.


In 2008, when I was visiting all the programming events, I was taking pictures of all the TopCoders, and other people, who were related to the community, with a stuffed pig. Some of those pictures you can find in my blog here. This time three more people didn't manage to avoid my camera. One of them is Ivan Metelsky, who is working on topcoder SRMs, and also is a judge on the TCO:

Two other are Artem Rakhov and Mike Mirzayanov, who are well known on this website :)