Hello Codeforces

Moscow team olympiad 2021 wrapped up a week ago, and the final standings made me disappointed (congratulations to winners, though). Two teams out of the top-10 weren't able to come up with some team name, and this is the greatest amount of no-name teams in the top 10 among all Moscow team olympiads.

My students often ask me how to choose a name for a team. So, today I decided to polish my list of rules and finally make it public.

Initially, your team name has 0 points. For each violation of any rule, this score increases by some amount of points. In the end, if the score is at least 2, I suggest not to use this name. Otherwise, you can use it.

1. "Noname team", "didn't come up with the name", etc. — 2 points

2. Something from programming ("Random shuffle", "Fans of C++", ...) — 2 points. This rule has an exception: if it is a fresh programming-related pun, not just a mention of some concept, it's only 1 point.

3. First letters of names/surnames — 2 points.

4. In case it is stated in the rules of the competition that there are always three people in a team: "three of ..." — 1 point.

Do I miss some rules to make standings less boring? Write in the comments. Otherwise, write in the comments something else.

Hi everyone!

This summer I participated in the program AddisCoder 2019. It is a five-week intensive summer camp where high school students from different regions of Ethiopia learning the basics of programming and algorithms. Next summer the program will be held as well.

It was an amazing experience because I met a lot of cool and passionate students, teaching assistants and professors. As for TAs, we were working on problems for students, helping them with exercises, giving mini-lectures and had a lot of fun exploring Ethiopia together in our free time.

Students chosen for this program are good. They were selected by the Ministry of Education based on their achievements during studying in high school or applied themselves. Some students never used a computer before the program still being quite good at maths and it was exciting to see their advancement from that level to ability to write some simple algorithms. After the program, they have an opportunity to continue study in the best universities in the world.

One of the organizers of this program is Jelani Nelson. He is a computer science professor who used to compete a lot on TopCoder and now runs this program. Teaching assistants are chosen from all over the world and some of them are also part of the competitive programming community. So I want to inspire you to apply as Reyna did it this year for me.

The exact dates of the program are not chosen yet, but it will likely be the middle of July to middle of August, for 5 weeks. The foundation will cover the flight and the hotel. If you need you can also ask for a stipend.

Apply here: addiscoder.com/#apply

For more details or some photos you can check out addiscoder.com