Programmer's day
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Programmers' Day
Programmers' Day (ru:День программиста) is a holiday that occurs on the 256th day of the year (on the 255th day, if January 1 is taken to be the 0th day), and is officially recognized in Russia. The number 256 (28) was chosen because it's the highest possible numerical value which can be represented with an eight-bit byte. Also, ‘256‘ in hexadecimal is ‘100’ (‘0x100’), and it's the highest power of two that is lower than 365 (the number of days in a year).
The holiday is observed on September 12 in leap years, and on September 13 in non-leap years.
For the first time the day was proposed by Valentine Balt (Russian: Валенти́н Балт), an employee of Parallel Technologies. As early as 2002 he tried to gather signatures for a petition to the Government of the Russian Federation to recognize the day as the official programmers' day.[1]
On 24 July 2009, the Ministry of Communication and Informatization of the Russian Federation issued a draft Decree on Programmer's Day.[2][3]
On 11 September 2009, the President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev has signed the Decree on Programmers' Day.[4]