Important events in September / World Programmers and Developers Day: The improbable!

HIBAPRESS-RABAT-JM

At first glance, we are faced with a very improbable world day… and yet it really exists.

A World Russian Day

The origin of this world day is Russian and it is fixed on the 256th day of the year*. Which makes the day fixed on September 13, except in leap years…

Everyone will have immediately noticed that 256 is a power of 2 (28 to be exact) and that it is even the greatest power of 2 which is less than the number of days in a year…

To get to the world day, we must go back to the Russian Valentin Balt, then employed by an internet development company, who launched (in 2002) a petition to the government to ask that a day off be granted to all developers.

Day off

The most amazing thing is that he won his case and that in 2009 the Russian Ministry of Culture and Mass Communication (you couldn’t make this up) took steps to create such a day.

In 2009, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree formalizing programmers’ day off on the 256th day of every year.

Fortunately, this day was not imitated in other countries.

* it is the Gregorian calendar that was used as a reference to determine the day in question and not the Julian calendar (used by the Orthodox). Let us recall that Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918. An (unintentional) homage to the Pope.