Sunday, April 13, 2008

INdT Programming Arena Contest at FISL

Nokia Institute of Technology promotes programming contests in cooperation with Forum Nokia at FISL 2008 Programming Arena Contest

The winners will receive Nokia N95 and Nokia N800 devices as prizes. Forum Nokia will also promote some lectures to guide developers that want to contribute with its projects.

This is the first time that Nokia Institute of Technology (Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia - INdT) will participate in International Forum of Free Software (Fórum Internacional de Software Livre - FISL) that will happen from April 17th to 19th at Porto Alegre, Brazil. In partnership with Forum Nokia, an on-line community with more than 3 million of subscribed developers, the Institute promotes programming challenges in FISL Programming Arena and the best ones win Nokia N95 and Internet Tablets Nokia N800.

The challenges consist of programming contests that take into account programming an developing technical skills. The competition, which can be performed by only one programmer or by a team, will be integrated into open source projects for mobile platforms.

There are two phases: qualifying and insanifying. At qualifying phase, some simple task help the teams to get closer with Python language, Symbian OS and the platform API. Those ones that achieve the best results are classified to the next phase. The final result is a contribution to an open source project that can continue even after FISL.

Daniel Rocha, manager of Forum Nokia at Brasil, will present the lecture “Nokia – Open Source Initiatives and Projects for Smartphones”. He intents to show the last Nokia initiatives on the open source world, such as Python for S60, Open C, Maemo, Mobile Web Server and other important projects. The main reason for the talk is to guide the developers on how to become involved in such projects, how to port open source code to S60 smartphones and how to contribute with Forum Nokia open source projects.

Besides being part of Arena, the INdT will also participate of FISL in order to identify potential employer candidates. “We know that the best professionals of open source, the main research upstream of INdT - Recife, are on FISL. The competition atmosphere is the environment to evaluate the abilities of the candidates for possible jobs at INdT”, says Vanessa Nalesso, HR manager of INdT.