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 :)