Global Programmers' Festival to be held in Xi'an next month

"I am very glad that we will have the chance to promote the understandings of the public towards our job and communicate with counterparts from other cities and countries," said a programmer in a foreign-invested company that settled in the Xi'an High-tech Zone some years ago.

The festival reflects the key role of Xi'an in both the historical and the current Silk Road under the Belt and Road project and in bringing about an interconnection of talents in the software field at home and abroad.

"The benefits of big data and intelligent technologies would not be accessible to us without the software companies and programmers, and the Global Programmers' Festival, a day especially dedicated to programmers globally, aims to help more people gain deeper knowledge of those obscure backstage heroes in China and across the world," said Lyu Dongguo, director of Xi'an Software Park Development Center.

Xi'an Software Park is undertaking the event together with Chinasoft, a Top 100 software company in China that set up an office in Xi'an five years ago.

Despite the city possessing a large pool of software talents, among which Chinasoft employed around 8,000 local staff last year, Lyu stressed that Xi'an was still short of high-end talents, and that the forthcoming festival aims not only to gather the programmers in China and the world, but also attract more high-end professionals, especially those with leadership abilities and, even more importantly, entrepreneurship.

Lyu also regarded the festival as a boost for companies in the park to embrace the world and reach out further, especially when the Belt and Road Initiative offers such a conducive environment for the companies to go out into the wider world.

"What we provide is a platform, but opportunities will not always come to you. So what the companies should do is to really go to the outside world and find more opportunities," Lyu said.

Besides an awards ceremony for those who have made outstanding achievements in the field, a carnival and a job fair, a White Paper on Human Resources of Xi'an Software and Information Service Industry will be published in which the industry situation, development, policies, and so on will be introduced.

The dates of Nov. 9 and 10 for this year's festival were chosen to avoid a clash with other major events, and from next year it will be on Oct. 24, since 1024, as a basic unit in the binary system, has a special meaning to programmers.