A Toast to Code Jam 2008

By Bartholomew Furrow, Google Code Jam Team

Cheers to the 100 Code Jammers who made it to the Code Jam finals in Mountain View today! We hope you enjoyed the competition as much as we enjoyed seeing you type furiously, solve ridiculously challenging puzzles, and meet other programming pros. Speaking of pros, a team that included past Code Jam winners used their 20% time to create a new platform that allowed everyone to program in the language of their choice. It was, as you know, a long road to the last round of Code Jam. More than 11,000 of you participated in online rounds, 500 semi-finalists reached the regional stage and 100 finalists from 23 different countries competed this morning. We're pleased to finally announce the day's results: Tiancheng Lou of China took home the $10,000 Grand Prize. Zeyuan Zhu from China won second place, Bruce Merry from United Kingdom came in third and cash prizes went to the other finalists.

Congrats to all and see you at the next Jam!

Improving the issue tracker for larger projects

Posted: 14 Nov 2008 02:00 PM CST

By Jason Robbins, Google Code

When we created the issue tracker for Project hosting on Google Code our goal was to keep things simple. We had found that most issue trackers include too many fields and options that aren't applicable to a given issue. As a result, we intentionally did not implement issue relationships like is-blocked-on and is-duplicate-of. For most of the projects that we host, simply adding a comment that mentions the other issue is enough information to get the job done.

Now we host more large projects, and some projects that started small with us have grown large. So, starting today, we are offering a formal 'Blocked on' field. And, when you close an issue as 'Duplicate', you can merge it into the original issue. For more information, take a look at our issue tracker documentation.

For projects that regularly triage issues, you can now pick where to go after you have finished updating an issue.

We hope that these changes help make the issue tracker as easy to use on larger projects as it is for smaller ones.

As always, we look forward to your feedback.

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