Harbour.Space Great Performance at Swerc!!

Last year Harbour.Space accomplished one of its major goals: to win SWERC, the Southwestern Europe Regional Contest, and compete in the ICPC World Finals. That objective was accomplished when RAW POTS, the team formed by Maksym Oboznyi, Marco Meijer, and Danil Zashikhin, won the gold medal and the overall contest against Southwestern Europe’s top contenders. And this year, as Svetlana Velikanova, Harbour.Space's co-founder and CEO, emphatically stated, “we did it again! For the second time in a row Harbour Space University qualifies to the ICPC World Finals… See you all in Egypt!” With this result, Harbour.Space maintains its place at the centre of the IT educational orb. 

And indeed, Harbour.Space keeps excelling with two fantastic results: a silver and a bronze medal and, with those marks, qualifies for the second year in a row for the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) Finals where they will compete against 140 other teams from 111 countries in Egypt. 

Last year more than 50,000 of the brightest minds in computer disciplines attended that competition, which was won by MIT. This year, after winning the silver medal in SWERC, Harbour.Space’s team P+P+P will be battling among their peers in Egypt.

SWERC, the Southwestern Europe Regional Contest, is one of the most important programming competitions in the globe. It is a 5-hour long contest where teams, made up of 3 students, solve algorithmic problems and do practical coding. This year it was organised by the Politecnico di Milano. Our silver medal winning team and ICPC representative, ranked 3rd overall, is named P+P+P  (where P symbolises each participant) and it’s formed by Batyr Sardarbekov, from Kazakhstan; Sergei Zolotarev, from Russia, and Yahor Dubovik, from Belarus. 

Coming into the tournament, they didn’t have any expectations, they just wanted to do their best, and they did! Together, they correctly solved 11 problems, and even though they weren’t expecting to win, their medal was not a fluke. They trained very hard with their coach and competitive programming teacher, Kamil Debowski also known as “Errichto”. He taught them that constant practice is essential to being successful in this competition. Kamil is a Codeforce “legendary grandmaster” and a Topcoder “Target”. He is also the author of more than 300+ problems in Codeforces, Topcoder, and Topchef, among others. 

Harbour.Space’s other teams also had great results in the competition (the full ranking is available here):

• Team “I eat PHP for breakfast” represented by Temirlan Baibolov, Maksym, Oboznyi, and Marco Meijer, ranked 13th overall and won a bronze medal. 
• Team x^3, made up of Anier Velasco Sotomayor, Humberto Yusta Gomez, and Brayan Durán Medina, ranked 16th overall

The faculty, current students, alumni, and everyone involved with Harbour.Space would like to congratulate the winners and participants at SWERC 2022-2023 for their wonderful performance and hard work. A total of 120 teams from more than 40 different universities across the region (France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Israel) participated and Harbour.Space came out, again, holding the top ranks. 

Congratulations to all of our students and winners!!