AFTER its successful rounds in Beirut, Amman, and Riyadh, the ArabNet Developer Tournament will showcase the UAE's most talented web and mobile programmers in a series of coding challenges at the Dubai Round on April 20 in Conference Halls 1 & 2 of Dubai Knowledge Village. The tournament that will kick off at 8:00 a.m., will consist of four heats. It will last for 12 hours, at the end of which the winners for Dubai will be announced. The competition, sponsored in the UAE by Du and hosted by Dubai Internet City, seeks to highlight young technical talent across the region and connect them with job opportunities in the growing digital sector. “The ArabNet Developer Tournament will shine the spotlight on the hidden heroes of the digital industry – the developers who build every website we visit and app we use,” said Omar Christidis, founder & CEO of ArabNet. Majed Al Suwaidi, Director of Business Development at Dubai Internet City and Dubai Outsource Zone, said: “By hosting this competition; we hope to be able to give local talent the support they need to take their ideas to market. In line with this, the in5 innovation hub hosted in DIC is committed to supporting entrepreneurs, programmers and start-ups from the early stages of idea creation through their idea implementation up until the commercial launch of their product by providing infrastructural support as well as a dynamic and engaging working environment which provides the tools need to compete in the global marketplace.” With $124 million in investments in IT startups in MENA in 2012, the digital sector in the Middle East is booming, but the difficulty of locating technical talent remains one of the main bottlenecks for its growth. Companies today are struggling to identify the developers that they need to build their business. A recent survey by Dice.com, a leading technology career site, concluded that the top three most difficult vacancies to fill in the US are developers, twice or three times as difficult as other vacancies, according to hiring managers. ArabNet's regional Developer Tournament addresses this challenge by offering a platform for connecting developers with career opportunities, either as the technical co-founders for new startups, or the leads of technical teams in established companies. – SG
