Touraine and French coder networks
In France, in the world, we have a multitude of groups of coders specialized in several languages - which we will talk about later -, of various levels (amateur, semi-professional, professional and institutional) and having elected a precise place to establish themselves. Each city or each district of a more or less important city hosts a group of coders, even if there are exclusively female groups. The levels of coders are divided into three levels: Amateur (A), Semi-professional (SP) and Professional (P) with each one having 6 grades numbered from 1 to 6. Code competitions can help us to know our level but it is only one indicator among others. Here is a non-exhaustive list of Semi-Professional (SP 3, SP 4, SP 5 and SP 6) and Professional coders in Tours and in France (P 1, P 2, P 3, P 4, P 5 and P 6). The amateur groups and the semi-professional groups SP 1 and SP 2 are not referenced here. From 1 to 10, these are the groups of Touraine coders; from 11 to 30, these are the groups of French coders; from 31 to 40, these are the groups of European and/or international coders.
Each group of coders chooses a specialization in one or more language families. It is important to know that software and Web programming is divided into language families according to their uses:
-Software languages (Python, Javascript, PhP, MathLab, MyQSL, R statistics);
-Mobile languages (Java, PhP, Ruby, Julia, Swift);
-Web languages (HTLM/CSS, Java, C, Python);
-Archaic languages (Cobol, Fortran).
Groups may or may not do programming competitions whether they are professional or not. There are many of them:
-Prologin
-The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC)
-Top Coder
-Google Code Jam
-CodeForces
-Google Hash Code
-Primers
-CodeChef
-Startup Weekend.
These are events that last from 2 hours to a week, alone, in pairs or in teams of 6. Semi-professional and professional coders often live in a community: they share work, competitions, maintenance of the community space, cooking, and hobbies, not to mention the daily practice of body weight training and martial arts. They often do community exchanges. Some have a job on the side (training, documentation, research, multimedia animations) while others live only on the money of the contests.