2021 - review

New Year have come at my timezone - and let's try to follow the idea of reviewing its results!

I'm trying to make notes of changes/improvements, but seemingly often forget to update them in time (shall fix this with subversion history soon).

Still it seems to be useful to try recollecting whether anything worthwhile had happened - this somewhat helps in the sense of motivation :)

The first problem added in 2021 was XWords by our colleague Grae aka Quandray. And it was #221 - so in total new 30+ problems were added.

Moreover, some of them were suggested by you - and even some were created by you! Grae and Clive set start to this great movement :)

Some things got broken - google appengine (on which our interactive problems and banners relied), github (in authorization), facebook isn't worth mentioning - it is giving pain constantly :) Even site itself for about a day was down when hosting got PHP updated to next major version. We have overcome them all - some sooner, some later. Even I'd say some changes are to better - interactive problems moved to "old-style" free hosting and got simplified so it is easier to add them.

Added means to change and recover password (not sure if all works yet) and binding github together with password access (if anyone uses it). Added admin-summoning button in hope this may help react faster.

Tried adding Scheme as new "special language", but probably it wasn't greatest idea. Still such things it is difficult to judge beforehand :) Recently tried adding SQL and Turing Machine - supposing there could be some more interesting problems for them yet.

Arena-type problems (currently 1) - still unsure what fun or use could be made of this, but perhaps it could be figured out and completed eventually :)

Probably most significant - change to certification rule advised by Clive aka CSFPython - which relieved "strategical" difficulty of adding new tasks!

There were more lower-level and technical things - not worth mentioning - but worth in keeping brain busy - and some, hopefully useful.

Happy New Year, Dear Friends! Thanks to you, to Providence, to God - for your friendly cooperation, your efforts. It significantly shapes my own interests and even lifestyle to some extent! I wish the 2022 will be brighter for every one of you!

Picture of the fir-tree is stolen, probably, from Advent of Code - but it's very beautiful.