Since 1991, Obradovic has been working at Sombor Gymnasium, except for a brief period from 1993 to 1997 when he worked as a programmer in a software company. He has a strong focus on competitive algorithmic programming, achieving significant success with his students. Several of his former students now work for renowned companies like Microsoft and Nordeus.

His accolades include leading his school team to victory in the High School Programming League 2012/13 and consistently participating in all 15 Microsoft “Bubble Cup” Finals. Obradovic has been recognized for his outstanding contributions to education, receiving prestigious awards such as the “Svetosavska nagrada” from the Serbian Minister of Education and the “Charter of the City” from Sombor.

Despite his programming achievements, Obradovic also prioritizes outdoor activities. For the past 18 years, he has organized nature expeditions for his students, involving canoeing, mountain climbing, and wilderness camping, covering over 1000 km per season. Additionally, Obradovic participates annually in the international programming competition CodeIT, where he not only guides his students but also competes alongside them, showcasing his dedication to both their development and his own continuous learning.

With a strong commitment to both programming and outdoor education, Obradovic continues to inspire and lead his students, fostering their talents in various domains.

For DevStyleR, the man who learned to code without a computer – Dusko Obradovic shares more about the importance of programming in his life, reveals to us the secret of a successful and beloved leader, and what it feels like to stand next to his students during CodeIT.

What does programming mean to you and how did your love for it develop?

At first, programming was just my job. Fortunately1, my programming career lasted for only 3 years. I had been working in a firm which made programs for accounting, and those challenges faded very quickly. For the following 3 years, I was working in Hungary as an entrepreneur in retail. Since 1998 until today I have been working in Grammar School in Sombor as an IT teacher. Ever since then, for me programming is pure pleasure.

You mentioned that you learned to program without a computer. How is that possible?

I suppose that today it would be very difficult. Almost impossible. Not because today’s children couldn’t do it, but because today’s technology makes the process of learning programming easier. At that time, there was no other way. I wrote my first program on a programmable calculator after 15 months of learning from a notebook and a board. I wrote my first program on a computer after 2,5 years, in 1984 in PASCAL on Honeywell. Soon after that, the first personal computers appeared on my faculty, but we didn’t have access like today – one or two times a week, for a few hours, mostly at night. There was no internet for us, mere mortal students.

The school team you lead in Serbia is the only one in the world that has participated in all 16 finals of the Microsoft “Bubble Cup”. How do you achieve such success?

We could say that at the beginning it was just a lucky set of circumstances, which in time grew into something inevitable. Experiences of older teams and their stories year after year inspire new generations to take part in qualification competitions. In the past 8 years, CodeIT qualifications have had the same priority with us as well.

These two competitions, and especially the marathons assignments, are priceless in the process of my students’ advance. Knowing that they have 20 days to solve the problem makes most of them to learn new algorithms and structures in that period so that they would make their placement better.

The fact that you don’t have to catch the beginning of the competition, that even less efficient solutions are also valued and the lack of time penalties all brought to the fact that longer qualification rounds are more popular in my school than the sprint rounds. Even if we put aside those who are satisfied with even getting a shirt, we can say that the fever of CodeIT and Bubble Cup is always present in our school.

You have received numerous awards in Serbia, including the “Svetosavskа Award” and the “Povelja grada”.

Both awards are not just the product of success in programming. Over a month which I spend in nature with my students has equally contributed, if not even more, to receiving those awards. I divide my year into programming season: from the finals of Bubble Cup at the end of September, over winter and spring, until the end of the finals of CodeIT at the beginning of June; and on the adventurous season: during the summer. This other includes camping, fishing and ecological-rowing expeditions. During those, we compensate nine months of cyberspace with the life in a complete natural environment without any comfort.

What is the secret to building a cohesive community that competes among itself in various competitions?

Today’s way of life, which is considered as a contemporary value, and extreme influence of mass media led to the fact that in Serbia there are no more colleagues ready to do something like that. As far as I know, it is similar in Bulgaria as well.
The other reasons are, that those who have the knowledge to pass on to new generations will rather work somewhere else for 2000+ EUR instead for 750EUR, which is the salary for teachers in Serbia.

I wouldn’t call my way of work a secret.

• – With my students I don’t have a typical teacher – student relationship. We are all pals, and in many programming competitions and on CodeIT in finals we compete against each other. (This does not apply when I have to mark them).
• Experiences of earlier generations from their faculties and jobs in IT companies, through the students themselves, their friends and relatives in one small town are easily spread, so many elementary school pupils are coming to my extra classes even before they enroll Grammar School.
• My extra-curricular classes are open to students from other schools as well.
• There are no divisions on gender, classes, religions… so, except on competitions, you can always count on help of those who are around you.
• Many of those students enjoy the natural beauties of Serbia with me, next to some water during a big part of summer in the adventurous season.
• In the programming season I do about 5 hours of extra-curricular classes a week. On the contrary to other professions in Serbia, doing extra hours in teaching is not paid.

How do you prepare students for Olympiads and competitions, and what is the best advice you give them before each event?

Before competitions in our country there is a list of advice that competitors should acquire. That list was based on hundreds of points that previous students had lost on their competitions, and that led to a difference in points on their expense.
Choice of the adequate type of data structures and their sizes.
Obligatory winning the partial points, if there are some.
Narrowing down of the possible ways of solving the tasks based on given limitations.
And many more…

Nemanja Majski is my only student who has achieved this so far. And for more than a year he has been working alone and going to Belgrade at weekends, where he and a few more students have been prepared for the international competitions. This, of course, makes me proud.

Talent or hard work – which one is the key to success?

It depends on what you consider a success. If success is getting a job in an IT company, it doesn’t matter. If the aim is to work in a better firm with a bigger salary, it is possible to achieve with less talent and much work or vice versa.

If success is reaching a level where you can choose where you want to work, you need both talent and a lot and a lot of work.

Now that you have mentioned this, I have to say that it is a big pity that in our two countries a good system doesn’t exist. It all depends on the individual. There are talented children everywhere. The proof for that are not so big towns like Sombor (SRB) and Shumen (BG). Whether they will be found and start their way in which their talent will be fully used, depends on luck as well. You should be born in a town like this or its surrounding at the time when there live enthusiasts who put long-term strategic aims in front of their own personal material ones.

You have been competing alongside your students at CodeIT for years. What do you feel and think when you stand next to them during a competition?

Since the codes are public after the competition, I cannot hide the ways I approach solving of the marathon tasks. Honestly, that is not my aim at all. But during earlier competitions that was my advantage. Tempo in which I type and test, comparing to my students, is certainly my handicap. Even reading the text of the task takes a considerable amount of my time. I still manage to compensate that by experience, but it is getting more and more difficult. It happens more and more often that one or even more of them beat me on the same competition. The last sprint round on CodeIT was a disaster for me. I didn’t manage to solve not one task in given time. My ages are getting me. Luckily, I have no problem with the fact that my students are beating me.

What advice would you give to future participants in CodeIT?

The first piece of advice is to be persistent and patient. I have recently tickled the CodeIT officials to, besides presentation of the Great Guru, organize one of the little Guru, i.e. me, where I would, at least to younger participants, convey a few very useful pieces of advice when solving marathon tasks. If they get lucky and that really happens, in future their results in marathon tasks will certainly be better.

Besides this, play computer games less. That is a waste of time and you have no use from it, but a current satisfaction. Successfully finished combat with the solving of a programming problem can give you a similar feeling, with the difference that this will definitely help you in your future profession.

According to GCHQ, the revelations surrounding the machine “shed new light on the genesis and workings of Colossus, which stood over two metres tall and is believed to be the first digital computer in history”, although much of the material about it in the National Archives remains classified.

The History

On January 18, 1944, British engineer Tommy Flowers arrived at Bletchley Park, a secret code breaking facility located about 50 miles north of London. He arrives in a lorry carrying a huge electronic machine that is immediately given the name “Colossus”.

There are claims that Colossus was the first ever digital computer used to crack messages between senior German commanders encrypted with the Lorenz cipher – details that remained secret until 2000.

The big secret until 2000.

Unlike its much more famous counterpart Bombe, designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman and used to crack the Enigma codes, almost everything about Colossus was kept secret for almost six decades.

Although modern computers run on electronic circuits that function as logic gates – these days using tiny silicon semiconductors – in the 1940s, creating logic gates in this way was a pipe dream.

The genius Tommy Flowers

British engineer Tommy Flowers created logic gates for Colossus out of vacuum tubes – something that was only later adopted by ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrated Computing), which until the details of Colossus were revealed was thought to be the world’s first digital computer.

ENIAC and World War II

ENIAC was created in the United States during World War II with the original purpose of calculating ballistic tables for the needs of the US Army. It was constructed in 1945 by Americans John Moakley and J. It was founded in 1945 by John Mockley and John Presper Eckert.

The reasons for keeping the details of the computer secret are not yet known, although it has been suggested that Britain continued to export Lorenz cipher machines abroad until the 1960s. And the reason for this was Colossus’ ability to decrypt Lorenz messages.

“Technological innovation has always been at the heart of what we do at GCHQ and Colossus is a prime example of how our employees keep us at the forefront of new technology – even when we can’t talk about it,” commented Anne Kist-Butler, Director of GCHQ.

The British Cyber Intelligence Agency confirmed that, in part, “because the technology was so effective, its functionality was still in use by GCHQ until the early 1960s”.

‘No detailed user handbook’

In the press release accompanying the new documents, former GCHQ engineer Bill Marshall stated:

“I worked as an engineer on Colossus for a year during the 1960s. I had just signed the Official Secrets Act and knew nothing about GCHQ but was offered ‘interesting work’ which I believed would be dealing with telegrams for a government department.

I was told very little about the machine I was working on — what the machine was actually doing was not for me to know. My job was to repair it as necessary, using just a few circuit diagrams and no detailed user handbook. It wasn’t until much later that I found out that several of the systems and detailed design information were supposedly destroyed at the end of WWII.

I’m very proud to have been involved with Colossus even in just a small way, and we should all be proud of what was achieved in the name of national safety and security,” said Marshall.

After the war, eight of the ten Colossus machines were completely disassembled — although, of course, the engineers involved squirreled away the odd part and circuit diagram.”

The engineer Tony Sale led a rebuild of a working Colossus in the 1990s that was completed in 2007 and is currently housed at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.

“From a technical perspective, Colossus was an important precursor of the modern electronic digital computer, and many of those who used Colossus at Bletchley Park went on to become important pioneers and leaders of British computing in the decades following the war, often leading the world in their work” said Andrew Herbert, the chairman of trustees at the museum.

The most difficult part is to establish an objective measure of the importance of Colossus, which was used to “decipher critical strategic messages between top German generals, although a letter published by GCHQ links Colossus to “quite disturbing German instructions”.

The Importance of Colossus

By the time the machine was delivered to Bletchley Park, planning for the D-Day landings was already underway, but it is argued that the intercepts Colossus provided were valuable for giving the go-ahead on June 6.

As explained by Chris Shore in his excellent lecture on the device for The Centre for Computing History:

“Being able to launch that invasion in early June was absolutely crucial, and they needed that up-to-date intelligence.

On June the fifth, Eisenhower met with his generals to decide whether to go on June the sixth. As they were meeting, so the story goes — and I believe this story is corroborated — a courier arrived from Bletchley Park, walked into the room, and handed Eisenhower a folded piece of paper.

Eisenhower opened that and read it, and what he read was a message that had been decrypted by Colossus at Bletchley Park just a few hours earlier, from Hitler in Berlin to Rommel, commander of the Nazi forces on the Atlantic wall.

And that message stated Hitler’s categorical belief that yes, there would be an invasion in Normandy, but that it would be a diversion, and that the real invasion would happen five days later in Calais. And that message specifically refused Rommel permission to move his tank divisions from Calais to Normandy to reinforce his defenses.

This was exactly the intelligence that Eisenhower had been waiting for – confirmation that the Nazi command had been completely deceived as to the timing and location of the attack.

Eisenhower didn’t reveal what he had just read — he wasn’t allowed to because people weren’t allowed to know that we were reading the German’s communications — he folded the paper up, he looked around at the assembled group of generals and he said simply, ‘Gentlemen, we go tomorrow.’”

Today

“Technological innovation has always been at the center of our work here at GCHQ, and Colossus is a perfect example of how our staff keep us at the forefront of new technology – even when we can’t talk about it. The creativity, ingenuity and dedication shown by Tommy Flowers and his team to keep the country safe were as crucial to GCHQ then as today. I’m thrilled to be celebrating the 80th anniversary of this computer and honoring those who worked on it and then with it”, said Anne Kist-Butler, Director of GCHQ.

Did you know?

Despite using around 2,500 valves and standing at more than two metres tall, Colossus is considered by many to be the birth of modern-day computing and is still thought of today as the first digital computer ever made. Experts who worked on the code-breaking computer went onto to create the Manchester Baby built at the University of Manchester in 1948 – putting Manchester at the centre of a global computing revolution.

“Knowing whether your ‘vaulted’ secrets have leaked publicly is just one API call away. We built a privacy-safe and secure process that returns an unequivocal answer to the crucial question: Has my secret leaked?” said Eric Fourrier, co-founder and CEO of GitGuardian.

This groundbreaking tool aims to address the growing challenge of securing sensitive information in the cloud-native application development domain. In this fast-paced environment, organizations often grapple with the risk of their secrets becoming scattered across various developer tools. GitGuardian’s ‘HasMySecretLeaked’ tool is specifically tailored to mitigate these risks and enhance security.

According to GitGuardian, the tool can identify and monitor sensitive information that is at risk of leakage, particularly during off-hours when security may be lax. Furthermore, it can track secrets that may inadvertently end up in personal GitHub repositories, effectively escaping the organization’s immediate control.

With ‘HasMySecretLeaked,’ organizations can bolster their cybersecurity measures by taking proactive steps to safeguard their valuable data in the cloud-native application development landscape.

GitGuardian is making security monitoring even more accessible for its users with the integration of the ‘HasMySecretLeaked’ tool directly into the ggshield command-line interface. This enhancement allows GitGuardian users to effortlessly check for potential data leaks in their confidential information.

Moreover, ggshield now offers plugins for efficiently retrieving secrets from key tools like HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secrets Manager. This expanded functionality empowers users to conduct thorough inspections of their secrets for potential leaks in their local environments.

The integration of this feature extends beyond the command-line interface. It is seamlessly woven into the GitGuardian Platform, providing comprehensive security coverage. The platform is designed to notify security teams whenever hardcoded secrets from organization-owned repositories, Slack workspaces, or Jira projects are accidentally exposed in public sources beyond the organization’s immediate control and visibility.

And even though it’s Friday today, in this article we’ll discuss why it’s important to pay attention to unproductive days and present some of the best tips and strategies to say goodbye to unproductivity.

How to deal with lack of productivity

Prioritization of at least one task
When you’re experiencing a lack of productivity, you can ensure progress by prioritizing at least one task to complete by the end of the workday. This can help you experience a sense of accomplishment while keeping your goals simple and achievable. From here, you can build momentum to make more progress when you return to work the next day.

Plan a productive tomorrow
After you’ve had an unproductive day, leave work, take a break and create a plan to boost your productivity for tomorrow. This can help you start the next day efficiently and without wasting time organizing your tasks. From here on, you can accomplish more than you originally thought and maintain a calm and efficient attitude.

Optimize your working environment
To move forward after an unproductive day, optimize your working environment so you can make progress. Try to eliminate any opportunity for distractions, including office clutter, text or email notifications, phone calls and interruptions from colleagues. From here, you can concentrate on your work and focus on completing your tasks.

Defining time management strategies
In addition to optimizing your work environment, you can take advantage of time management strategies to bounce back after an unproductive day. Consider creating a workflow schedule that you can follow to organize your tasks efficiently. Additionally, you can use time tracking apps or software to measure the time you spend on specific tasks and set reminders.

Consider work-life balance
Think about why you had an unproductive day and evaluate your work-life balance performance and your personal needs. Many people experience a drop in productivity due to career stress or personal issues. Consider evaluating your current routine or situation to recognize your limitations and set boundaries that improve your ability to focus on work.

In a May interview with Kinda Funny, Ferguson said that people shouldn’t spend time looking for a secret level that doesn’t exist.

“We’ve had some fun, but we wanted to make sure it felt authentic to the gothic, dark themes we had. And because of that, there’s no secret level in Diablo 4 that people might be looking for, as per previous games.”

Said Rod Fergusson.

Players, however, don’t believe the general manager and have still been searching for a secret level in Diablo 4 since the game’s release.

In the first part of Diablo, a rumor was released that there was a secret cow level. And if you click on a specific cow and a specific number of times, you will open a portal to a mysterious level known as the Secret Cow Level. It turned out that no such mystery existed in the first game, but players left their doubts about the rest of Diablo.

So far, there’s no sign of a secret level in Diablo 4 – despite some slight references to cows throughout the game.

As reported by PC Gamer, a thread on reddit includes some interesting evidence that fans think might be a hint of its existence after all.

There’s also more conclusive evidence. Both a “Bloody Wooden Shard” item with a W carved into the side and a “Mustic Dome” can be found in the game, likely referencing the wooden leg of Virth and the city portal dome that were needed to access the Mu Mu farm in Diablo 2.

Will Diablo 4’s secret level turn out to be real, or will all players’ efforts to figure it out prove futile?

If you’re a fan of the game, share your thoughts by emailing us at [email protected], and we’ll be happy to share your comments with our readers.