This past weekend the CodeChef and Directi teams were at TechFest giving talks as part of CodeCamp (slides can be found here) and hanging out with students at the Directi booth.  It was a lot fun meeting students, talking tech and giving away free stuff.  The crowd seemed genuinely excited about CodeChef and we’ve gotten some really good feedback.

People love free stuff. At the booth, we started asking tech questions and giving out Directi <geek> t-shirts and mugs to those who knew the answers. Pretty soon word got around, and we had to get creative with the types of problems we were asking: Name 10 programming languages, who founded Oracle, name 3 types of databases, etc… The best moment of the day was an answer to 3 types of trees. Instead of going for B-tree or Red-black, one enterprising student said; “Deciduous, Conifer and Carnivorous.” After he named a carnivorous tree and the crowd roared in approval, we figured it was only fair to give him a t-shirt.

We were also promoting a contest, where we asked the output to 3 code snippets. We put the snippets up on banners and gave out fliers. The deadline for submitting answers to the TechFest Challenge is tomorrow afternoon and on Monday we will announce a winner (who will receive a Nintendo Wii!).

Pictures from TechFest below:

CodeChef will be participating at IIT Bombay’s Techfest this coming weekend in Powaii. We will have banners up and giving out fliers with three code snippits. Anyone who comes to the site and correctly selects the outputs will be eligible to win a Nintendo Wii! We will also be there at the Directi Booth answering questions. Feel free to stop by and say hello!

We are pleased to announce CodeChef’s first online coding competition will take place on March 1st. The contest will be open to anyone, contain 8 problems, last for 2 weeks, and the winner’s will get some awesome prizes. Stay tuned for more details.

There are now 23 practice problems available! The problems range in degree of difficulty, we’ve bucketed them in easy, medium and hard. The easiest problem is the ATM. If you’re new to online coding competitions, why don’t you give that a shot first? We will continue to add problems regularly and send out updates through the blog. If you have any questions, check out our forums.

We’re happy you’re here.  At CodeChef, we want to provide you with an opportunity to go beyond your every day work and studies and improve your coding skills through online competitions, practice problems and discussions (and hopefully have some fun too!).

We will be rolling out a number of exciting features in the coming months, stay tuned to the blog for updates.  If you have any questions, comments or feedback let us know at feedback@codechef.com.

Bon Appétit!