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: