The announcement is long overdue. This month, the CodeChef Programmer of the Month is Ajay Somani who has been a consistent performer on CodeChef since the March 2009 challenge. He even stood 1st in the November 2009 Challenge!
Here is more about Ajay:
Name: Ajay Somani
Age: 20
Organisation: Google
Userid: innocentboy
Twitter ID: ajay_somani
Brief introduction about yourself (under 140 characters): I’m a very ambitious and competitive guy. I’m passionate about computer science and I’d like to do well in whatever I work on. I like travelling to new places and eating great food.
How/When did you start programming?
I started programming when I was 15, during freshman year at college. I just started by doing assignments of a compulsory course at college but later some seniors at our college introduced me to topcoder and I found it fun. In my first year summer holidays I came to know about SPOJ, ACM, UVA and some other online judges and I started practicing more.
What do you do when you’re not programming?
I pretty much end up using my computer anyway, mostly doing reading random stuff on Google reader, facebooking, watching movies and sitcoms. I do enjoy playing lightweight flash games on internet. I also sleep a lot and really like eating good food and hanging out with friends.
What do you like most about CodeChef?
I’ll probably go with prizes too 
. Apart from that Codechef is a great platform especially for Indian students to compete and learn from each other. I also like the challenge problem in monthly contests. It’s fun to try out different approaches and see how they perform on the judge test data.
How many hours a day do you program?
It varies greatly depending on the mood and requirement on that particular day. On an average I’d say around 7-8 hours.
What’s your favourite book and why?
I’m not much of a book-reader. I haven’t read any novels yet and I haven’t really liked any of the course books that I’ve read so far. I’d say Introduction to Algorithms (CLRS) and The C++ Programming Language (Bjarne Stroustrup) are some of the better books that I’ve read.
If you could eat dinner with any famous person (past or present), who would it be and what dish would you have?
Person – Leonardo Da Vinci. Dish – Would like to try anything delicious from his time
What are your plans for the future.
I really like my job so I don’t have any plans of changing that in the near future. I’m interested in computer science research and entrepreneurship, so I might go for higher studies later and work on a challenging research problem.
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