We are looking for Problem Setters and Testers. We have listed down the rules here. Please go through the same and get in touch if you feel that you want to contribute.

This is in our endeavor to improve the problem setting process. Hopefully this will help us to have more exciting and smoother contests in future. Please do leave us your feedback.

Cheers,
Anup

Hello everyone,

This is a small update to let you know that we have now added some problems from contests being hosted on Codechef in the ‘Peer’ area of the practice section. These problems are available at www.codechef.com/problems/extcontest . As of now, approximately 150 problems from various contests hosted in the past one year have been added to this section. We hope you all have a fun time cracking these

Regards,

Aniruddha.

Hello All,

We are very happy to announce CodeChef now has Facebook Connect integration.  What does this mean for you?  You can now sign in using your FB login, publicize your achievements on your wall, and challenge/invite your FB friends.  More details on individual features below:

1. Login using your Facebook credentials.

All you have to do is log in to Codechef and click on the FConnect button at the top of the page. You will be prompted to login to Facebook and once you have done that, your Codechef and Facebook accounts will be linked. In future, so long as you are logged in to Facebook, you can simply click on the FConnect button on the Codechef website and you will be logged in to our website.

2. Signup using Facebook

If you are a new user, you can signup using Facebook. Click the FConnect button on the top of the page instead of the ‘signup’ link and you will be take to a page with some information fetched from your Facebook account. On signing up, your new Codechef account will be automatically linked to your Facebook one.

3. Publishing to your Facebook Wall

You will now be able to publish messages to your Facebook wall via the Codechef Facebook application. You can manually publish messages each time you solve a problem correctly or edit the Facebook settings from your profile page to automatically publish a message the first time you solve a problem correctly. Additionally, you also have the option to publish messages to your wall each time you enter a contest and if you are ranked in the top 10 in any of our monthly contests.

We’d love to hear from you with any questions, concerns, bug reports, or loveletters at feedback@codechef.com.

Regards,

Aniruddha.

Hi guys,

Our March challenge has come to the end, and here are our winners!

India:

1. Yash – Rs.10000
2. Ashish Pant – Rs.4400
2. H Umesh – Rs.4400
2. Uday Jalan – Rs.4400
2. Kunal Jain – Rs.4400
2. Jitendra Kushwaha – Rs.4400
7. Keshav Dhandhania – Rs.2500
8. Abhijith Reddy D – Rs.2500
9. Venkatesh – Rs.2500
10. Akshay Utkarsh Sharma – Rs.2500
11. Anshul goyal – Rs.1500
12. Gagandeep Singh Bhatia – Rs.1500
13. Rishikesh Dwivedi – Rs.1500
14. Vikas – Rs.1500
15. K.V.Vivek Kumar – Rs.1500
16. Mahesh Chandra Sharma – Rs.1000
17. Harish Narware – Rs.1000
18. Suhash – Rs.1000
19. Atul Kharabe – Rs.1000
20. Pratik Tandel – Rs.1000

Global:

1. Cedric Yen-Yu Lin – $78
1. ChenGaoyuan – $78
1. Tomek Czajka – $78
1. David Stolp – $78
1. max – $78
1. Balakrishnan Varadarajan – $78
1. Qinsong Zeng – $78
1. Tao Zhao – $78
1. Stephen Merriman – $78
1. Mark Greve – $78
1. Michael Dorfling – $78
1. Liao Hongshu – $78
1. Pan Jianyang – $78
1. Josh Metzler – $78

Contest Statistics:

Congratulations to all the winners of this month’s challenge and thank you all for participating.

We’ve had some hiccups in this contest for which we sincerely apologize. We would also like to thank you for all the invaluable feedback we received and rest assured we are giving all of it due consideration.

If there’s anything you would like us to know, do drop in an email at feedback@codechef.com .

Cheers,
Basil

Dear contestants,

As you all know there have been glitches in this month’s contest problem. Needless to say they were glaring and should not recur. We are sorry.

Life has come a full circle for us in the last couple of weeks. The other day we were basking in the glory of completing one eventful year and being so privileged to get all your patronage. We were bragging about our achievements! And now we have to face this to bring us back to our feet.

But we see a silver lining in this too. We have been inundated with lot of emails and feedback showing us how much you care. As we have been telling you time and again, we value each and every comment of yours and will certainly try to improve from here on. The kinks have been identified and we will now work with renewed vigor to get it all in place.

The “Traffic Jam problem” has been fixed and the scorecard has been updated. Please let us know in case there are still any discrepancies. We are extending the contest by a couple of more days. The contest now ends on 13th of March, 3 PM IST. We know that there is no substitute for the time spent by all of you on the problem. But this is the least we could do to try and be fair to all.

And do we need to say that we will need your continued support in our endeavor to make Codechef the way you want to see it? It will take us some time to get there. Please bear with us and be with us.

Keep sending your comments and let us know what you think and how can we improve further. Point out our mistakes but please do not hate us.

Anup

All our Programmers of the Month have been brilliant in their own way. While some performed exceptionally well in our contests, others have done a lot in contributing to the site.

This month, as part of our anniversary special, we are picking the best of our past POTMs and are giving him the title of Programmer of the Year 09-10!

Not only has Stephen Merriman performed consistently well in our monthly challenges, but he has also been a generous contributor to our site. We’d like to show our appreciation for all the tutorials, feedback and the consistent help he provides on our forums. Thanks Stephen!

Here’s more from the Programmer of the Year himself:

Name: Stephen Merriman
Age: 23
Institute: none, though I can throw in a shameless plug for my work: http://www.cre8d-design.com
Userid: TripleM

Brief introduction about yourself (under 140 characters): Having not discovered programming contests until university, I now love them, and was very excited when I found a new one in CodeChef.

How/When did you start programming?
It’s quite hard to remember, actually. I remember making games in BASIC on an old Acorn Archimedes when I was very young, and then when my sister took some computing papers at university I would watch/read her textbooks. So maybe somewhere from 7 to 10? After competing in the IMO throughout high school, I never discovered programming contests until part way through university where I competed in the ICPC and found Topcoder among others.

What do you do when you’re not programming?
What do you mean not programming? Oh yeah, I do find time to play soccer during the summer, and attend a weekly pub quiz (sadly, there aren’t enough questions about programming for me to be any good).

What do you like most about CodeChef?
The contests, of course; I love entering any contest I can find online. Plus the fact that all those crazy targets at TopCoder don’t compete, so I actually have a chance of winning

How many hours a day do you program?
Seeing as my job involves programming all day, let alone the time I spend solving problems on SPOJ, CodeChef or competitions like the Codejam, it’s probably too large for me to want to think about!

What’s your favourite book and why?
This is going to sound a bit repetitive after Anshuman and Varun, but make that three in a row for Harry Potter; maybe there’s a connection between programming and magic? I’ve always found novels about magic enjoyable. Plus, I have read all 80 something Agatha Christie murder mysteries (the link is more obvious there, problem solving <-> whodunit).

If you could eat dinner with any famous person (past or present), who would it be and what dish would you have?
Boy, that’s a tough one.. the dish would be roast chicken just because it’s my favourite meal. I’d have to think more about this but for now let’s say Fermat, just to see if he really did have a solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem.

What are your plans for the future?
Currently I’m perfectly happy with my job. I get to work from home for my sister, sleep in a bit, and make websites all day. I can’t see this changing any time in the forseeable future, but we’ll see how things go. Other than that – more top 5 codechef finishes, and getting as far as I can through the TCO + Codejam later this year.

A whole year has gone by since the launch of CodeChef. Initially envisioned as a platform for online competition, where fellow coders from India and around the world would come and test their skills against each other, CodeChef has now become so much more.

With over sixty active CodeChef Campus Chapters in the country, two exciting meetups under its belt, a multi city geek symposium in its first year of existence, an excellent practice problem section, and an active wiki, blog and forums, CodeChef has accomplished a lot in its first year.

Let’s take a look at some interesting facts, figures and milestones that make CodeChef what it is:

• CodeChef has a user base of over 30,000 people globally.
• Our website receives over to 50,000 visits every month.
• Participants are students from 2000 different institutes, IITs, IIITs, BITS, NITs, DCE/DTU, JNTU and professionals from over 1000 different organizations such as  TCS, IBM, Oracle,  Google, Adobe, L&T Infotech, Thoughtworks.
• Prizes worth up to Rs.1,50,000 are given out to Indian and global winners every month.
• Over Rs.18 lakhs in prize money has been given out by since the first CodeChef Challenge in March 2009.
• CodeChef has established campus chapters in over 50 prominent colleges in the country including the likes of IIT-K, BITS Pilani, BIT Mesra, DA-IICT etc.
• The first Meetup was conducted in Mumbai on 18th July 2009. CodeChef’s second Meetup took place at Delhi College of Engineering/Delhi Technological University on 31st October 2009.
• The CodeChef Techtalks, an event that featured international speakers; in Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore took place on the 10th, 11th and 12th of September 2009.
• CodeChef’s Programmer of the Month puts the spotlight on some extremely talented programmers. They have ranged from 17 yrs old Keshav Dhandhania to 33 yrs old Josh Metzler.
• The CodeChef newsletter goes out to 12000 readers every month.
• CodeChef held the Campus SnackDown in January 2010. 639 teams participated and the top 7 teams were flown down to Mumbai for an In-person round.
• CodeChef has over 2150 fans on the FaceBook Fanpage and over 1286 followers on Twitter.
• Hundreds and hundreds of photos make up the CodeChef Flicker stream.
• Through Vimeo, CodeChef has uploaded a bunch of videos to its blogs and even a video tutorial to its wiki!

Come back in a few days to see our exciting addition to this blog.

Also, make sure you keep a watch out for our Anniversary Facebook Contest and our Programmer of the Year!