We turned three. Happy Birthday to us! :)

3 min read

Today, as we step into our fourth year, we are embraced by a gamut of emotions. We feel as fluttery as we did when we had started. And at the same time we also feel confident about what we are doing and all that we intend to do. Three years have passed by, but it does not seem that long. It was just the other day that we started trying to provide some sort of a platform targeted primarily towards the Indian programming community and fighting hard to come to terms with the challenge. Today, we not only have the Indian programmer in our contests, we also have the best programmers from across the globe joining hands with us to engage the community and make it exciting, competitive and a fun learning experience for all.

However, the path till here has not been without any hiccups. We have faced many challenges in between – both small and big, some good and some bad, some that we knew how to handle and some that we learned only when they hit us. We have certainly not been perfect. All this made us believe that we have seen it all. But we know that there is a lot more to come and we are not taking it easy. If anything, we only feel confident. The appreciation emails and comments that we receive provide us an impetus to give that extra bit.

And the journey has been a thorough learning experience for each one of us too. Not that we saw ourselves here when we started. And we are happy that we are here today. This wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions of various people who have helped us in our endeavor:

  • The brilliant problem setters and testers who have created and validated the amazing collection of problems that we can boast of today,
  • The SPOJ team which has been tirelessly working in the background to give us a very powerful judge program,
  • The community out there that is helping other programmers to resolve their doubts,
  • The various support teams and people here at Directi, who enable the functioning of the CodeChef team,
  • The ex-members of our very own team,
  • And finally and most importantly you all for your participation and absolutely amazing feedback and critique.

We feel deeply grateful and humbled to have all your support today.

Let me take this opportunity to try and summarize where we stand after these 3 years:

  • What started as a unique 10 day long contest hosting platform, we quickly added to it the shorter format and will be hosting the 20th successful short contest this month.
  • The user base has grown close to 1,00,000 globally.
  • We have a whopping number of 1793 unique problems in our practice section and it is growing by at least 24 problems per month.
  • We have hosted close to 200 college contests other than the regular contests conducted by us.
  • Our problem setting/testing panel has grown to a size of 50 including many of the top programmers from across the globe.
  • We have had 8,77,447 submissions to problems made by 33151 different users/teams and this will be stale data by the time you are reading this.
  • We received more than 600 emails from the community and responded to each one of them in the last year alone.
  • We have Campus chapters in almost all the prominent and many more colleges from across the country.
  • We have distributed goodies to more than 35 cities in India and 80 cities to other parts of the globe just in the last 4 months.
  • We introduced the find a bug and get a goody policy and have given away 10 t-shirts to people who have helped us in finding bugs as a token of our appreciation.
  • More than 15000 fans are on our Facebook page and we have close to 2500 followers on Twitter.

Today, we are on the doorsteps of addressing one of the many issues in our long list of “to be done’s”. We are about to launch a new Forum. We have received a whole lot of feedback from you guys to make the forums more interesting and active. We have been working on it all this while to present you a Question and Answer Style forum, which we believe is more suited to a community like CodeChef. Keep watching this space on more about it. They will be up soon.

We will also be changing the present long contest rating system to the more dynamic ELO based rating system by the end of the running contest. Hopefully it will make the game more exciting and competitive. Next in line will be the revamp of our tutorials/editorials sections. This is one area where we have received a lot of feedback to improve upon. We have been able to do only so much till now. Hopefully this will change soon.

Yesterday, we took time off from work and pampered ourselves in celebrating our third anniversary as a gesture of patting us on our back! Please check out the photos and spare a moment to wish us a Happy Birthday. ๐Ÿ™‚

We have grown by leaps and bounds and we cannot thank you enough for this. We have started expanding our dream to provide to all the students across the globe the best fun learning platform in the field of programming! We still have a very long way to go and with all your support we know we will be there. Without you, without your feedback all this was unachievable. We feel happy, we feel humbled, we feel confident and we feel hopeful today!

Do keep sending your feedback. We love it. Thank you.

The CodeChef Team,
Suraj Sharma, Tojo Chacko, Abhijeet Pandey and Anup Kalbalia.

Exciting Updates for the month of June 2022

Updates in the Practice Section We have launched the Practice skill score. It contains Platform statistics: Where you can see the overall stats of...
surajmsharma
1 min read

Weโ€™re Celebrating Our Birthday Month, And Thereโ€™s Some Exciting…

The Chef turns 13 this month, and as we step into our promising teen years, weโ€™d like to bring you some good news.  Special...
debanjan321
1 min read

Exciting updates for February 2022

A month back we re-designed the practice landing page to improve the user experience. That was just the start of some amazing enhancements that...
surajmsharma
1 min read

13 Replies to “We turned three. Happy Birthday to us! :)”

  1. Happy birthday, CodeChef. I appreciate your great enthusiasm and effort, thank you very much. Wish CodeChef better and better in the future.

    A small piece of advice: After logging in CodeChef, one should be able to comment on any blog post easily WITHOUT filling in email or sth. like that as at present which is inconvenient and unreasonable. ย 

Leave a Reply