On January 10th 2010, we at CodeChef witnessed the most awesome teams from campuses all over India battle it out in person at the Mumbai headquarters of Directi. 639 teams of three each, had registered for the CodeChef Campus SnackDown, a two round ACM ICPC styled coding contest. The first round of the SnackDown took place on 21st November 2009. We then flew the top 7 teams from various corners of India to prove their mettle.
The 21 finalists met on 9th January for a pre-event dinner on the night before the contest finals. Here they got a chance to interact with each other, meet Bhavin (CEO of Directi) and mingle with other personnel from Directi.
Good food, interesting conversations and some fun laughs turned the dinner into a fun filled night!
The next morning at 9:30 AM teams met at the DirectiPlex with more food, some table tennis and of course, a 4 hour final on site round of the SnackDown to look forward to!
And now finally, after multiple rounds, tiresome travel and sleepless nights, we present to you the CodeChef Campus SnackDown Winners!
Bhavin and Amit with Yash Kumar (18yrs), Nadeem Moidu (20yrs), and Kunal Jain (19yrs)
Dream is an example of national integration; hailing from Rajasthan, Kerala and Chhattisgarh, these three young programmers met at IIIT Hyderabad. Inspired by their Seniors – The Kings Gambit, they formed their own team - Dream and went on to win the SnackDown!
Ramki and Bhavin with Purav Shah (20yrs), Pratik Tandel (20yrs), Krunal Manik (20yrs)
This team’s friendship goes back to school days. Having started programming in the first year of engineering, they were introduced to algorithms and contests by their friend and mentor Varun Jalan (most of you know him as syco). Under Varun’s guidance team Phoenix was formed and they are soon going to represent India at the ACM ICPC world finals in China.
Bhavin and Yazhini with Akhil Ravidas (20yrs), Abhilash R (20yrs) and Venkatesh Basker (19yrs)
Counter Gambit is formed of three hardcore Southies. Since each of them are from completely different programming backgrounds they have their our own strengths and weaknesses. However, as a team, they are really quick in solving problems which helps them get a head start in most contests, or so they’d like to think 
They too are representing India at the ACM ICPC world finals this year.
The rest of our finalists are (in order of ranking):
Team: TheKingsGambit
Institution: IIIT - Hyderabad
Team Members: Anshuman Singh (21yrs), Gaurav Agarwal (22yrs) and Rajat Goel (21yrs)
Team: BruteForce
Institution: IIITM - GwaliorTeam Members: Shilp Gupta (22yrs) Manyata Goyal (21yrs) and Vineet Chaudhary(22yrs)
Team: CKrackers
Institution: Madras Institute of Technology
Team Members: Rajesh Venkatachalam (20yrs) Rajesh Rajagopalan (20yrs) Gokulakrishnan Gopalakrishnan (20yrs)
Team: DareToCode
Institution: IIIT - Allahabad
Team Members: Imran Khan (22yrs) Surendra Kumar Meena (21yrs) and Tasnim Khan (20yrs)
We had a lot of fun with the CodeChef Campus SnackDown and would love to do something like this again. We also have some fun interviews with the rest of these teams so let us know if you want more insiders information. 
Cheers,
Team CodeChef
Update: Due to multiple requests the onsite contest is moved to January 10th, the online round will take place on November 21st at 7pm.
CodeCheffers,
We are really excited to announce two contests in November. In addition to our 10 day algorithm challenge (Nov 1st - Nov 11th) we are also hosting our first ever “CodeChef Campus SnackDown.”
What is the CodeChef Campus SnackDown?
We will be holding an ACM ICPC style team contest with two rounds and cash prizes of Rs. 3 lakhs! The first round will take place online on November 21st from 4pm-9pm 7pm-12am. The top teams from this round will be flown to Mumbai for a final in-person round on December 5th January 10th. The overall winners will receive prize money and an opportunity to dine with Bhavin (Directi’s CEO)
Who is eligible?
Anyone can participate but only students attending college within India are eligible to participate in the final round (and win prize money).
International participants, worry not, we will be holding a team based contest within the coming weeks in which everyone will be eligible for prizes.
What is the format of the contest?
Standard ACM-ICPC style rules, teams of up to 3, penalties for wrong submissions.
What are the prizes?
We will be giving out Rs. 3 lakhs in prize money, the top teams from each institute will also be recognized and rewarded.
Full details will be announced shortly, so mark the date on your calendar and stay tuned…
Cheers!
CodeChef has come a long way since its beta launch in Jan 09. We hosted our first programming contest in March and soon started looking at other ways we can encourage the developer community. One of our earliest initiatives was CodeChef Campus Chapters aimed at helping students become better programmers. The response from you guys has been awesome and within a few of months we already have 35 active Campus Chapters from all over India.
In an effort to keep you updated with what is happening on all our Campus Chapters we plan to dish out a CodeChef Monthly Campus Newsletter. Here’s what we’ve got for you this month:
Read the entire Newsletter on our Wiki
Banana Soufflés,
Last weekend we kicked off the first (of hopefully many more) CodeChef Tech Talks. We were very lucky to have two awesome international speakers present alongside some of Directi’s finest. We’d like to give a big thanks to our sponsors: ADP, GoodAgile, and Xebia, our hosts: IIIT-Hyderabad and Directi and our Media Partner: ITVidya for making this event possible. Videos of all sessions will be posted soon.
In Mumbai, the day started off with Bhavin (Directi’s CEO) giving an overview of our goals behind CodeChef (in essence to raise the quality of software development in India). He then discussed how to develop a web architecture that is “infinitely scalable.”
Bhavin (left) with Naresh Jain (right)
Owen Rogers followed up next with a session on releasing code to production every week. He gave some insight into how his team works and their philosophy (thin slices, quick releases, continuous monitoring, zero-downtime database deployment, etc…). He advocated that different approaches worked for different teams and described some best practices he feels his team could be doing more of (TDD, pairing, automated testing):
Owen and the crowd
After lunch there was a birds of a feather (BOF) session where audience members suggested topics, and anyone who was interested in participating could join that particular group. Topics included: what do you consider to be “meaningful” work, are estimates for software development projects harmful, what tools do people use to encourage knowledge sharing across their organization:
The final talk was given by Lisa Crispin author of Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams. She discussed the current trends and tools in the agile testing world (like Cucumber for behavior driven development), and shared her insights and experiences.
Lisa (center) with Owen (left) and Naresh (right)
The day concluded with a Q&A with the audience.
The format of the event was pretty similar in Hyderabad and Bangalore though different speakers gave talks alongside Owen and Lisa. At IIIT-Hyderabad Ramki gave a session on RDBS’s vs other data stores for scalability:
Ramki enjoying himself :)
In Bangalore, Naresh Jain gave a talk on Avatars of TDD:
The crowd in Bang
Overall we had a really great time putting on this event. The people who attended the event were awesome, it was a good mix of students and professionals all bringing in different experiences. Everyone was really enthusiastic and actively contributed. We were really happy with the turnout (except for Hyderabad where for some reason 75% of the people who received invites didn’t show up 
).
Generally the feedback we received was positive (do a quick twitter search for codechef_techtalks to see the chatter) though we know there is room for improvement. How can we make this event better? Was the format of the talk ok? More speakers or less? More interactive / hands on workshops? What topics would you like to hear more about? Was the invitation system a deterrent for anyone to participate? If you have any feedback please let us know via email/twitter/or the comments below.
Cheers,
Amit (Chef)
On the 3rd of Sept 2009, I delivered a session at MPSTME, NMIMS (Mumbai), on ‘The Basic Implementation of a Search Engine’.
The crowd attending the session ranged from first year students to final year students and so I kept the session rather basic without going into the details of the subject. The students were bright and very enthusiastic, and the audience participation was simply awesome.
In the session I demonstrated a small Perl Script with a few functions to explain a Crawler, Indexer and Search Logic. I am attaching the code to this post and below is the video of the session.
Lastly, I would like to thank Gaurav Munjal and the entire ACM MPSTME team for all their help.
This session was part of a CodeChef Campus Chapter. Register here to start a Campus Chapter in your college as well.
CodeChef Talk at MPSTME, NMIMS (Mumbai) from Directi on Vimeo.
Cheers,
Vikram
~vix on CodeChef Twitter
CodeChef MPSTME and ACM MPSTME have come together to present “The Open Book Programming Competition“.
As the name suggests, the contestants are allowed to bring books and material related to the languages or the compilers used. The contest is hosted on CodeChef as a part of the CodeChef Campus Chapter Program. This is a closed competition and the contest URL shall be revealed to students present at the venue. So if you are a college student in Mumbai and would like to participate make sure to register and reach the venue on time.
Details of the competition:
Date: 1st September, 2009
Timing: 4 pm – 6 pm
Venue: Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering, NMIMS University, Mumbai.
Registrations: Online Registrations are open at www.theobpc.co.cc . There are limited number of seats and the registrations will be closed as soon as the seats are filled.
The Prizes for the Competition are:
Consolation Prizes to be given as well.
CodeChef MPSTME Chapter is also organizing a session for MPSTME students where Vikram Ghotgalkar, Software Developer, Directi (~vix on CodeChef twitter) will demonstrate a basic implementation of a Search Engine in 30 mins. This will be followed by a prize distribution round of “The Open Book Programming Competition”.
For further details please visit www.theobpc.co.cc or mail in to acm.mpstme@gmail.com
If you’d like to host your contest on CodeChef, feel free to mail us at contests@codechef.com
Cheers!
Anusha
We’re very excited about our latest community initiative – the CodeChef TechTalks. CodeChef TechTalks are India’s premier invitation-only geek symposia. The purpose of CodeChef TechTalks is to promote technical education and knowledge sharing by making internationally renowned speakers accessible to the best software professionals in India.
For the first edition we will be covering three cities – Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad from September 10th-12th. We have Lisa Crispin and Owen Rogers flying down especially to deliver their sessions along with Bhavin Turakhia.
You can find complete details of the event as well as criteria for eligibility here. Like everything else on CodeChef, the TechTalks are not-for-profit. If you think your company can host or sponsor the event then do let them know about us. You can find more information regarding this here.
Spread the word about CodeChef TechTalks, go ahead and share this blog post!
Twinkies,
This past weekend we had our first CodeChef meetup! Against all odds, we were able to host it in our new office, and despite the weather, about 60 people showed up.
We really enjoyed meeting some of you in person. Bhavin started off with the inspiration behind CodeChef and our goals:
Next we asked CodeCheffers to go around and learn more about each other. Everyone received a piece of paper with statements like: Speaks 3 languages, Loves South Indian Movies, Is proficient in Erlang, Has solved 3 hard CodeChef problems. The goal was to get signatures from other people with those attributes:
After some quick snacks:
Go ahead Anshuman... one more Samosa never hurt anyone...
We tested people’s logic skills by having them solve a murder mystery:
No Bhavin the butler didn't do it!
Finally, Varun (aka syco) gave a rousing session on advanced data structures covering stacks, queues, heaps, binary index trees, and segment trees:
The videos from both Bhavin and Varun’s sessions, will be uploaded shortly. We look forward to future meetups in other cities as well. If anyone has any feedback in terms of how we could have made the meetup better, please let us know.
Cheers,
Chef
We are pleased to announce our first CodeChef Meetup - an opportunity for local programmers to meet face-to-face, learn from each other, hangout together and just have some fun. The first meetup will take place in Mumbai on 18th July, Saturday. We hope to expand to other cities soon.
For the first meetup in Mumbai, we’re going to have Varun Jalan, winner of The CodeChef May and June Challenge, take a session on Advanced Data Structures. In addition to that there will be a round of puzzles and you can hang out with the top CodeChef performers.
Click here to RSVP. Check out the complete details of the meetup on the CodeChef Meetup Page.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Hey,
CodeChef.com has some of its merchandise up for grabs. You could be one of the lucky few to get your hands on them!
CodeChef will be posting two brain teasers everyday on Twitter starting 22nd June to 25th June. If you can answer at least one puzzle, you are eligible to win a CodeChef t-shirt. At the end of each day we will randomly pick five names from all the correct entries and send them their prize. At the end of the contest we will select one person who has answered the most puzzles correctly and send them an Amazon gift voucher worth $25 (if there is a tie, a winner will be chosen randomly).
Instructions to participate of the contest
1. Follow CodeChef on Twitter and be on the lookout for two puzzles posted daily around 11:00 AM and 7:00 PM.
2. Once the question is posted, you have 24 hours to submit your response.
3. All submissions should take the form @codechef *your answer* #codechef (Please include the hashtag so we can easily track the responses)
4. Answer at least one question right and you’ll be eligible for a free t-shirt. If you crack both the questions you’ll double your chances for that day.
5. We will declare the winners around 8:00 PM everyday.
6. The winner of the Amazon gift voucher would be declared at the end of the five days (26th of June 09 around 9:00 PM).
7. You can attempt as many questions as you like, multiple times. The more questions you answer correctly, the better your chances will be to win.
Cheers,
Krishna
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