Yasou CodeCheffers,
We are pleased to announce that CodeChef, as a part of our Directi’s Go For Gold Initiative, will be partnering with IIT-Kanpur to bring to you IOPC 2012 programming contest. The contest is open to all and will be a team based contest. Register your respective teams by clicking on this link. Go get started!
The contest duration will be 24 hours from 14th January, 2012 1200hrs to 15th January, 2012 1200hrs.
To be eligible for prizes, the teams need to be comprised of students who are currently registered in some university only. It is not necessary that all students be from the same university. Also, you need to be registered on the Techkriti IOPC website to be eligible for the prizes. The registration for the same is here. For detailed rules of the contest checkout the contest page.
Good Luck for the contest. Hope to see you there.
Tojo,
Team CodeChef
The Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, India cordially invites you to be a part of online programming contests,Alkhwarizm and Limite-De-Plazo, organized as a part of our annual fest, Effervescence.
These programming contests are brought to you in partnership with the Directi Go for Gold Initiative.
Alkhwarizm will start on 1st October , 7.00 pm ( GMT +5.30 hours) ( Other Time Zones )
Limite-De-Plazo will start on 2nd October , 7.00 pm ( GMT +5.30 hours) ( Other Time Zones )
Total prize money for Al-khwarizm and Limite-de-Plazo is 35,000 INR ( $775 ).
For registration please visit either of the links
Cheers!
Team CodeChef
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
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