We will be turning 4 by the end of this month and we still feel that we are in an embryonic stage. In our bid to evolve and mature, we bring in new changes that we believe help us to serve you better. We recently introduced some new changes to our long challenge schedule and goodies to be given. They brought smile on your faces. And that made us happy. And now, here we are with another one.

This is one of the many changes that we intend to bring as we step into our fifth year, in our bid to make CodeChef more friendly for all of you. Without making you guess any further, let us talk about it.

In order to clean up our institution database, we have now incorporated a drop down list of institutions for you to choose from at the time of registration. Those of you who are already registered, may also do so by editing your profile. This list comprises of all the institutes across the globe that we have users from until now. Users with proper institute name will be able to avail some really exciting features including the ability to start a CodeChef Campus Chapter on behalf of their institution.

If your institute’s name does not appear in the list, do not frown. You can still register by choosing “Other” in the list, and then entering the full name of your institute. It will come to us for approval and we will try and locate your institution and add it to our database for your classmates. In case we are unable to find it, we may need your help to do so. This will help us clean our database, which becomes essential as we intend to work on some features that will rely heavily on your institutions’ name.

So, we would want you all to use this new feature for getting your institution’s name corrected (if it is already not so).

If you are still frowning or if you want to applaud our new feature, you can always write to us at feedback@codechef.com.

Thanks,
Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef

Let us confess, winters are not our favorite time of the year. They make us lazy and bring us a lot of work! And they also make us present to you something that we had launched way back in 2012 and you are already using!

The “submissions” feature will let you view every single submission ever made on CodeChef, since the beginning of the time! Well, okay, since the inception of CodeChef. The archive of all the submissions ever made on CodeChef (and that is over 1.5 million and counting!) is now available for you to search, sort, see and learn. It might sound too tempting to be true, but it is. And isn’t that awesome? Let us brag a bit and say yes it is. And hold on, the awesomeness does not end there.

In addition to seeing all the submissions, it also allows you to:

• Filter submissions based on any specific “Language”. We have been bragging all this while that we have over 40 programming languages listed! But now you can make use of it to learn your favorite language here. Need to learn input/output in Java, Python, Go, Scala or Erlang? It just a few clicks away.
• Filter submissions based on their “Result”. Now you can see all Accepted (AC) solutions in F# or Scala, ever made on CodeChef! Or how people can get Time Limit Exceeded (TLE) in C programming language!
• Explore submissions made by any specific “User”, for any “Problem” and in any “Contest”. And to assist you in this there is an auto complete feature that just increases the awesomeness.
• And on top of that sort all your filtered submissions based on execution time and memory consumed!

If you have not already explored it, check it out right now here and let us know how much you love us for this.

If you have used it and are in awe, we are dying to hear some praises  And if you still want to play picky, and want us to fix another bug, we will have to hear that too!

In any case, we will be eagerly waiting for your review and feedback as we always do, so please keep them coming.

Till next time, Adios Everybody!

Rudreshwar
Team CodeChef

Hello Guys and Girls,

We are back again with some visual changes – say hello to our new home page. We have been working on this since quite sometime and I am sure you guys will love it Quite a few things have been changed and replaced. Let me try to take you through them – ride along.

The first and foremost thing you will notice is the change in the color scheme. We have tried to use lighter shade which is more pleasing to the eyes. The content blocks are re-arranged and are easy to scan through with bold headlines. We have tried to fit in as more useful content, starting with Recent Questions from our newly re-vamped forums at the centre replacing the old Recent Activity and site wide global Recent Comments on the bottom left corner. We have shrunk the recent activity section to a Submissions link on the right hand block, but fear not because the link now points an entire page dedicated for all submissions across the website. If you have not yet see it, this new page has filtering and sorting functionality to modify the view according to your needs. This page has been on the website for past 2 months and it seems that everyone is loving it.

The newly baptized Recent Questions section fetches the most latest questions from our recently revamped forums. It lists the questions along with the number of views each question received and the last user activity on it. Moreover this section is auto refreshed, meaning you need not refresh the entire page to view the latest questions. We are looking forward to your more active contribution towards our community.

The most lovable section on the home page, the banners have also been given a new look. The right and left hand side arrows have given way to buttons at the bottom of the banner which lists the name of the each banner. We have added a new Performance banner, which can be accessed by pressing the last button in the banner list. This banner will be permanently displayed and show the top contributors on our forums, along with the top long contest and short contest rankers. The top contributors are dynamically fetched from our forums and the latest top five contributors for a given month are listed here. This list is refreshed every 10 minutes. So, from now on, whoever have the highest karma by the virtue of answering most number of questions or getting most votes and has the most activity during the current month will be enlisted here The banners will auto scroll after 4 seconds and if you want to stop this auto scrolling to get a better view of a banner, just hover your mouse over the banner.

The Facebook Fan Box has been changed to match the color theme of the home page and moved to the right hand bottom section and fits quite well with other components.

We have been working hard to try and make the site as useful and as feature rich has possible. This home page design change is a step towards that objective. Hope you guys like the changes. Feel free to let us know what you think about our new home page. Mail it to us at feedback@codechef.com or just post a message on our Facebook Wall.

So long then, till next time.

Best Regards,
Tojo Chacko,
Team CodeChef.

Hola,

First things first, the site is back online and waiting to judge your submissions We made some minor improvements to the site and it is quite visible on the problem page. The meta data section for the problem has been revamped to show only supported languages for the problem and the author of the problem as well.

Never before on CodeChef were you able to correctly guess whose problem you were solving. Now it should be quite eminent after seeing the author info.

We have also made certain changes to the problem submission page. Now the language field drop down pre-fills with supported languages for the problem.

The bug with the code editor has been fixed too. Some of you may have seen it missing from the problem submission page. That issue has been resolved and now it should be visible consistently.

Hope you find these changes useful. Do let us know what you think of them at feedback@codechef.com. We are eager to hear your take on them.

–Tojo,
Team CodeChef.

Dear CodeCheffers,

Moving with time, CodeChef has brought you many changes. This year, with us entering into our 4th year of existence, we introduced a Brand New Forum, where people can interact and share their ideas about any queries related to contests, algorithms and anything related to programming.

We also brought you the new ELO based long contest ratings and improved our long contests by increasing the number of problems and hence providing a something for all – be it a newbie or an expert.

The changes do not stop here. We are committed to giving you a good experience along with your learning. Continuing the trend, we would like to present you some UI (User Interface) changes, which, we believe will enhance your experience on the website.

Here we go with our changes -

THE FLAGS

The time has come to be on the Top. Lead globally or in your own country and bring your country flag up. Yes you got it right , now you would be able to see your country flag on the rank lists for short and long contests. Moreover you would be able to view it on your very own profile page.

THE HIGH RISE

You all must have seen the stock market going high and low. Doesn’t it build up the excitement in the buyer/seller ? So now it is your time to experience the same (and even more) level of excitement. You can see your ratings in the same way. Keep your fingers crossed at the end of each contest to see how much you have gained (lost ). Get to know about others too – how your friends fared in the last contest.

Isn’t it cool? Wait !! We still have one more cat in the bag.

Aren’t you bored of seeing your static rating graph on your profile page?  No!!! :-O That’s really nice of you But we do!

Now you can use your CodeChef handle as your IDENTITY. See your progress report in a graphical way, not only for the long contests, but also for the short one.

And no my dear friends, this time it’s not just “see”! In fact it is “play”, “download”, “print” & “use”. These graphs are not just images. You can play around with them and zoom in for a better view. Download your rating graph in 4 different formats. Print your graph and use it wherever you want to. Put them on your Facebook walls. Share them among your friends.

I hope you all will like to use these changes as much as we have loved bringing them to you. There is still a lot more to come. Stay tuned and enjoy “coding”!

And please please please do not forget to let us know how much you love us. .

With all well wishes “ta-ta”.

Abhijeet,
Team CodeChef.

The celebrations of our 3rd anniversary are not yet over. Its time to rejoice once again as we are launching today the new Questions and Answer styled CodeChef Discuss.

We know we took a while to do this.  It started as an internship project of one of our fellow CodeCheffers, Balajiganapathi in the month of June 2011!  But then we got caught up between various other things and somehow this lost steam. We are grateful to Balaji for taking this up and today we are happy to be able to make “his project” see the light of the day. We are very hopeful that our now dormant community will benefit from this and will become more vibrant. Please read the FAQ for more details about the new forums.

Yes, the new forum site is now live. Once the DNS propagation happens you will be able to visit it at the same old URL. Till then you may face a redirection. The old forums will remain for a while at the new URL.

So what are you waiting for? Let us make asking Questions and giving Answers a fun process and in the process help each other around. For any queries or assistance related to new forums send in an email to help@codechef.com.

And please keep sending us your feedback, both good and bad.

Cheers,
Tojo Chacko
(Team CodeChef)

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.

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.

As we are about to embark into the fourth year of our journey towards providing a platform to the programming community, we are happy to bring about some long awaited changes to our contests. Not to keep you guessing, the first change is that we have added more problems to the longer version of the contest.

Over the last year we have tried hard to bring the best programmers on-board and improve the quality of our problems. I believe and I say with some audacity that we have achieved a part of that goal. We now have the support of the finest programmers from around the globe who are helping us to dish out the best quality of problems for you.

The grapevine has it, that while the quality of our contests has certainly improved, this has also resulted in the level of these contests getting a notch higher and hence there is very little that a novice programmer finds to do in our long contests. We felt that somehow in the process, we have started digressing from our original objective of making a newbie love programming rather than get intimidated. The whole idea of a 10-day contest was to provide an opportunity for every programmer to learn a concept required to solve a problem and get the gratification of solving a problem in a live contest without being bogged down by the constraints of time. Not to forget that all this had to be achieved while being competitive.

To overcome this, we are adding 4 more problems of easier levels to the existing lot of 6. Yes, that makes it 10 problems in every long contest from now on! We believe this will encourage many more novice programmers to come, participate and learn in the process. While we are excited to bring in this change, I am keeping my fingers crossed to see the reaction of people at the top, on now having to solve more number of entry level problems!

It was not a very easy decision for us to take. What this meant was more work for our problem setters, much more work for our problem tester to ensure quality of each and every problem and an increase in our monthly budget. But much more than any of this, the fact that we might be risking upsetting the best programmers to solve more number of easier problems may seem like adding noise to the contest!

However, we feel this change is something that has been awaited since quite sometime now. Hopefully the contest will now have something for everybody. And while we would like to take the credit for this change, it will be grossly unfair on my part, to our awesome problem setting panel who did all the work to help us achieve this. Kudos to all of them for some frenetic last minute effort to bring in this contest for you. Hopefully, you will like it and make our journey into the fourth year much more gratifying.

Please send in your feedback. We really love it. Do not hesitate. Come and participate. We have a few more surprises in store for you! Keep watching this space.

And please, please let us know what you think of this change.

Cheers,
Anup Kalbalia
Team CodeChef.

Hey Guys n Gals,

Amidst all your feature requests we have added the much awaited “deleting your comment” feature. What this means is that now you will be able to delete any comment posted by you without waiting for the admins to approve it! Hope this makes life slightly more convenient for you and also help you to keep the comments section clean.

CodeChef moderators will now be able to un-publish/approve comments that they deem inappropriate directly from the comments section.

Keep dropping in your suggestions to feedback@codechef.com. The next feature to be taken up can be yours.

–Tojo
(Team CodeChef)

Fellow programmers!

This is to inform you that we have secured the cluster judging option on CodeChef; we have always received feedback about the judge’s delayed response-time, and cluster judging will now double the judge’s response speed, such that you can forget the slow judge of yesteryear. You can experience it first-hand at all our practice sections.

We’re encouraging any feedback you can give us regarding anomalies that you may come across while submitting your solutions, and we’ll fix it right away – Once we have ensured our cluster judging system is flawless, we’ll be activating it for our contests.

Therefore, if we can work together on this and work fast enough, we can employ cluster judging for this Sunday’s Cook-off.
So, let’s make this happen!