CodeChef has been serving the competitive programming community for a very long time. Today, incidentally on the occasion of our 72nd Independence Day, we make a digression. We are excited to announce that we have something for our developer community too!

All this while, we have seen many enthusiastic CodeCheffers, taking the pain of scraping the CodeChef website and creating various really cool and useful stuff out of it. This has made us go one step further and provide all our beloved developers and programmers with the power to turn their ideas into reality much more easily.

So here we announce the launch of the CodeChef API Hackathon powered by Alibaba Cloud.

What is CodeChef API?
CodeChef API is an OAuth 2.0 HTTP API, which exposes CodeChef resources and data to the developers. You will get to know all the details about the API once the contest starts.

Why?
There are things that we want to do and cannot do on our own. And, there are things that we do not even know and can be done. This is where the awesome community comes in. We have seen numerous enthusiastic users who scrape our website to build stuff that does wonders.

We believe that the API now opens up new opportunities for our fellow developers from the community, and will help them build useful and relevant apps which can help the growing community.

CodeChef API – The internship project
It started way back in 2015, when two of the community members proposed to us an idea of making a CodeChef Android app and we were so convinced that we immediately wanted them to get started. Yes you read that right, an Android app! We will get to that story some other time.

Soon we realised that it would be much better to have an API first and then build the app. Since then, there have been many changes in our priorities and despite being partly ready to launch the API, we couldn’t give it to you.

Now
We thank Alibaba Cloud, who liked our idea of an API for the community and supported us in being able to bring this API to you. It gives us immense pleasure to let you know that via our First Hackathon, we are presenting you a brand new CodeChef API that you can consume and you can also build your apps and deploy them on the Alibaba cloud.

Interns & Internship
We have always been proud of our interns and always try to have them throughout the year. They are the packets of energy and enthusiasm which fuel the overall work ethics of the team. CodeChef API was one such project and we thank all our interns who have contributed to the project in some way or the other – Vikesh Tiwari (aka vicky), Shivam Khandelwal (aka skbly), Prabhat Awasthi (aka hacker_ratty) and Shivangi Gupta (aka shivangi_gupta -_- ). Go, hound them!

And with this, we also extend a chance to grab an internship opportunity to all the users who come up with great ideas and implement them.

Looking forward to it…

Cheers,
Abhijeet

The most awaited flagship global coding competition by CodeChef will unfold the curtains to its onsite round in February next year. After successfully completing its four editions and witnessing participation from over 29K programmers in SnackDown 2017, we can say that SnackDown has come a long way since its inception in 2010.

We have been bombarded with questions by the community who were eagerly wanting to know the dates for SnackDown this year. We are here to put an end to all these speculations. Coming to the answer you’re all looking forward to: the online rounds will kickoff in October 2018 and on-site finals will take place in February 2019. We’ll post the final schedule for SnackDown in September, so watch this space!

Oleg Merkurev of Ural Federal University and Aleksei Daniliuk of NRU Higher School of Economics from Russia raised the trophy of SnackDown and claimed a cash prize of $10,000

Till now the final round of SnackDown has been an onsite event hosted in India in the month of June-July. This is also the time of heavy monsoons in major parts of the country. To not let the extreme weather come in our way of hosting a glorious finale on Indian soil we decided to keep it in the month of February of 2019.

Stay tuned for more updates to our facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/CodeChef/
Till then, do let us know your thoughts by writing on the comment section below or you can even write to us at: feedback@codechef.com

Cheers!
Team CodeChef

We are happy to announce ShareChat as our official sponsors of our monthly contests.

ShareChat is a social network for the next billion smartphone users. They have grown organically to 18 million active users and are doubling every 4 months. Currently, their userbase is majorly from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, Canada and are expanding at a very rapid pace.

With the volume of users that they are handling comes the challenges of scale. And, that makes them a very exciting technology startup to work for. If you are someone who yearns to be a part of the startup culture and a great technology team then you have another reason to participate in our monthly contests.

ShareChat has been supporting us for a while now, and we hope that together with them we will bring more exciting opportunities for the programming community.

We hope this collaboration will be mutually beneficial and also help the community going forward in multiple ways. Wishing you all the best!

Cheers!

The Chef

What is happening?

In light of the recent discussions in the community over plagiarism charges and how this has affected our users and their ratings, we are taking a few steps to restore order in the universe (and to maintain fairness on our platform). Below, we outline the actions we are taking and the motivations behind them.

What action is being taken?

For users whose ratings have been dropped to zero following plagiarism charges,  we are increasing the rating by a maximum of 800. We have also ensured that user is penalized by at least of a rating difference of 750.

Formally, we are increasing the rating of all those users by X, where X = minimum of 800 and (Y-750) and Y = previous rating before dropping their rating to 0. We guarantee that X is non-negative.

Why is this action being taken?

You may have been following the discussions taking place in our community over the issue.

1. Multiple users whose ratings had dropped to zero following plagiarism charges came to us with the concern that such a massive drop in ratings reduces their incentive to participate in contests.

2. The second concern was that it would take quite a long time for such users to regain their previous ratings.

3. Finally, some of the users with zero rating who had performed better than those with much higher ratings were getting less rating increments, which they found demotivating.

We understand that many of you felt that the decision to drop ratings was harsh and hasty. It was also pointed out to us that because the drop was not implemented after every contest, it was essentially unfair and did not give all users a fair chance to regain their ratings. After hearing from you all on the issue and brainstorming with our panel and moderators, we have come to this decision. We believe that it is the best way to address your concerns while maintaining as much fairness as possible.

How will plagiarism cases be handled in the future?

For all the future plagiarism scenarios, with each cheating attempt, we will decrease the rating of the user by 750 points flat (however ensuring that the rating doesn’t become negative). There will be no reconsideration or changes in our rating system to handle users with zero rating. No requests for leniency in this regard will be considered.

Further, we will be handling the cheating cases month by month without making any delays in the penalty.

We understand how much it affects our community when we have to take such actions. There is also a likelihood that many honest users get unnecessarily affected by the actions of a few. Do understand that plagiarism is an issue that deeply affects us all and we are trying our best to come up with new ways of combating it and making our community a better and safer place for all of you. As always, we’re there to listen to your suggestions.

Happy coding!

The Chef

As you all know, Chef loves to dish out new enhancements during his birthday month, and this time, he’s cooked up something special which many of you have been asking for – a Rating Divisions system!

Users are now divided into two Divisions based on their overall CodeChef rating.

• Division 1: Users with rating >= 1800
• Division 2: Users with rating < 1800

All CodeChef contests (Long Challenges, Cook-Offs and LunchTimes) will now have two parallel contests, one for Division 1 and another for Division 2. A user can participate in only the Division that she belongs to.

The Division 2 contest will have some more easier problems, whereas the Division 1 contest will have a few more harder ones. This means that beginners get to practice on more easier problems, whereas the higher rated users will skip some of the easy problems and focus on solving the harder ones. A Win-Win situation, if ever there was one!

The ratings will be calculated only within your own Division, and hence will be a better reflection of your true skill level.

Also, we can now have more External Rated Contests, which will be rated only for Division 2 users. The Chef has also introduced Unofficial Participation, through which Division 1 users can also submit in such contests, but it will not affect their rating.

And last, but not the least, we hope that it will be further motivation for users to improve their performance and get to compete with the elite!

Head over here to know more about this system.

Cheers,
The Chef

Our newest initiative, the CCDSAP was launched with an aim to level the turf by providing students and professionals with an even opportunity to get certified on a skill that is fundamental to computer science. Soon, we were reminded that there was more than one uneven turf.

Though we priced the certification very moderately and are also giving away early bird discounts, since the launch, we have received several requests from students who are unable to afford the certification fee. Our endeavour has always been to provide a level playing field and hence this is the first in a series of steps that we intend to take, making the certification affordable to all the student programmers in the country.

We are happy to announce a 100% Scholarship for the next CCDSAP Exam, the details of which are as under:

• Winners of the scholarship will be awarded a free registration for the November 19th Exam.

• The participant should currently be studying in a school, college or university in India.

• The participant has to get the best rank in her institution in the November 2017 Long Challenge.

• The participant has to solve 3 or more problems in the long challenge.

• In case of a tie between two participants of the same institution, the participant who achieves the rank earlier may be given a preference. One participant from each institution will be selected.

• The participant will have to travel to one of the 9 cities in which the exam is conducted on the 19th of November. The cities are Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kanpur and Gandhinagar.

• This scholarship is not valid for any other exam date and not transferable to anyone else.

• If you intend to avail this scholarship, you need to fill up the form – https://goo.gl/PSwKrJ. Only those who fill up this form will be eligible.

• After the publication of results of the November Long Challenge, all the candidates who are eligible for the scholarship will be notified via email on how to avail the scholarship. Those interested will need to fill up a registration form to be sent in the email.

• Any applicant found cheating or not abiding by the our Code of Conduct will not be eligible for the scholarship.

If you have any queries, feel free to write to us at help@codechef.com

Cheers,
Anup

Yes, you heard that right. We are launching a brand new certification program on Data Structures and Algorithms. Recent studies have corroborated our belief that a vast majority of engineers in India are unfit for software development jobs, a fact that we identified and took on to fix 8 years ago.

This certification program is a new step in that direction to improve the employability of programmers.

Over the last eight years, we have brushed closely with the need of student and professional programmers to get good jobs and admissions into institutions of higher education. While, we have always maintained to be a platform for learning and competition through fun, over a period of time, we realise that there is a dire need of a good assessment program for the knowledge and understanding of Data Structures and Algorithms which is done in a proctored environment. To validate this, we conducted a survey among our users for which we got an overwhelming response in favour of the need for such a program.

Given the response that we got to the survey, it becomes imperative for us to give it a shot. We believe that a Certification provided by the global experts in the subject will provide a good ground for the students and professionals to assess themselves. It will also provide the software industry a standard to benchmark against and get access to the best students out there. More importantly, it will provide a level playing ground to every software student and professional to choose a career path that she wants to.

Also, based on our survey results and being a not for profit, we will try and keep the cost of this program as low as possible for us to be viable, so that it remains affordable to everyone.

Details of the program:

• We are starting in only 7 cities. We will add more cities in near future.

• There are three levels of Certification. We are starting with only the first two levels – Foundation and Advanced. The Expert level will be added later.

• We plan to have this exam once every month. And, that will depend on the kind of responses that we get. We will keep announcing the dates of the upcoming exams.

• We are launching this at discounted price for the first exam. So grab your seat now!

Over a period of time, we will also try and collaborate with various software organisations and educational institutions to consider the CodeChef Certified students and professionals for job interviews and admissions.

So, do let us know your thoughts and queries so that we can answer each one of them.

Regards,
Anup

No, that is not a spelling mistake.

Since the day we started, we have been a not-for-profit initiative, focused on improving the standard of programming in India and improving competitive programming as a sport.

However, we need money in the same way that a student needs money – but instead of asking for it from our parents (that’s Directi) as we have been doing for the last 8 years, or from our friends (that’s you), we have decided to earn it ourselves.

In the last few years, we started reaching out to schools in our pursuit of bringing informatics to the young guns in India, and we realised that having a steady source of income would help us get there faster.

We will be monetising some of our channels to start a self-sufficient revenue stream, in a way a student takes up a part-time job in a call centre to earn some money. We will also try to use the expertise that we have gained in the subject to offer additional paid services that will add more value to those who need it.

More so, we can assure you that you will not be charged for any of our existing services – it will be absolutely free! And we will continue to remain not-for-profit. Yes, that is right. The money that we make will be invested back in the projects rather than in making us (or our parents) rich.

Our focus has always been, still is, and will always be – learning.

That kind of sums it up, but for those who need more clarity on why we are doing this, let me try to explain.

1. Our parents are not disowning us. They will keep supporting us, but we want to become self-sufficient. CodeChef has been a Directi initiative and will continue to remain so. However, now that the kids at CodeChef have grown up, we believe that we should stand on our own feet. The change that we had envisioned when we started has widened in scope, and so we believe that we will need a lot more resources than what we have right now, and approaching our parents for every single such need seems inappropriate.

2. Why the sudden need for monetising?

   As briefly mentioned above, in the last few years we have realised that if we want to transform the problem-solving landscape in India, reaching out to schools is unavoidable. The challenges that we face are:

   1. The school space is far larger than the college space. The number of schools is an order of magnitude larger than the number of colleges.

   2. Schools are not online. A large majority of school students are not connected to the internet.

   3. Awareness in schools about programming is abysmally low.

   4. Schools are ill-equipped with computing facilities.

   To address the above limitations, we will need access to a lot more resources than we presently have.

3. The goal of this move is to start sustaining ourselves and scale up – earn what we need for our expenses. We believe we can do so.

We are aware that this little blog post may still not give you the clarity you need, which is why you’re welcome to address all your queries to our Twitter handle, using #WhyCodeChefWhy, so that we can better track them and ensure we respond to each and every query.

That is all for now – Code on!

Cheers,
Chef

Our journey with SnackDown 2017 has come a long way in the past 2 months. In this edition, we removed the restriction on team formation. We also ushered in the concept of SnackDown Hubs, which were physical locations set up in 11 countries around the world to bring in coders under one roof to compete in the qualifiers. It was exciting to meet our community members for the first time at such a hub in our own offices at Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

All efforts put together helped make this edition of SnackDown witness the largest and most diverse pool of participants CodeChef had as yet seen in a contest. The first online qualifying round this year saw registrations from 21039 teams. The participants drew from 119 countries and spread across 3431 institutions around the world.

We progressed from there to 12859 in the pre-eliminations. By the eliminations we were left with only 3403 teams competing. It was an exhilarating 5 hour long contest that brought us to the ultimate list of participants for the finals.

The finals of SnackDown are sure to be a congregation of the best of the best. Here is the list of those we are looking forward to join us:

Global Finalists:

1. Global Rank #1 – dalabengba
2. Global Rank #2 – mess_compress
3. Global Rank #3 – umnik_team
4. Global Rank #4 – kuntukuta
5. Global Rank #6 – fansofyjqqqaq
6. Global Rank #7 – snackitmodown
7. Global Rank #8 – anta_t
8. Global Rank #11 – dreamoon_shik
9. Global Rank #12 – team_sua
10. Global Rank #13 – olddriver
11. Global Rank #14 – ssuiggimma
12. Global Rank #15 – lydliyudong
13. Global Rank #16 – login228
14. Global Rank #17 – qls_is_strong
15. Global Rank #19 – mazeshen
16. Global Rank #20 – jinotega3000
17. Global Rank #21 – sequoia
18. Global Rank #28 – mclg
19. Global Rank #35 – math_traitors
20. Global Rank #42 – aimfund
21. Global Rank #50 – unpretired
22. Global Rank #62 – rco_div1
23. Global Rank #84 – team410_228
24. Global Rank #87 – rian_paper
25. Global Rank #98 – qwertier

Indian Finalists:

1. Global Rank #80 – scc_snack17
2. Global Rank #86 – algo_masters
3. Global Rank #88 – fftwreksbitset
4. Global Rank #93 – persistence_sd
5. Global Rank #119 – linearprogram
6. Global Rank #127 – zeross
7. Global Rank #151 – kanpuria_pudia
8. Global Rank #161 – logicmonks
9. Global Rank #162 – bhayanak__maut
10. Global Rank #163 – octane_twisted

School Finalist:

1. Global Rank #30 - hkr0
2. Global Rank #273 - jaimatadixyz

While we wait for the Finales to kick off, we will be sharing some interesting insights into the lives of our finalists through the team profiles. Keep watching this space for more updates!

Regards
Rishabh Jha
Team CodeChef

The Chef would like to apologize for the delay in updating the March contests’ ratings. There had been some issues with the rating calculation code, and we wanted to fix them before updating the ratings. Ratings for all the four rated contests of this month: March Long Challenge, LunchTime and two external rated contests (CookOff was unrated) have been published.

There were two issues:

1. Due to an unintended consequence of a separate piece of code, users who were tied for the same rank in a contest, were being considered as being ranked one after the other by the rating algorithm.

2. The September Long Challenge of 2009 had a contest code which was different from what later became the norm: SEP09 instead of SEPT09. And due to this, this contest was missed during the rating calculation.

Both of these issues have been fixed, and a thorough code-review done. We are positive that there will be no such incidents in the future.

Happy Coding!

- Vishal
Team CodeChef