CodeChef is a not-for-profit educational initiative by Directi, an Indian software company. It is a global programming community that fosters learning and friendly competition, built on top of the world’s largest competitive programming platform. We have also built a large community of problem curators.

CodeChef was created as a platform to help programmers make it big in the world of algorithms, computer programming and programming contests. We host three featured contests every month and give away prizes and goodies to the winners as encouragement. Apart from this, the platform is open to the entire programming community to host their own contests. Major institutions and organizations across the globe use our platform to host their contests. On an average, 30+ external contests are hosted on our platform every month.

We also partner with colleges and groups to create local CodeChef Chapters, meet-ups, orientation sessions, programming workshops. In addition, we sponsor coding contests and teams of Indian programmers as part of our Go for Gold Initiative.

How it all started and when?

It was in the year 2009 that we had started CodeChef. The goal was to improve and expand the Indian programming community. This goal was shaped by the following turn of events. Directi had made its first visit to a campus for hiring freshers in the year 2009. It was a phase in Directi, when we as an organisation wanted to make a transition. We wanted to build some great products and for that we had to hire the best talent from across the country. It was a big leap for us. The question was how? We came to know about the ACM-ICPC through a few of our lateral hires. We explored more and it is then that we figured out for the first time, the value of competitive programming, also termed as Sports Programming. There was a direct correlation between the best software engineers and the best competitive programmers. While we did find a path towards our hunt for talent, we realized a bigger problem that India was facing.

We came to know how poorly India has been performing at this prestigious international programming event. In spite of the vast amount of intellectual talent available in the country, our performance has not been close to top notch. It was disheartening to see India lagging behind so much when it came to solving complex programming problems. We launched CodeChef as an experiment to address this situation. We wanted Indian students to have fun while improving. It was also important for us to bring the global competition home, so that we can learn to compete with the best out there.

In 2010, we had launched the Go For Gold program. The goal of the Go for Gold Project is ambitious: we want an Indian team to win the ACM-ICPC contest, the most competitive programming challenge in the world.

Over the last six years, we have taken some steps forward. Today, it won’t be incorrect to say that students in most of the top tier engineering colleges in India are making use of the platform.

Over a million programmers worldwide have joined CodeChef so far, and we're always looking for more.

Initiatives taken up by us

• Host your own programming contest: We provide our platform to any educational institute and organization across the globe to conduct their own programming contests. We take care of the infrastructure, platform and support aspect of hosting a contest for them. For educational institutions, it comes at absolutely free of cost, however, this will be a paid service for businesses.
• CodeChef Campus Chapters: These are programming clubs targeted specifically towards competitive programming, which are guided and mentored by us. The idea behind them is to create a strong culture of competitive programming across all colleges and schools in India and exchange knowledge amongst themselves using our platform.
• Evaluation platform for teachers/educationists. Collaboration with various education institutions like NITTR, IIIT Delhi, IIT Madras, NIT Trichy, IIIT Hyderabad, Amritapuri College of Engineering. One of the major success of these collaborations was the inclusion of competitive programming in IIIT Delhi’s curriculum. A detailed case study of its inclusion can be found here: https://news.iiitd.ac.in/sites/default/files/docs/news/Case_study_IIITD_CP.pdf.
• CodeChef for Schools: We have started promoting about competitive programming amongst the high school students by creating awareness about the International Olympiads for Informatics (IOI).
• CodeChef Certified Data Structure & Algorithms Programme (CCDSAP): We conduct Data Structure and Algorithms exam under an invigilated environment to assess proficiency in Data Structure and Algorithms. It is our mission to provide a reliable, valid and fair method of assessing the skills and knowledge needed to become better programmers and develop a community of highly skilled certified professionals who are good problem solvers.

Contact

If you have any suggestions on how we can make CodeChef better, or if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch. Just use feedback@codechef.com.