An upcoming sport - Coding Competition

India has never made it big in renowned inter-collegiate programming competitions like ACM ICPC or IEEE -IEEEXtreme. The 2011 ICPC and IEEEXtreme competitions had first Indian teams ranked at 42 and 105 respectively. Not to take away anything from the teams, but this is hardly anything to be proud of from a country which produces approximately 4 Lakh (1 Lakh = 100K) engineers annually. In fact, if we consider the fact that IT industry has been the darling of the Indian economy for a past decade, the results are downright poor. For a country having dearth of technical talent and good English speaking skills these results are just not good enough.

The reason is obvious, there are not enough domestic "tournaments" which these colleges can take part in and hone their skills before bursting on the international skills, whereas their international peers have already solved dozens and dozens of programming problems "just for fun". These countries  / universities take pride in organizing such events. Participants receive vociferous support from peers and well-wishers and Coding Competitions are nothing short of an admired sport. We in India are far far behind on this aspect.

This article is inspired by the fact that India's largest IT company - Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is conducting a pan-India coding contest that is expected to attract thousands of teams from hundreds of colleges. The pleasure of being able to participate in such events is a reward in itself, but from what I have heard and read on the net, the prizes for winners are attractive too. Prizes include iPad 2 WiFi, 16 GB, Smart Phone, Kindle, Digital Photo Frames, IEEE membership etc. How I wish the clock winds back by a decade where I as a collegian could have a shot at these prizes :(

The name of this competition is CodeVita and requires students to register in order to participate in the event. The registration URL is http://tcscodevita.com and it seems that the student community is responding well to this opportunity. The schedule as advertised on the site is as below.

TCS CodeVita Schedule (Source: http://tcscodevita.com)

Registrations opened at 3 PM IST on 9th July 2012. The site is not yet indexed by Google or other search engines which could make this post a very useful one :). Considering that the site is so fresh that Google has not yet indexed it, it is heartening to know that registration count has already reached 3 figures within a few hours of opening.

Screenshot of the registration site

Spread the word out. Let eligible college students know that honour, glory and oh yes, the prizes await them. I for one will be interested to see how it pans out. Will you be interested?





Disclaimer:- The author works at TCS. This blog is NOT an official source of information about CodeVita. Since the author is a passionate programmer and the source of action is so near to him, it is but natural for the author to talk about it. Is that not why people blog?