[Inpycon] [PyCon 2013] Programming Challenges, Hackathons & Sprints, in Python at PyCon

[Vivek Prakash]

Hi,

I am Vivek Prakash, co-founder of HackerEarth [1]. I am new to this mailing
list and I came to know that Pranjal has proposed an algorithmic
code-sprint based on Python programming language. This is really a
fantastic idea and it will only help in making Python more popular among
students and colleges. Such online programming competitions has the added
advantage that they are not localized and can be accessed by people all
over the world, which makes them even more fascinating.

HackerEarth is quite popular among students in colleges for the programming
competitions. Mainly we help companies to conduct open programming
challenges to find talents distributed across the country. Recently InMobi
gave job offers to 7 students directly through a programming challenge [2].
However, students and colleges use HackerEarth platform for hosting their
own competitions. This is used by most of the IITs and NITs currently, e.g.
IIT Guwahati, IIT Ropar, IIT Mandi, BITS Pilani, DAIICT, NIT Warangal, NIT
Surathkal, etc. and they have hosted more than 50 online competitions in
just last six months.


So I propose that PyCode 2013 (name suggested by Pranjal) can be very
efficiently hosted on HackerEarth without any constraints. The native
audience is very large, so the contest can be easily made popular.
Answering the Kiran's question that How can we organize the contest with
all the talks going on - I think this will be separate from the main event.
PyCon India will have to just spread the word that there is a Python
specific programming contest being conducted online. This will mainly
attract the students and those who are interested in solving algorithmic
problems.

We will happy to share the result of the programming contest with the
Python community and build further relations. As far as I know, there has
not been any such Python specific programming contest till now in India,
and this will certainly help us to gauge how popular is Python in colleges
among students apart from the open-source popularity. We do have some
metrics which you seen here [3] and here [4].

We at HackerEarth also use Python/Django as the primary backend and have
built some cool technology to handle the application, infrastructure and
scaling issues. We have already processed over 300,000 code-checker
requests in last 6 months. We are a team of 8 incredibly talented people
[5]. You can check out our engineering blog here [6].

We are all attending PyCon India 2013. Let me know how we can take this
forward. Looking forward to an exciting Python programming contest!


[1] http://www.hackerearth.com/
[2] http://www.hackerearth.com/inmobi-hiring-challenge/
[3]
http://www.hackerearth.com/india-hacks-2013/analytics/#/language-analytics
[4]
http://www.hackerearth.com/inmobi-hiring-challenge/analytics/#/language-analytics
[5] http://qr.ae/pTKek
[6] http://engineering.hackerearth.com/


Cheers,
Vivek

Vivek Prakash | HackerEarth <http://www.hackerearth.com/> | Co-Founder  |
vivek at hackerearth.com | Follow us on twitter:
@HackerEarth<https://twitter.com/HackerEarth>
'Like us': http://www.facebook.com/HackerEarth
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