For the last 2 months or so I’ve been working on setting up an India specific, online coding coding contest: www.codechef.com. The goal of the site is to identify top technical talent, promote our brand and foster technical competition. It’s a cool project for me ’cause I get to use my existing web project management skills, as well as manage the marketing side (which I’ve never done before). I’ve taken a real interest in social media marketing and am pretty pumped to test out some ideas I’ve had. We will be building a Facebook app, integrating with Facebook Connect, running Twitter contests and doing some other new media-ey stuff.
Last week we soft-launched at a big student festival at the top engineering school in Mumbai IIT’s TechFest. We setup a booth and asked students the output to three code snippits, if they could answer and explain, we gave out some t-shirts. It turns out people will do anythig for free stuff. The booth was packed the entire time. It was a really great experience, interacting with students, talkin’ up CodeChef and walking around wearing a giant chefs hat. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I’m looking forward to seeing how big we can make this.
Some random pics from techfest below (look for the cool chef’s hat)…
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