India Hacks Challenge - Put your Grey Matter to test!

Friday March 29, 2013 , 6 min Read

Paul Graham once said - “There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student or a developer”. Such is the power of a good coder who having the right intention and hacking a solution to solve a pertinent problem.

The stage is set for India's biggest hacking competition - India Hacks organized by YourStory.in in partnership with HackerEarth. With over 1,800 participants already registered from over 100 colleges and universities - it's going to be a epic battle of 24 hours to see who'll be crowned winners of the India Hacks challenge.

Each of the participants have to solve five to six tough problems and Top 2 hackers to do so in the shortest duration will each win a cash prize of Rs 60,000 and Rs 40,000 respectively. All Top 10 hackers will win an all-expense paid trip to Bangalore and an opportunity to tour some of the top tech companies in the city. Winners will also get a chance to spend some time with mentors either on phone or in person. And we have some amazing people from the industry as mentors -

Ankur Jain, Director @ Walmart Labs (part of early Kosmix team)
Harish Vaidyanathan, Director Technical Evangelism @ Microsoft India
Jayesh Jose, Distinguished Engineer @ Zynga India
Narendra Bhandari, Director, Software And Services Group, Apac @ Intel
Pieter Kemps, Venture Capital, Startups And Cloud @ Amazon
Rohit Singhal, Founder And CEO @ Sourcebits
Sandeep Kowdley, Technical Director @ Electronic Arts
Saran Chatterjee, VP-Products @ Flipkart
Srikant Sundarrajan, Pricinipal Architect And A Big Data Guy @Inmobi

Speaking about the hacking culture in India and the India Hacks competition, this what some mentors had to say.

Ankur Jain, Director @ Walmart Labs (part of early Kosmix team) - Indian tech eco-system is improving very rapidly. People are thinking of solving problems at global scale which is a good thing. I am very optimistic about the eco-system. Hackers are doers. They don't wait for anyone to tell them what they should do. They make things happens. I would encourage all Indian developers and students to start hacking right away. Don't over analyze whether their idea will work or not. Go and build things. Start now! Break things but move fast! There are millions of talented hackers in India. India Hacks is a perfect platform to showcase their hacking skills. I am sure they will come up with some ideas during this amazing contest. I believe this is the first time this kind of contest is happening at such a large scale! Kudos to India Hacks team in making this happen. I am looking forward to see what hackers will come up during the contest!

**Rohit Singhal, Founder And CEO @ Sourcebits -** With internet use at 10% countrywide and only 3% of mobile users owning smartphones the current Indian hardcore tech/geeks eco-system is by nature still relatively young, but is growing rapidly and that growth will accelerate quickly. Having said that, there’s still a significant culture, and it’s being recognized by the fact that the best VCs and angels in the world are making investments not just in the future of India, but also in the future of that culture. The widespread transition that will take place over the next few years to smartphones as costs continue to come down will drive a massive opportunity in India and it will be unlike anything we’ve seen before. While I appreciate the beauty of elegantly designed UI/UX, I also appreciate the beauty of elegantly designed code. The India Hacks model takes a purist approach by having all participants tackle the same challenges and by focusing exclusively on code. The fact that it’s online and open only to Indian hackers is also intriguing. I’m looking forward to seeing how that opens things up to some amazing talents that might not otherwise get discovered.

Sandeep Kowdley, Technical Director @ Electronic Arts - We've seen that the entire tech landscape across India has been evolving at an extremely rapid pace over the last couple years. At Electronic Arts, we work on some of the most complex technologies & next gen games which require people with an unusual combination of great creativity, passion & top notch engineering talent. With the changing IT landscape, it is extremely critical for students and developers to stay up-to-date with changing technologies, platforms, business trends to ensure they bring in clear differentiators moving forward. I’m highly excited about this initiative from India Hacks! I believe this ignites the competitive atmosphere helping recognize great talent across students and developers here in India. At EA, we look for the crème de la crème of talent and I’m hoping India Hacks would provide us this opportunity!

Harish Vaidyanathan, Director Technical Evangelism @ Microsoft India - The new breed of the Indian techie has very strong tech skills and also a good feel for design/UX. In addition they realize it is not just about good code, it is really about the problem that the code is solving for. We are a developer nation, which is well represented by everyone wanting to solve problem, either through sheer ingenuity or plain jugaad. What we need in good measure now, is for people to identify pain points & tackle them with the same ingenuity and smarts. Really excited to have a platforms for hackers of India to unite. Am really looking forward to killer ideas that have the potential go beyond “birds flying through outer space and hitting at pigs”!

If you are up for the challenge, then register now for the India Hacks competition by signing up here - http://indiahacks.yourstory.in/ The contest will start at 9PM IST on 30th March, 2013 and will end at 8.59PM IST on 31st March, 2013. Rules and details of the contest are as follows:

The contest consists of five challenges — a mix of algorithm puzzles, API based problems and a Codegolf challenge
For API based games, the results will be declared after running all the API solutions.
There will be some penalty for submitting the wrong solution to some questions, so watch-out for that
Final decision of the contest solely rests with the contest admins and no queries will be entertained in the matter.
Participants are advised to refrain from discussing strategy during the contest.
Any case of code plagiarism will result in disqualification of participant from the contest.
The participants can directly code on our interface. We support 8 major languages and you can look at the environment in which we run your code.

For registration and more details, please visit - http://indiahacks.yourstory.in/. If you have any queries, feel free to reach out us at: [email protected]

GAME ON!

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