I have a dream

I am no Martin Luther King, but I am going to borrow his line because I have a dream too.

 

One of my dream is to see my younger brothers and sisters studying in colleges go and win prestigious programming competitions and make a name for their Alma Maters and themselves. A decade and a half ago when I was studying, computers were very costly, there was no Google and certainly nobody in India at least regarded programming capabilities as a serious skill. Today things have changed.

 

Today, having good programming skills can open up a lot of doors for you. From simply earning a source of livelihood to catapulting you to fame, the possibilities are endless. This aligns very well with TCS' vision of promoting Programming-As-A-Sport. Am personally very grateful to TCS for allowing me to work on conducting CodeVita and taking the vision forward. And now that I have the opportunity, I want to create opportunities for all you youngsters that I never got when I was your age.

 

Conducting programming contests, that too on a national scale for a country like India (today its only-India but tomorrow the whole world might be our stage, who knows) is no mean task. Approximately 100K students are expected to appear for the contest in a span of 24 hrs. Supporting such large concurrency requires a lot of software engineering. Have you ever tried measure how much system resources are consumed when you compile your program, when you link and load the program and finally when you execute it? I bet, you will agree that the values are non-trivial. Now imagine thousands of programs from various participants being submitted to the system. Every second, hundreds of compilers need to be spawned to cater to these compilation and execution requests. Remember we are talking about 7 languages - C / C++ / Java / C# /Perl / Python / Ruby. Managing these requests within the constraints of available computing power requires lot of performance engineering of the whole software stack used to build the system.

 

TCS management has shown the good will to conduct this initiative and TCS engineers have created the platform. All that is now awaited is students such as yourselves to participate honourably in the contest. The contest is open book and internet-enabled. You are allowed to refer any electronic and paper resources, but we expect the participants to follow the Honour Code i.e. Participants MUST submit only their original work. Participants MUST also NOT discuss or expose the contest problems with anyone except their team mate.

 

Personally, I feel its a confluence of many factors that is making conducting such large scale talent identification possible. First and foremost is the initiative of the world-wide IT industry to tap and nurture talent right from the very beginning. Companies recognizes the importance of attracting talent into the industry and is collectively making efforts to improve industry-academia interfaces. Second is the technology maturity such as - Cloud Computing for making availability of resource on-demand a reality, Rise of open source and free technologies which can be used for conducting contest such as these; Realization of the fact that sound Programming skills are the basic foundation for a high-growth technology-oriented career path. Third is the fact that User-generated content and data has increased so alarmingly in last few years that even non-IT industries across the world now need Data engineering and Automation skills which are, again so dependent on programming skills.

 

So now that the second Season of CodeVita has gone live, take full advantage of the platform that you are being offered. Login to https://tcscodevita.com . Bring out the passionate programmer in you and may the best of you win. All the Best !!!