I came across TopCoder, a site for conducting coding competitions. It is a nice idea to get rated against other programmers and improve the skills. Programming on the job is mostly routine and repetitive for most application development scenarios and standard algorithms are almost never used. This will make sure that we don't forget the fundamentals and with time the routine programs will also get better - develop an eye for better processing, efficiency and performance. What I would like to believe is any activity that is even tingling the brain will add some value directly or indirectly to work - something like regular exercise to keep us healthy.
I was curious about any presence of Indians in this. There are thousands of programmers from India and some very good universities, but I didn’t find the country or any university from India featured in the list. This is just confirming my suspicion that we are better in following than leading. Or it could be just that this is not yet known to our brilliant programmers or all the Indian developers are 110% immersed in the work that nobody has time for things like this.
Anyways I am planning to attempt and get a rating sometime to see where I stand.
