Challenge Hunt From Idea To Execution
09 Mar 2015Hey! Were you able to solve that problem in the long contest?
If you belong to the coding community, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is the common lingo. I have been a developer for a over a year now but I was new to this type of programming. So, just like everyone else from the community I decided to participate in online programming challenges to sharpen my problem solving skills. CodeChef was the most popular and the only choice among my peer group so that seemed that obvious choice for me to begin. Soon, I realised that apart from CodeChef there were numerous other online challenge platforms like HackerRank, HackerEarth, TopCoder and the likes which offered a variety of programming challenges. After knowing this I felt the need for a place where I could see all the active and upcoming programming challenges from multiple platforms. I asked about this to several of programmer friends and came to know that there was none. Being a product guy I decided to build such a place. When I told my friend Chirrag about this, he seemed equally excited. So we decided to hack on it together.
This was the basis for Challenge Hunt. Here’s how we hacked on it.
The Initial Idea
The idea was simple: to create a chrome extension (since it has the most desktop users) which showed people all the active and upcoming programming challenges. Initially we thought of scraping the data from 4-5 popular online programming challenge platforms and showing it in the extension UI. But when we came up with this idea, we realised that since the problem was so common someone else might have already solved it. It was then that we stumbled across clist.by which had already listed programming challenges from numerous platforms. This made our job much easier and removed what seemed the only hurdle in building Challenge Hunt.
Two weeks of hacking
After two weeks of continuous hacking we were finally able to launch Challenge Hunt. But this wasn’t a one step process. We first prototyped a basic version, showed it to a couple of people and then made changes to it based on the feedback. This happened a few before we started showing some love.
pretty solid idea, I can see this would be so much relevant to a certain class of people. (y)
liked the color selection good work
This is when we considered launching Challenge Hunt
Get on the hunt!
We launched Challenge Hunt yesterday i.e. 8 March, 2015 and are already seeing a good response.
Get Challenge Hunt and get on the hunt!
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