Directi Corporate Blog

Directi, the leading internet products company, today announced the formal launch of CodeChef – India’s largest and only non-commercial, online programming competition. CodeChef provides a platform for practice, competition and improvement for student and professional software developers across India.

Sharing his views at the launch, Mr. Bhavin Turakhia, Founder, Chairman & CEO, Directi said, “In the last few years while the engineering colleges have mushroomed all over the country, the curriculum in most colleges does not truly recreate real world scenarios and allow budding software developers to collaborate with professionals.”

The IT-BPO sector over the last decade has been known as a high-growth industry contributing close to 5.8% of India’s GDP and employing over two million people. In spite of such a large IT talent pool, India has yet to develop a globally recognized software products company of the size and scale of a Google or Facebook.

Out of all students in the top 100 tech universities globally only 0.67% are educated within India. This is a significantly small percentage considering that India houses one-sixth of the world’s population.

Mr. Turakhia further added, “We designed CodeChef as an initiative to supplement the Indian education system by enabling knowledge sharing, encouraging collaboration and driving learning through competition. We are determined to bridge the gap and help aspiring software developers in India morph into highly talented professionals.”

Since CodeChef’s inception five months back, more than 250,000 individuals have visited the website and over 10,000 users have submitted their code. Featuring monthly contests in more than 35 different programming languages, CodeChef also has big prizes. Winners of each contest can win prizes of up to Rs. 50,000, recognition from their peers and an invitation to compete at the CodeChef Cup, an in-person competition scheduled for the end of the year.

In addition to practice problems and monthly contests CodeChef also works with students and professionals through its campus chapters and TechTalks programs. CodeChef TechTalks promote technical education and knowledge sharing by making internationally renowned speakers accessible to the best software professionals in India. The next series of talks will be held in Mumbai on Sept 10th, Hyderabad on Sept 11th and Bangalore on Sept 12th.

For more information please visit (www.CodeChef.com)

Directi, a 300+ million dollars group of businesses that develops innovative mass-market Web Products, inaugurated its new state-of-the-art facility in India – ‘Directiplex’. Located in Mumbai, the facility has been created to cater to the consistent growth in Directi’s businesses and employee talent base. Spread across 120,000 square feet, Directiplex has a capacity of 1500 seats and boasts of some unparalleled amenities.

The facility currently houses the 550+ employees who have been the drivers for the success that Directi’s businesses have seen over the last 10 years. Directi has an aggressive strategy to continuously hire the finest talent and Directiplex with its large scalable infrastructure is well poised to support the next level of growth.

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Bhavin Turakhia, Founder, Chairman and CEO, Directi, said, “Starting from a one room office back in 1998, to moving into this large world class facility, Directi has come a long way indeed. We hire only the best talent from a large pool of talented software developers offering them some of the most challenging assignments, advanced career development opportunities and a work environment that fosters innovation. Directiplex aptly accommodates this need and boasts of advanced facilities that create an environment to enhance employee efficiency.”

He further added, “At the end of the day a happy individual makesan efficient employee and that is what we aim to achieve through the innovative deployment of technology, ergonomics and recreational facilities at Directiplex.”

Directi constantly strives to provide a work environment that is conducive to creative thinking and instils a sense of well being amongst employees. The facilities team at Directi is always researching on ergonomics that are related to the environment, seating, lighting, workstations, etc. Any tool, device or software that can help Directians perform better is implemented.

Directi has instituted a number of innovations at the Directiplex with respect to office design, workstation design, chair design and layouts in an effort to create one of the most productive work environments in the country.

Directi was host to the ILUG-Bom (linux user group mumbai) and Mumpy (mumbai python user group) on Sunday 8th march 09. This has been the second time that we have taken care of the venue and hospitality requirements for these meets, the previous one was held on 14th February, 09.

Rajeev R. K. did a presentation on video conferencing using open source tools. He also gave some information on OSGRID which is mainly used by different universities for video conferencing.

Baishampayan Ghose then took over with an introductory session on python programming language. He went on to share some information on Google App engine which is also based in python.

All in all the event went well and we’re looking forward to the next one : )

~ Gaurav Chaturvedi

With a plethora of large scale Internet products in development, we at Directi are posed with a host of exciting challenges everyday. We would like to have on board those with aptitude and attitude to overcome any challenge.  Keeping this in mind we have created a dedicated puzzles section on our careers space

Our purpose of having a puzzles page, is to understand what a developer can do to chase a problem. Solutions to such problems go a long way to explain numerous traits of a developer like problem solving skills, understanding of algorithms and data structures, simplicity of expression and thoroughness of programming knowledge to name a few.

For a challenger, the thirst for a new challenge can never be quenched; and an impressive solution will show us if a developer has what it takes to be a part of Directi.

~ Co-authored by Anup and Ramakrishna

Directi sponsored IIT Mumbai’s Techfest that was held over the weekend. We were the Golden Edition sponsor, sponsor for Technoholix as well as Codecamp, all rolled into one. At the Technoholix night, 3Run from UK enthralled the audience the audience by fusing Martial Arts, Free-running and Parkour and Action Team from Turkey put up a unique acrobatic-basketball performance.

Techfest also served as a soft launch pad for CodeChef.com – our nation wide coding contest portal. Our booth was bustling with the computer science legion eager to attempt the questions and win freebies.

Although it was a Sunday, the lecture hall was packed with students excited to attend sessions on Automated Testing v/s Manual Testing by Bhavin, amongst others. You can browse through the PPT as well as download it from our wiki.

All in all, Techfest was a pleasant experience. Kudos to our team of enthusiastic developers and community evangelists that made this a success!