How Codestrike came into existence ? ✌️

I am a third-year graduate student studying at MIT school of engineering Pune. My majors are in computer science. computer science and engineering involve a lot of programming and logic building skills. However, the college curriculum does not meet these limits. On top of that not being in a top tier college like the Indian Institute of Technology or the National Institute of technology the curriculum was even limited to a certain number of concepts. It focused more on mugging up the knowledge through books and simply writing them in the exam. there was no coding culture or any sort of coding competitions quad programming contests for that matter which were held. so one of my friends named Anant thought of an idea of conducting weekly coding competitions among students and giving away prizes to the winners as motivation further even said that we could take this to the college level and multiple colleges can participate in it. this was the time for the foundation of code strike I remember talking to him over the phone for an hour just to decide the name of the competition.

So we started this competition and we needed a platform where we can create our own coding competitions upload problem statements and participants can solve them. by that time we were in our second year and we didn't know anything about competitive programming or any online platform that existed(yeah that's how bad the coding culture in our college was). We searched a lot and then found the platform called Hackerrank where we could create our own programming contests upload problem statements and the students from our college can solve them. every week we got around 50-100 submissions from which we decided the winner and put the notice on the notice boards. we were running this smoothly and at our own expense. now for us to scale this and involve other colleges we couldn't use Hackerrank anymore because we needed something that's more private and has more features and can acquire a large number of students. 

This is when we decided to build a platform that can have as many features and customizations that we wanted. among the three of us(my co-founders Anant and Suyash) I was more on the side of software development so I decided to create a web app by the name of code strike. after discussing it with my cofounder friends we decided to purchase a domain and start building. we could have asked her college for funds initially but we wanted to prove ourselves first so we built the entire web app from scratch using Python and JavaScript. the features were similar to that of Hackerrank but only more customizable we now had control over users data and over the entire database. the first edition was built and we launched it on www.codestrike.in . it was hosted on AWS. later after building the entire web app we decided to consult our teachers and launch the product in the college. the initial response of teachers was very positive and we thought that we had done it and Codestrike was good to be launched. however later due to some issues we didn't your back from the teachers nor did we receive any guidance further by this time we were building a second and better edition of Codestrike. Yes, that's right we built two editions without the first one even being used. After this, we consulted a lot of teachers in a normal college and the result is the same. they responded positively in the initial stage but later we did not hear back. We realised that only building the platform was not enough we had to show its use case for the teachers to actually consider us. so we started conducting competitions and meetups on our own. the response was not very huge as we didn't have anything to give away for prices. however, we did manage to find a decent number of people who could help us scale up Codestrike. Finally, at the end of my fifth semester, the training for the industry was going to start and the college needed a platform where they could conduct assessments for the students based on this training. this is when one of my teachers Suresh Kapare approached us and told us the requirement. we levelled up code strike again to meet the requirements and the platform was put to use with a grant of rupees 15,000 from the college. since January 2021 the platform is being used to assess students. this is the first time we saw code strike gaining heights. It is being used continuously even now for online training assessment. hope we can scale up the platform more and bring more value to the colleges and students making the assessments easy. another use case of code strike is in the industry for hiring programmers. employees can conduct coding tests and real-time interviews which currently are being held on Google Docs. we have a spectacular platform for real-time interviews on interview.codestrike.in that has a concept like a google meet room for conducting interviews in real-time with a fully functional real-time IDE that can compile code in the cloud itself. We plan on developing both our products simultaneously and add value to the assessment and hiring process. Be sure checkout both the platforms today!