Indian Super Coder Overthrows World Coding Grandmaster At Code Gladiators 2022, Claims The Champion’s Title & Rs 3 Lakh Prize

It’s a narrative straight out of a Bollywood film script where two ex-champions fight it out for the winner’s crown and the Indian super coder edged out the world grandmaster to bring home the top coding title. The battle in question here was the finale of the world’s biggest coding competition - Code Gladiators 2022. IIT-Delhi’s Kalash Gupta (1st runner-up of Code Gladiators 2021) fought tooth and nail against the title’s defending champion Yury Pisarchyk and 3.3 Lakh other participants and won the title. With this, the UK-based ex-champion Yury occupied the 1st runner-up spot. Simply put, the winner and 1st runner-up of the 2021 edition exchanged their positions at the winner's podium this year! 

The 22-year-old, Delhi-based Kalash Gupta is not new to the coding circles. An avid programmer, this fresh graduate already has half a dozen coding titles under his belt. He participated in Code Gladiators 2020 & 2021 editions too and reached up to the runners-up positions in these editions. “My victory this year means that I’m getting better at competitive coding,” said a jubilant Kalash Gupta. 

Code Gladiators is an annual coding competition organised by India’s largest technology community - TechGig. Here, top coders compete to showcase their coding excellence to the tech industry and earn laurels and jobs with top companies. This year, Code Gladiators celebrated its ninth edition with 3.3 Lakh registrations, which is a 6% Y-o-Y increase in participation. The most significant jump was noted for the registrations of women coders which noted a 65% increase in 2021 v/s 2022. Precisely put, about 95-Thousand women coders registered at Code Gladiators 2022!

This year’s edition saw over 2-Thousand international coders from 86 countries at the competition. The top five countries for participation were Canada, Australia, Austria, the UAE and the US. In fact, 3 coders were from war-torn Ukraine as well. All the coders fought the coding battle for 125 days and 18 winners took home Rs 50 Lakh at the grand finale event. 

This year’s Code Gladiators hosted one open codeathon and 4 theme hackathons, namely: HP Machine Learning, NTT DATA AI Hackathon, KoreAI Intelligent Virtual Assistants, and Microsoft Azure Women’s Hackathon. Nineteen corporates and coding communities, and five tech bloggers partnered with this year’s edition. They included Oracle, PayFair, Hewlett Packard, NTT DATA, Kore AI, Microsoft Azure, Persistent, Colruyt Group, RenewBuy, Providence, Publicis Sapient, AllState, All Scripts, and IG Group. 

Sanjay Goyal, Business Head, TechGig thanked all these partners and applauded the winners. “TechGig’s vision to bring the best coders on one podium to encourage coding innovation has always found enthusiastic support from technology companies. At a time when veterans talk about the scarcity of tech talent - especially in niche technologies - Code Gladiators hosted 4 theme hackathons with over 40-Thousand participation in technologies such as AI, ML, Cloud etc. We had 95-Thousand women coders registering for this competition, again defying the notion that female tech talent is tough to find. This makes me believe that Code Gladiators is the no #1 platform for the developers, by the developers.” 

This year’s edition was a total hit on the digital and social landscape too with a total of 11.2 Million impressions. Its social media hashtag #ComeCodeConquer garnered over 628 social media posts from participants, ex-winners, tech leaders, corporate partners, tech bloggers actively posting about how #CodeGladiators brought together lakhs of coders with technology companies. As Rishabh Rathi, a participant and ex-winner stated, “Code Gladiators gave me an independent podium to showcase my tech skills and ideas to top leaders directly. This access to leaders is difficult to seek otherwise.”. 

As for the champion, Kalash Gupta, he still feels that there is a lot to do for him in competitive coding. Fresh out of IIT, he has taken up a job where coding is one of the ‘many things that he will be required to do’. Here’s wishing him and the other winners all the best.  

The winners include:

Champion: Kalash Gupta

1st Runner up: Yury Pisarchyk

2nd Runner up: Yash Shah

3rd Runner up: Piyush Garg

4th Runner up: Naitik Varshney

Code Diva Award: Aanshi Bansal

More winners were announced for the four theme hackathons. All winners’ details are available at https://bit.ly/3QBA3ES

About TechGig 

TechGig is a young and enthusiastic technology company, offering cutting-edge solutions to its clients using innovative technologies. We help our business partners realise their true talent and business potential using our specialised skill assessment, community engagement and recruitment solutions.