Who Knew - Coding competitions have gone mainstream

I never have been one for certifications or test taking. I do enjoy challenges. Such as it gets you focused at the specific skill at hand. For example, I have done fitness challenges over the past few years. Also, I am a regular at playing fake sports challenges known as Fantasy Sports. Anyway, with all these self learning resources available on the web it was bound to happen. Coding challenges. A sites in that space is Top Coder what even has resources to practice up on their wiki . Or how about javascript under pressure ? Moreover, Stanford has a course Introduction to Competitive Programming Contests, and Google has codejam .