As TopCoder and CloudSpokes integrate, the APIs are going to play a critical role. TopCoder has already started work on a API, which can be found here. That API is built on a Java stack.
In order to accelerate development we are looking to move some of the API work to use a more cloud-friendly approach built on NodeJS. This is complicated by the fact that the back end of TC relies on an Informix DB.
See the Deployment Guide for detailed instructions.
NOTE: You should develop and test using 64bit linux. To date we have validated successful deployments only on Ubuntu 10.04 and Centos 6.4. Other flavors/versions of 64bit linux should work, but have not been validated. OS X and Windows based operating systems most likely will NOT work.