Late 2010:

• Graduated with Master of Science in Computer Science

2011:

• Software Engineer at Teradyne, Inc (Feb 2011 – April 2011)
• Software Engineer II at Oracle Coropration (April 2011 – Present)
• I ./make Java
• Move to a new apartment
• Parents visit Amerrrricaaa!
• Graduation walk

Travel:

• Washington DC
• New York City
• Niagara Falls
• San Francisco
• Houston
• Las Vegas

Items checked-0ff from To-do list:

A while ago, I created a giant laundry list of things I wanted to do before I die. I am proud to report that I have checked off the following items from the list:

• Smithsonian Museum Complex (a childhood dream)
• The Holocaust Museum
• Vegas!
• Shoot a real gun

Hopefully, 2012 gives me the opportunity to work on several other items on my to-do list.

Love life:

Oh, well!

2012:

A month in 2012 and 2012 has been very exciting so far to say the least! Thanks to two of my very special friends

To give a background for the readers of this blog post, I arrived “in the new world” on 5th of August, 2008 as a candidate for masters starting in Fall 2008. I graduated in December 2010 with Masters in Computer Science with specialization in software engineering.

Now, that you have enough information about me, lets get started. You might find references to courses in computer science but this blog post can be generally applied to other fields too. Also, by writing this article, I am not making a new revelation – this is more like a thinking out loud exercise for myself and I hope it is helpful for the readers of this blog post.

Following trends – The first couple of days in the US, you tend to do what everyone else is doing. I did too. Like everyone else, I applied to the same on-campus jobs, took the same courses as others were and looked at the same areas or locations for housing. Dont! What I have found out is this country rewards you much more for being an individual that what I was used to back home in India. But, I have learned this the hard way.

The biggest mistake was that I took a course everyone else was taking about AND assumed that the course is too simple – merely by following the grapevine. When I came here, people were talking about a course called “Introduction to database management systems” taught by Prof. Zhang. The rumor was that the professor is too lenient and you are guaranteed an “A” grade. Well, there are very few things that are guaranteed in life and grades is certainly not one of them. It eventually turned out that I did not have any interest in database management systems and hence although the course was great, with great opportunities for interesting projects, I did not do well. I scored a B-

Hence, the moral is, be an individual. Do your own research and make choices based on your research and logic. Don’t be a member of a herd!

Optimizing Income – A bit of background information -  I fortunately got a job very early as a dorm proctor at the Residential safety office. The job allowed you to “work” on your laptops when you are not helping out people entering the dorms. When I started this job, there were more proctors and less amount of shifts. They also had a “swap board” where people would post shifts and if you are free you can pick up shifts.

However, since I started after the shift allotment schedule and all the possible shifts were allotted to people, I did not have any shifts to start with and I spent like a zillion hours looking to find shifts to work with. It felt like my part time job is my full time job and studies is part time. This might be true for certain fields (yes, that is true at NEU; if you manage to take the “right” kind of courses) but definitely not for Computer Science. This cost me dearly in terms of assignments and grades. I also found out that being able to use a computer at an RSO shift meant watching more movies!

Moreover, the shifts didn’t have equal pay; especially the night shifts paid more – of course, it didn’t matter then that it messed up my sleep cycle and I spent the next day in a “zombie” state which affected my studies and the time could be used to do something productive. Oh, well, I was a student then – productivity was an unheard concept!

So, I guess the moral of the story is, keep and do your on campus job purely for subsistence purposes and don’t make a temporary career out of it.

Choose your partners / team members well – I have been on both the sides of the coin, I have been a terrible partner AND I have had a terrible partner; hence I can’t emphasize enough, how important this is? This point also borders on a philosophical perspective! Oh well, I can get philosophical sometimes. Such is life!

The purpose of teams and project partners is to enhance and promote creative thinking and people can do better things with their projects – it is NOT supposed to be a host – parasite relationship. I am not sure, how people who depend totally on their partners or team members can sleep at night? I surely wasn’t! I had no satisfaction about the assignment, the course and hence the semester!

I know people who have finished their masters only by being support wheels to their partners or team members in projects and assignments. When it was an individual assignment or project, the course “encouraged collaboration”. When the course didn’t have both of the above points then the course was not worth taking! Ofcourse!

Do you really want to be one of those people? What is the point of spending $34,000 a year (at least that is what it was then) when you are not really learning anything? If learning was not your primary aim and you have no love for your chosen field – if you are here purely for the US Dollar to Indian Rupees conversion rate then I have four characters for you – GTFO.

TL;DR:

Hence, to summarize,

1. Be an individual. Do not follow the herd!
2. Don’t optimize income from on-campus jobs. Spend the time in learning something that will help you in your career. Eventually, when you get a full time job, the extra 2$ that you earned per hour or even the extra 150$ a month that you earned by sacrificing  your sleep time or study time won’t matter!
3. DO real work on your projects and assignments AND expect members to do the same. Choose team members to achieve this goal.

For me,you are a geek if :

• Your idea of perfect life is “Eat, Sleep and Code”
• You are highly opinionated about the superiority / inferiority of a technology or a programming language. You strongly agree / disagree to  companies’(company here means a tech company; there are no other companies in this world) policies. And of course needless to say you blog your opinions online!
• You believe the concept of “The Matrix” is real and we all live in a computer generated world
• And you believe all the liberal arts majors are fictitious! ( no offence intended )
• Can live off  top raman / frozen food / Pizza / anything that can give you just about enough energy to code
• And you can convert “Caffeine to Code”
• You search for “How to kiss” and “How to ask a girl out” on Google
• Your idea of proposing to a girl is to send her an encrypted message to decipher. ( if you are up for it; decipher this )
• You don’t buy apple products for their marketing excellence but for their technological excellence or innovation ( if any  )

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list. You can add your points in the comments section of this post.

]]> http://pranavbhat.com/blog/index.php/2010/04/are-you-a-geek/feed/ 2 http://pranavbhat.com/blog/index.php/2010/03/a-twitter-client/ http://pranavbhat.com/blog/index.php/2010/03/a-twitter-client/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:06:32 +0000 pranav http://pranavbhat.com/blog/?p=161 Continue reading →]]> Initially I thought of making a web based Twitter client that will imitate the functionality of the original Twitter website but the scope of this project has increased since then as you will see as you read this post. Of course, needless to say this project by no means is a product I want to create and launch; eventually to make money out of it. (Although it would be great if I could but chances look slim!)

The reason this client is web based is because I wanted to create a complete project in JQuery and have JQuery make AJAX calls to a proxy web service which will in turn make calls to the Twitter API. The proxy is needed so that the browsers won’t block AJAX requests as cross site scripting.

To track changes and to maintain feature lists and bug list I’m trying something different this time around. I’ve decided to use Zoho Projects and I’ve been so far very impressed about Zoho projects. They have a very easy to use user interface and I got started with Zoho projects almost instantly! They have several features but a detailed discussion and complete review of Zoho projects deserves a seperate blog post!

Hence to summarize, the objectives of this project is:

• Create a client for popular micro-blogging service Twitter using the Twitter API.
• Effective use of JQuery and Javascript to create a truly AJAX/DHTML based UI using JQuery UI
• Implement all the basic functions of Twitter
• Blog about the recent development(s) of this project on this blog!

Some of the basic Twitter functionality that I am targeting in the first draft of the project ( Alpha 0.0.1 if you will) is:

• A user would be able to get his home timeline. In Twitter API terms, a home timeline is the feed that you see when you are log into twitter. It is basically a list of Tweets by everyone whom you follow
• A user would be able to see his public timeline. This is usually a list of tweets that are visible to public and are usually tweets that you send. You can check your public timeline by logging into Twitter and clicking on the profile link on your homepage
• Replying and direct messaging any user on Twitter
• Follow/ Un-follow other users
• Post new Tweets
• Viewing a user profile

Finally, I would sign off saying that in the bigger scheme of things, I would like to create  a Twitter client for the Web (which I am currently working on right now) , a desktop client using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework about which I am currently reading) and then have a client for the Android platform. Ideally all these three projects should share a lot of code (like many software engineering books suggest) and that is what I plan to accomplish in these three projects.

So, the other day  while coming back from the college library I picked up two of the books on python(Learning Python and Beginning Python) and have started reading about python. I did read a couple of pages and this is what I have to summarize:

• Python is dynamic object oriented language
• works on Windows, Linux/Unix and MAC OSes apart from a range of other OS
• has simple syntax and is modular with hierarchical packages
• newer modules can be added and modules written in C/C++, Java and even .net framework supported
• used extensively and the demand is increasing day by day
• And finally its open source!

All the above points make python a language I definitely want to learn and I am cursing myself for not learning it for so long.  So, do check back soon as I will post about my progress of learning python. Do suggest any resources/ articles/ books on python that you might know in the comments section.

Value Type:

The .net CLR(Common Language Runtime) store the data of the value types in a part of the memory called as the stack. The most basic type of variables like Integers, Booleans, Bytes etc are stored as value types by the .net runtime. Value types can be easily created, updated and removed from the stack by the .net runtime.
There are three types of value types:
•    The built-in types of the .net framework
•    The user defined types
•    Enumerations.

Reference Types:

The .net CLR stores reference types in 2 steps; firstly the address of the memory location, called as a pointer is stored in the stack. This pointer points to the address where the actual data is stored in the part of the memory called as the heap. Reference types which are no longer referenced are garbage collected periodically by the runtime. Reference types are generally very effective in passing parameters to functions.

Some of the examples of reference types include strings, objects (of classes; built-in or otherwise) etc. To illustrate more, I did an experiment which demonstrates value type and reference type and how can it be detected if a variable is a value type or a reference type.

SByte a = 0;
Byte b = 0;
Int16 c = 0;
Int32 d = 0;
Int64 e = 0;
string s = “”;
Exception ex = new Exception();
object[] types = { a, b, c, d, e, s, ex };
foreach (object o in types)
{
string value = “”;
if (o.GetType().IsValueType)
{
value = “Value type”;
}
else
{
value = “Reference type”;
}
Console.WriteLine(“{0},{1}”, o.GetType(), value);
}

In my next post, I will write about how to create your own value type and an example of a reference type used for function calls.

I am also a big fan of the .net technologies and hence I also wanted to have a website that will have all the information about me and allow me to showcase my work in .net technologies. This prompted to me buy a Windows based web hosting plan from Godaddy.

Now, I can build a website in asp.net which will contain all the information about me(you can start by visiting my homepage) and then following the links in the menu bar to know more about me on the about me page and about the projects that I have done on the projects page(which is under construction as I type this post).

Finally, you can use the contact me page to contact me about anything and everything under the sun. So, I hope you enjoy your time on this new site of mine and I will try and have a detailed post of how did I convert from my old site to the new one and how the mapping of blog posts from the old domain takes place.

So, as soon as i read about Scribefire, i was like “this is the thing i was looking for!!” and hence installed the plugin immidiately and viola; this is my first post from scribefire. If all goes well i will be posting very often using scribefire because this is kind of convinient for me to post this way; so hoping that this works out fine for me!

The movie starts like the usual with a small town girl who dreams to make it big in the Indian modelling world and is the usual modest and cheerful girl and then as she gains success and fame she turns bitchy, arrogant and unprofessional.Then she goes into a rehab, treats herself and walks on the ramp once again. I mean thats about the stroyline with things like a couple of hot models; real life incidents from modelling world are put in and so on and so forth. So, the storyline is the same “mom and pop” storyline that is so evident in most of the movies in India; with the difference being glamour and hot chics and some real life incidents and romours put into the movie.

So, overall an average movie but great acting by both Priyanka Chopra and Kangana Ranaut. So, I would recommend fashion as a one time watch!!!!

Indian National Anthem