Howdy folks, first of all, wishing you a very happy new year. It has been a long year, in a purely poetic sense. Life went through some major ups and minor downs, but all in all, it was a great year. I would be summarizing few of the great moments that I remember in the following paragraphs.
The year started with a lot of confusion. I was going great with Python, but something felt missing. I missed C. I knew C was not the right thing for me, and C++ looked intimidating. I needed something that would back me well for the code competitions I participated in, so C++ or Java seemed to be the only way out. I choose C++, for it looked similar to things I already knew.
C++ was a great choice. I got going with it quite smoothly. I learnt the fairly advanced concepts in it, and implemented some algorithms and applications using it. But the results of the coding events I participated in didn’t change much. I really sucked at them, sometimes unable to solve even 1 of the 8 problems given to be solved in the 8 to 24 hour time limit. Felt ashamed.
During march, we had our college technical festival, a.k.a. Technitude. All of a sudden, I and my mate Aditya found ourselves handling two of the technical events namely ‘Code Wars’ and ‘Debugging’. The events were just what they sounded like and it went fairly well. I had never before been the responsible person for any such event in the past, and executing it successfully was something I was proud of. I even made great contacts with my seniors at the same time, who later became the people who guided my with many important decisions.
The Technitude was great, and tiresome. The committee members and we, the volunteers, worked hard to make it work. Things concluded with the afterparty, which sadly, I wasn’t a part of. Anyways, things went pretty fast after the technitude. Fourth semester came and went in no time. I cleared it, marginally. C++ was still on, in the background. I bought ‘The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stoustrop’ and started to read it.
In the post-semester holidays, there were a couple of other competitions, which I failed, yet again. The C++ learning wasn’t helping me with the competitions as much as I expected. Probably because algorithms was what I lacked, and not a language.
Around in June, the startup fever took over. More than a startup, it was for refreshing my Python skills, learning a web framework called Django, and creating my first serious RESTful application. It took about a month for me to realize that a social networking backend was not really a one man business, at least not if I wanted to build it up in under a year. I deserted that ship, and started with another application along with my friend, this time entirely in Javascript. That was when the love for Javascript took over. I realized that after all these languages I have learnt, Javascript was something different. It required my to completely empty my brain of existing rules and guidelines, and start afresh. My love for Javascript will take up an entirely new article, so I am leaving it here.
In around late August or September, we had our committee elections. I was elected the Technical head, and then our committee went further to deliver an amazing Engineers’ day. Javascript and my new startup were in the making. Later, we got Rajashree in our team, who looked at the frontend and UI stuff. We got Nikhil, who joined the frontend team. Harshal, a budding lawyer, joined us later in November. We are five now, and while we don’t work as consistently these days, we still call ourselves the Cherrylogs Dev Team, which is nice.
In the first week of October, I got the chance to develop the website of FabIndia’s Cooltobeindian initiative. Although I and Rajashree did all that we could, they were not satisfied, and we did not get paid. Anyways, I will leave that for a separate article as well. That incident taught me a lot of things, especially to say ‘No’. Now, I am much comfortable in saying No to people and things that I know are not going to be worth the efforts. Result? I get much more time for things that actually make me happy, the ones that are worth it, the 20% that matters.
Then there were submissions, practicals and examinations. I got a Laptop in late October, which was generously given to me by Vijutai, my aunt and my mom. The post-semester holidays were spent on Javscript and Cherrylogs. I and Kunal did some work, but not a lot of it. On 23rd December, I left for Murdeshwar, Karnataka. An awesome place to spend a day or two. Then I came back to my native, Karwar, and now I am here writing this post, sitting in the hall room, thinking about the wonderful year that I have just passed.
Wish you all a very happy new year, yet again.