This has been arguably my worst year so far! 🙁 Though my memory is not that lasting and its not that volatile either. I have made all my efforts to write down things/events happened last year.
1. Joining Let Me Know [www.letmeknow.in]: I joined Let Me Know team at the end of 2008 and my contribution to the team started mainly from January 2008 and have been a part of the team for over an year now. We have made a lot of progress over an year- with a wide base of readers and over 600 opportunities spanning 7 different areas. We moved from this (blog) to this (now both redirect to the same new portal). Initially i was covering all the events but later February-march we got a pretty good team and my area of focus reduced to Technical Fest!! But later on after the month of May the blog was left to the responsiblity of few and the work during that time increased and also the flow of information reduced. We took a major step of having our own portal and this was all the brainchild of Nitin Rao, the Founder of Let Me Know. He spoke with lot of ppl including Web Developers, speaking to various ppl on Fund Raising and at last we hired Grayscale Design- The most creative technical students i have met. They designed the complete portal from scratch and achieved to our expectation both in terms of the functional requirements and the site asthetics. I feel the current Let Me Know site is the most easy to use site i have ever seen!!! We have few plans at the back of our mind and Nitin has been a great source of inspiration for me and my work!
2. 4th Semester debacle: 4th sem is the worst of all the semesters so far- the only reason being i got the least GPA and that really pulled down my Cumulative GPA. This sem had a few alien subjects- Computer Graphics, microprocessors to name a few. Microprocessors is an interesting subject but the way it was taught never appealing. There was a lot of confusion in the lab- Thanks to the final year students taking it. Otherwise, it would have been one of fav subjects and would have helped me to take up embedded systems. But now i tremble with fear on hearing the word “Microprocessors”. We had a mini project in this sem and it was to creat a software package which would support a basic paint tools and also include a provision for animation of those graphical objects. I had decided to use Java for developing the application and i knew it would need a lot of Swing and AWT stuff and i was prepared for that. I even got a copy of my senior’s project to have a look how exactly the package must look like finally. His was a pretty impressive package and was appreciated by most of them. We were 3 in a team and the complete package was coded by only me- i dont remember how much time i spent on this and the final application has some thousands of lines of code all written by me. But finally i ended up getting a BC- It was so dissapointing- There were groups whose package was no where close to mine but they got BB, AB and those who did not submit got BC. So my package was equivalent to not submitting. I had given the package a complete professional look and when ever i think about this i feel really dissapointed. Thanks a lot to the teacher who never cared to look out for the features of my package. She was sitting as if we had forced her to check my application. The worst thing was- We could change the code of the package to get the output for the question given for the Mid Sem and End Sem lab exam. This was so foolish- The application designed is for someone else’s use and how can the user keep changing the source code to do a partiuclar work. What i ifeel is that the application should have been tested for the features and its level of usage- which was not done. 🙁 No point in grumbling now. Ahaa.. i forgot about the great Unix Lab- I got the output in mid sem/end sem and all other labs but i got a BC- the common thing between Miniproject and Unix Lab is the grades were given by the same teacher x-( Anyways i got fairly bad in all the labs- 3 of t hem including the Mini project this pulled down my GPA to 7.92 i could not score much in theory. Also in this sem i was really passionate to become the Campus Ambassador, Sun Microsystems for my college for which i sent out my resume [Guess i had a proper resume in 4th sem 😉 which i have changed totally now]. I used to rearly stay in my room- its pretty obvious why ppl dont like to stay in their rooms- and i used to spend most of the time in Room No 27, 7th Block which was just opposite to my room no 3. We had a really great time in 4th sem- We used to play MotoGP whole day and even days before the exams. We were so fearless and we never missed even a single episode of Roadies 5.0. And there was this song “Jinke Mari na” which was really popular during those days and we made it a point that it was played in my friend’s room (Room No 27) atleast once a day. These were some noteworthy incidents of 4th Sem.
3. Holidays and Internships: We have 3 months of vacation after every even sem. This time i had thought of preparing for SCJP and be certified by June 30. I was skeptical about an internship but what changed my mind i approached on kind CEO who agreed upon allowing me to work under him. But it was my fate that one of his team members fell sick and had to go back home. He was the person who had to assign me some work. While around in the office i spent time working on REST Web Services and also learnt C#, ASP.net. But that was the last i used .NET. Nitin introduced me to one of his friend’s, Priya Naik, who helped me to work under her. She was really passionate about what ever she was doing and i really enjoyed the work of research and analysis. This was really different experience as i had not ventured into Non technical work before. This opened up lots of opportunities for me and also my reach. But all these were not encouraging for my SCJP stuff and though i managed to complete Kathy Sierra book but i was not confident. Gone were the days and i havent found time to prepare for it agian. I should have cleared it in 3 months vacation 🙁 That was about pretty exciting boring holidays.
4. Selected as Campus Ambassador for Sun Microsystems: This was one of my cherished moments when i got to know that I was selected as the Campus Ambassador for Sun Microsystems. This led to me meeting many ppl and met someone who was really special for me until sometime 🙁 I organised my first independent workshop in the first week of August which was a 3 day workshop on Java. In the interim i got in touch with a particular person who i never thought would turn out to be cause for turn arounds during my 5th Sem and early 6th Sem. I organised few workshops as part of Sun Club activities but havent been able to do much lately. Have planned few events for 2009 hopefully will organise them soon.
5. Holidays again!! : These were the holidays between 5th sem and 6th sem, to be more specific after the odd sem. I spent these holidays studying GWT, Ajax, PHP, JSP and so on… I also managed to end up working on PHP but my work hasn’t seen the light yet. Waiting for something big to do!
6. 5th Sem and early 6th Sem: These semesters were filled with anecdotes some out of which had happy ending and few others Sad ending and few no ending at all 😉 Being selected as the CA of my college i had great amount of responsibility and being in 3rd year added to those responsibilities. I met a really interesting person who would have gone unnoticed by me had that person not appraoched me. By the way its a girl. I used to chat with her even before i met her and the first time i saw her was during Web Club recruitments. And i am hardly interested in speaking to them but this person was really different and i could gather just enough information about her and i can judge ppl fairly well though not an expert in it but can do a bit of good work for myself. We had lots of conversations but all started and ended with Tech and had teamed up for TGMC, event organised by IBM. Being novice in web applications and UML i could be of not much help for the team though i tried working for it so hard that I ended up sacrificing my ADS Lab grades 🙁 But i couldn’t hide few things and when i opened up- its was all the end to something which had just started. But i am pretty happy that i managened to keep up my cumulative GPA unlike 4th sem. One of the most impressive works was my mini project which fetched me a AA !!!! I made it so very uer friendly that ppl had to hardly type anything for getting their work done. It was a Single User simple relational database. Tough the functionalities were less but it was really easy to use. There are so many things which i would like to write but not enough energy to type then down here. 😉 Early 6th Sem was a great disaster and i would say better forget the early 6th Sem.
These was a recap in brief of year 2008. Hoping for some real action in 2009- really important year in my life- Placements, higher studies and what not. 🙂