TWTW: June 02–08, 2019 | #23
By: Joel V Zachariah
Tags: Education, Internships, Journal, Diary, Twtw

TWTW: June 02–08, 2019 | #23

A week of packing up for the summer work | TWTW #38

Sunday (02/06/2019)

Went to church on my own — caught a 6 AM bus to Vytilla. It was quite an experience to feel independent and accountable. Returning after the service, I bought a book from H&C Store — a self help book by Robin Sharma that I felt would be useful for the problems I was facing in my life currently.

Fun fact: The book was cheaper on Amazon [:/] Oh well, extra money for a deserving author, I assume.

At home, I spent some time studying 6th module of Software engineering. Anshul, my friend from VIT came over and we sat together programming in the afternoon. I dipped my feet in dynamic programming on his insistence by attempting to code the 0/1 Knapsack Problem. He, on the other hand, was working on linked list based questions on Leet Code. Unlike me he does not have a necessity to do as he is placed but still wants to up his game so as to be ready all the time to code deep if required.

In the evening, we went out for a walk and had a deep conversation on a lot of topics ranging from ideologies, religion etc. We realized that we had a lot to relate to as we had similar upbringings. I had a good time and was grateful for him to consider spending his time with me.

Later that evening, I worked on setting up the conference team. Alas, I could not work on the mini — project that I wanted to do this weekend. Well, at least I studied a bit. I received the news that I have been shortlisted for an internship opportunity from college. I hope I do not have to cancel it in order to attend the internship (if selected) I am trying for at Bangalore.

Started listening to So Good They Can’t Ignore You audio book. A lot of useful and researched thoughts. Received the good news that our college juniors came in top 6 in a hackathon.

I slept at 11.15 when I was convinced that I was not doing anything productive. Plans for tomorrow:

Make teams for conference work and get the wheel rolling. Work on IRIS dataset on Kaggle. Complete home notes of 6th Module of SE. Be prepared for telephonic interview from internship opportunity. Read self — help book. Do 10 aptitude problems, 2 coding problems and 1 puzzle. Look in to the remote internship work matter.

Monday (03/06/2019)

The point 1. and 2. is taking time. Got 3. and 6. (partially) done. Started 5. a bit. Waiting for more details to get started on working on 7.

4. completed →questions were as follows:

NULL vs VOID ?

Stack vs Heap ?

Recursive Algorithm ?

Explain Graph, Queue ?

Explain your field of interest ?

Any other field you explored ?

Explain a project you did ?

How long would you be available for internship ?

All together, it came to 16 minutes. Fingers crossed.

Work starts full swing!

Visited the homeopathy doctor in the evening. Also in the evening had a discussion on the sections to include in the marketing brochure of our developer conference that we were planning on. I made a draft for our conference promotional material content.

I feel I can do more but a lot of time goes in thinking. Goals for tomorrow:

10 aptitude questions + 2 coding problems + 1 puzzle. Work on IRIS Kaggle Data Set. Read self — help book, G.E.B. each for 30 minutes. Coursera Course — complete next week material. Study 5th module of Computer Networks. Go through GATE exam preparation work. Conference preparation work.

Tuesday (04/06/2019)

In the morning, received the unfortunate news that Nipah Virus has been confirmed to be in our state again. We believed that we had controlled the situation last summer yet it seems to affect another life. I hope it does not spread and that students going to schools/colleges may not get affected in their academic calendar as delays in exams ruin plans made.

After solving 10 aptitude questions and spending considerable amount of time on twitter, I decided to work on the IRIS dataset on Kaggle.

In the afternoon I received the good news that I have been shortlisted to attend the internship at Mettle Networks, Trivandrum from June 17th onwards. I am really grateful for finally landing an internship.

I informed my cousin at Bangalore that I am going with this option rather than his company Sentienz. I called Mr. Gokul, the HR of the company in the afternoon and he congratulated me. He informed me that I would be working on AWS/Watson API during the internship. He finally asked for my official details in order to create the ID Card before I join.

Rest of the letter cropped out for privacy reasons.

Once the excitement and wishes lessened, I returned to my work. I suddenly remembered the Codepreneur challenge to make a poster to teach children computer programming via a poster. I went on to that after completing the Kaggle work.

From 7PM till 10PM we kept 8 conference calls with the 10 teams of MEC.Conf. It certainly was a challenge trying to stick to 15 minutes per session.

Went to sleep after mailing Mettle Networks my details.

Wednesday (05/06/2019)

In the morning, I completed the Time and Work series of questions. After Anshul’s encouragement, I got back to programming on Geeks For Geeks and completed the 0/1 Knapsack problem. Best takeaway of the day was this pod cast with Naval.

Some of the many highlights from the podcast:

Your resume should be a catalog of your sufferings.

Every man lives twice — the second one begins when you realize you only have one life.

Naval spoke about his famous tweet strorm that helped people understand how to be wealthy:

Spent quite some time planning for the conference. Had a good conversation with friend Baibhab, the school friend currently at SRM. Interestingly enough, his father is now transferred to Pubjab and he is finding the new location quite different. Highlights of our call:

(Baibhab jokes a LOT… sarcasm coating after coating) Even he feels college time is unoptimized and system does not want to improve because decent results roll in each year — not acknowledging the fact that institution is basking in the success of students who struggled on their own to learn, no thanks to the institution. Quite harsh but it seems students create the prestige for the university. Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida is a small but remarkable college with students excellent in competitive programming. I should probably try to mail someone who studies there and ask for the magic recipe (to which Baibhab says — driven community). Baibhab wishes to work for a few years and then try to build a company. I am still trying to fixate on what is optimal for my caliber. I do not wish to settle for networking and HR though I feel I can, but I have a long stretch to go in the tech route too. We both agreed that our school takes kids too lightly and does not take an effort to expose them to interesting stuff like programming for problem solving. His friends used to do graph and DP problems while preparing for Cyber-Olympiad while we by hearted facts like father of computers for similar events.

Thursday (06/06/2019)

Decided to get back to the books. Woke up early to study but quickly my mind demanded rest. After nearly a two hour call regarding conference schedule, we came to a consensus about the same. Sahil our senior helped us out by telling us what to do right and what not to miss out.

I am starting to plan out how to maximize my time in trivandrum during my internship period. I reached out to a tech community meetup organizer voicing my interest to be participative in the group. I also made a list of things I should be working on in the summer:

Remote Internship

On — site Internship

Placement preparation

GRE Exam preparation

CS Guidebook ideas

DGPLUG training on FOSS

MEC.conf planning work

IBeTo group project work

I have more on my wish list but since I am infamous for setting unrealistic goals, I think this is a challenging list already. I hope I do the first four right at least as it is going to greatly impact my career.

Tomorrows exam subject (Software Engineering and Project Management) is not hard — it is actually quite intuitive, as in, how to respond in crisis situations etc. But the problem I will be facing is not knowing the right words or terms to use due to my impatience to memorize them.

Friday (07/06/2019)

Exam was in the afternoon. It was alright — I wrote a lot but did not answer to the point. I feel the quality of our question papers have increased as now questions are application type rather than copy paste from source material. On one hand, the originality seeks to find the students who learn from the essence and apply while on the other hand, it feels unfair that our batch had to endure it without any prior intimation.

Kudos guys!

Spent the evening planning for the conference. Devdutt is back in the planning discussion and as he was out of the loop he was rightfully disappointed in the decisions we took. We spent quite some time debating about it and deciding what might be the ideal changes to make. I hope none of us lose our temper and hamper the progress — it certainly is a skill to maintain your cool and make reasonable disagreements in such matters while thinking from an unbiased and plane manner.

Got the good news in the evening that Rawn and Shawn, the twin brothers got selected to serve as interns in an IBoson Innovations, an AR/VR/game development company in Trivandrum. I am glad that they are working on something they like in the summer rather than following the crowd merely for the sake of it. We can even meet in person and work on ibeto project. Destiny works its way!

Saturday (08/06/2019)

The conference work is starting to take a lot of time. A lot of chaos and a lot of rework to be done. I was dreading this moment from the beginning and now it is here taking away the time for other matters. To make matters worse, the department members are not being responsive and making delegation of work that much more challenging. I do not want to sound like a dictator by demanding everyone to reply and be responsive but at the same time progression is not happening because some are not at the same frequency of seriousness as we are.

Also as Devdutt suggested, wait cycles for validations from other departments takes time as the size increases and bureaucratic processes are involved. I wish we could be fast and autocratic but then a lot more risk would be invovled as we bypass major discussions. Starting to understand the difficulties or running a system without crashing it. I think the reason why decision making is faster in companies compared to our is because there is an incentive for the value of time that they put in — income. In our case, people do not equate experience as an incentive and so try to avoid it as they only see time loss in the end.

I cannot deny that line of thought — I myself used to dodge duties as it ate my time. But at times certain experiences were more important than others and so I have said no when questioned. But examining the juniors in the various teams, it is too early for them to decide what experiences to forgo and so feel it will take some one on one conversations to fix the problem.

I visited the doctor in the morning — have mild cold and headache. It might have to do with the long hours I spend working on devices.

My phone is running of memory space and I am too lazy to spend time filtering the 11,000 WhatsApp images which will be a mix of family photos, memes and random pictures. I wish I had the courage to blindly wipe out the memory and start afresh but there are a lot of dependencies that I value and feel responsible to not be blindly to.

The irony is I used to feel jealous of people who were in similar positions — a time when I was not too involved and had a lot of me time. Well, everything has its plus & minus and grass looks greener on the other side. Anyway, my phone is slow to charge too — which I assume has a correlation with the fact that I am short on memory (how though? Got to google it).

So when ever I use the phone, charge is usually below 10% and I have heard that is when radiations are the most. Well, my head must be enduring a lot during those conference calls and messages. I have to keep 3 department conference calls tonight and inform them the work we have moving forward.

I really need to read up on how to effectively organize events without sucking out the life from one. I just hope I can manage it all as the summer break progresses. Following Kurian, I left a few teams that I felt were self — reliant so that I do not experience burn out. I guess the key lies in trusting your peers to make the right choices than to doubt their every instinct in the name of inexperience.

I took my fathers advice and started studying for Saturdays exam. This is because tomorrows church service would be lengthy and my aunt’s new home house warming ceremony is there.

In the afternoon, Mahalingam Sir of MITS got in touch with me asking what topics could he teach for School of AI Kochi meetup? We were thrilled to hear of his interest and so have included him in the organizers group to discuss further about this matter. I hope we can together develop a useful curriculum for students to gain from.