सोल्टीलाई KtmJS मनपर्यो

I had always wanted to present in KathmanduJS. It is a wonderful meetup happening in the mystic city of Kathmandu which also happens to be the capital of the land of Himalayas, Nepal. It was the eight meeting of the community on Jan 30th of 2.0.1.7. And I knew I had to end my year with the notes I wrote.

As for me, what look forward to attending meetups is the sheer excitement by presentations wherein speakers share their experience, joy and passion of the technology they came across. Kudos to all the speakers of the 8th meetup! It was interesting to see two speakers, Damodar and Prasun, talking about Ionic and React Native with each of them putting forward their valid use cases of the same. It’s not always coca-cola, is it? Damodar runs a channel in Youtube on hybrid applications.

It was time to pull the curtain on 2017. So, I did not want to present anything new or something disruptive technology. I wanted to chat about Javascript and what could be the next big thing in 2018. Functional Programming, how tomorrow it might be a situation where it only compiles to Javascript and people are using different languages according to their fit.

The most remarkable experience was to see four contributors of KtmJS comming forward and congreggating ideas / efforts on the repository (special thanks to Suman Kunwar). I am sure we will be able to build a better user friendly community management system. A shout out to the contributors: Jagat, Pratik, Rasik and Suman.

A talk to remember

Undergraduate students at Herald College, Kathmandu, Nepal.

How often do you meet a professor nearby your home? Not many times, at least for me. I was introduced to this wonderful gentleman who hailed from Bangalore, the same place where I started my career. As it happens, we belonged to the same community (technology). We talked about recent trends such as bitcoins, start-ups, and payment gateways. Most importantly, we talked about the prospects of Information Technology in Nepal. He asked me to take a session in Herald college, that the message was to convey my experience of the industry I worked for last 4 years.

I was not sure with my content and how I would present it. I kept on thinking about myself, about the time when I was pursuing my studies.Did anyone take a session for us from any of our alumni? Had we got any leads when we were in our sophomore years? Instead, we had to take matters into our own hands. Maybe we could have accomplished more than what we thought we could. Maybe some one would have invigorated the young blood in us. These were the exact thoughts I wanted to convey via presentation. That you can achieve much more than academics, that there are reasons to find passion in Information Technology.

I was thoroughly impressed by the experienced faculty of Herald College. They were more aligned to workshops and seminars, where in, I could see some classes designed for the same purpose. I had seen couple of banners of the upcoming talks by some experienced/renowned individuals. Had I expected this sort of transformation regarding colleges in Nepal? No. Well, it sure was satisfying to see these changes. I urge other colleges to take few notes and be open to this dynamic and ever demanding course.

I did my homework, and so, I was all prepared. And just when I entered the lecture hall, a student asked me, “Which college are you from?” I guess they were expecting someone in suits or someone with white beards for that matter. And when I responded saying that I am here for the presentation, he immediately reiterated, "Oh! Good Morning Sir." Not that it boosted my confidence, it felt good though.

The presentation started off with few murmurs while I tried bringing my audience's attention to the slides. After a while, I could see concern eyes gleaming at the slides, doubts, and questions regarding their career.Some of them wanted to pursue their studies abroad, few of the lot wanted to start something on their own and some of them were just following the course. A deja vu moment, indeed.

Like I said before, my contents were geared for undergraduate students on topics like Personal Projects, Community and Working in Groups to build solutions. And after an hour and a half, I concluded my talk. I was then greeted with a warm applause from students and teachers as well. A feeling of gratitude, I must say. They also presented me a wonderful token of appreciation.

Here is a brief outline of the talk:

• Introductions : What is a Startup? What do you mean by Frontend Engineer?
• Research Papers / Publications : Where should you look for references? What is plagiarism check? Google Scholars.
• Communities : What is a Community? What are the prominent communities in Nepal? Where should you look for the newsletters / information?
• Personal Projects : Why are personal projects important to students? What is Google Summer of Code?
• Thinking towards Automation / Learning the art of Problem Solving.
• How to build your profile? What is Github?

References:

• Speaker Deck
• github.com/developers-nepal/groups
• developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/
• scholar.google.co.in/

Mini C Compiler using Yacc & Flex

Last month, we were given a project to develop a mini C Compiler using Yacc & Flex.Last week, I had this silly assumption that I would somehow manage it from the net. And on the final day before our assignment was due for submission, I was like “Why didn’t I start coding a week before?”.

In the end, when I was ready with code for submission, I was happy with my effort although I could have modified to include advanced features. Nevertheless its a simple and a basic code for the beginners in Yacc & Flex.

Here’s a link in Github: Mini-C-Compiler

If you have any doubt, feel free to comment or mail me your doubts.

Shree (श्री) – Nepali Unicode

Project Screenshot

Shree (श्री) Nepali Unicode is our first lab project for fortystones. We started this project in our fourth semester break and completed it in 7 days. Our main objective was to create a Firefox addon which would allow user to transliterate in Nepali wherever he/she wants. For instance, if you are using Facebook chat, the addon would transliterate your message to Nepali. The addon is almost complete and we will soon be launching our first Firefox addon.

If you are interested in creating a firefox extension, I think these sites will be of great help.

• Getting started with extension development
• How to develop a firefox extension
• Firefox toolbar tutorial

Initially, I was clueless as where to start off. Me and Prashish ( my project partner ) , both of us, were constantly googling articles, grasping basic ideas, implementing them for hours. Finally, we concluded that we had to code in JavaScript (for algos and the project itself) and understand how to use XUL, XML etc for the Firefox addon. On the bright side Prashish had prior knowledge of JavaScript and a perect time for me to get along with Javascript. My prior knowledge of OOP concepts boosted my confidence in learning JavaScript.

As usual, we had to overcome simple yet important issues while coding & designing. However difficult it seemed to us, we were able to conquer them in the end and yes, a proud moment for both of us when we launched it.

I did realize from this project that however difficult any project may seem, if you try it, you will complete it, if not, at least end up learning something new.

Hey, if you want to improve the current version of Shree or have any innovative ideas, feel free to contact me.

नमस्ते

Into Google APIs

As soon as I open Firefox or Chrome (IE 😦), the first thing that comes to my mind is Google. It so happens that I open Google without any intention of opening it. In fact I totally agree that Google must be credited for its Search engine. However, we all must know that apart from Google mail, Google Search Engine,and recent Android development, there are Google APIs which will amuse you. For e.g. Google Maps, Google Earth, AdSense and YouTube.

I mean, being an IT student, playing with Google API is so much of fun. You can find more information in Google Code. Most of the Google APIs are only available in beta version but it would naturally save you a lot of time, if you had to code it from its very initial phase. 😉

Therefore, you just need to Register for yourself and then get started with Documentation, Blog, Group, Lab of those APIs. Well, if you are free check these links for a change My personal Google Transliterate and Google Maps too

Two Simple Steps to become a Successful Programmer

So, you want to become a Successful programmer in two steps, huh? Slap yourself, Go back to your Room, Lock the Door, Write a note saying “I Quit”, and Start a new life with a New Profession.

Well, I am still a novice to comment anything on becoming a successful programmer. But, if you take my words, I feel programming must come from the heart, your passion to write codes and interest that you generate on every output.

That is what, the following two articles is trying to reveal. Just because you get into a job or you score good marks, doesn’t make you a successful programmer.

So my two steps to become a successful programmer are the following articles by Sandip Dev and Peter Norvig. Go through these articles, try to grab and implement suggestions from them.

• How to be a good programmer
• Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

“The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time. ” – Tom Cargill 😉 !!!

My First Post

Unlike Sheldon, I can’t say “Good morning everyone and welcome to “Science and Society”. I’m Dr. Sheldon Cooper, BS, MS, MA, PhD and ScD. OMG, right? ” Nevertheless, I am a student pursuing my Under Graduate in Information Technology (IT) in Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Allahabad, India.

Well, I feel everyone has something to say. People like Steve Jobs, Richard Stallman, Linus Trovalds, Mark Shuttleworth, Bill Gates are followed for what they have to say and students like me always find inspirations in their thoughts. Then we seek blogs to ponder our opinions and views.

I mean, in this fascinating world of Google, Facebook, You Tube and Twitter, information is always within reach. So with this blog, i will be sharing all my experience, skills and views on Current happenings and stuffs that i know (all related to my subject)

And I hope you will be following my blog.