Potpourri of LIFE...

Before I begin, I would like to explain the title of this blogpost. Potpourri is a literary production composed of parts brought together without order or bond of connection. I was tempted to name the blog as "Potpourri" for two reasons. One, that it sums up the happenings of my life in the last fortnight perfectly. Two, because it looks very good to they eyes on screen(atleast to my eyes).

The first part of the fortnight mainly revolved around the family whereas the latter half concentrated on the professional aspect. Family time involved cousins coming over,late night snacks, visiting relatives and most importantly spending quality time at home with parents.

The highlight of the first half of the past 15 days is certainly the new addition to my life,to my family..my prized possession..A Hero Honda Pleasure..It involved some research,some googling, some brainstorming to narrow down to choosing a two-wheeler..Finally, I had the pleasure of owning a PLEASURE.. Now that obviously called for a learners' license, which meant I had to do brush up on the traffic rules. The LL too arrived in 3-4 days after a not-so tough viva at the RTO.

Amidst all these joys, there was a sense of excitement and a sense of nervousness to attend the Yahoo Open Hack 2011! I was sharp on time to the venue on a Saturday morning at the all exciting Lalit Ashok! The security was tight owing to the political events happening in Bangalore with Yeddyurappa resigning. We were then welcomed at the event by the crew at the registration desk.

It was the fourth Open Hack event at Bangalore. The session was introduced by Micheal Smith from Yahoo! which was followed by talks from Saurabh Sahni on YQL and Y! APIs,Natarajan Kannan on YUI 3,Pradeep B V on HTML 5 & CSS 3 and Harsha Rajashekar Vashisht(my super senior at MVIT) on Hacking with Node.js at the Kalinga room/ Parallely, the Siddhartha room at Lalit Ashok was busy with Praveen P N's on Building High Performance Web Sites,Prajwal B S's Y! Geo Technologies and Tathagato Rai Dastidar's Yahoo! Search BOSS.

The highlight of the event was Douglas Crockford,the creator of JSLint and developer of JSON discussing JavaScript. He was present at the event to give us talks on three main topics. a.Server Sidedness b.The JSON saga and c.Programming Style and Your Brain. A man with such credentials was very amiable and interacted feeely with the crowd. The technical talks gave us a sense of direction to proceed in this field and boosted out technical knowledge.

The rest of the event was filled with a few developers building applications, a few learning to develop and a few interacting with others and brodening their horizons. The hacks were based on the location ,mobile and entertainment challenges which led to mobile apps,web apps and hackware hacks. The top 50 hacks out of 111 were chosen and were presented by one team member. A few hacks were funny, a few aiding the social mass and a few were purely technical.

The winners' hacks were something that we could all connect to and use to make our lives simper and easier.

The grand prize winner hacks were Spotlight – Illuminate your part of the World(This hyper-local web app surfaces the best content in our area) and D.A.M.N. - Single Serving Friend (Connects people on demand to enable them to share meter fare in taxis / auto-rickshaws. This is done by finding out common routes that different people want to take at a given time).They would participate the the Grand Open Hack at New York this September.

The other winning hacks were fakemytrip, crosstag, devsync, StoryBoard and iCribber. fakemytrip was certainy my favourite and rightfully chosen as the popular hack by the jury.

I would sum up my experience as a place of learning from others and exchanging ideas that would soon become innovative products(hopefully). The experience included learning about hacking with plenty of fun(i enjoyed the foosball and the T-shirt is pretty satisfactory) and amazing yummy food for the weekend. The bean bag, that they allowed us to take back, is a tresure at home now.I carried it home by using the public transport..Anything for the bean bag!! The hospitality at the event, the crew, the mentors, Anil with his team and most importantly YAHOO! deserves a big pat on their back for organizing such a mega event!!!I am tempted to work for Yahoo! some day after this event. Amidst all this action, the VI semester results were announced too. It was,all in all,a perfect end to the semester holidays...

I could not ask for a better start to the final year. Three years of engineering have somehow have passed so soon and here we are,walking through the gates of the college as seniors. Seeing the college,friends and teachers after a month instilled a feel-good feeling. I already had a responsibilty at hand, even before I entered college. It was a great opportunity, more than responsiblity. I was asked to be a part of the event management committee for organising one of MVIT's milestone events - The Silver Jubilee Mega Alumni Meet to mark the 25 years of our college. I plunged into it as I would get to meet and interact with the seniors I know and the seniors who passed out from college much before I joined.

The latter week included some(very little) seriosuness to prepare for GRE which is less than a month away.The week also witnessed our first training and placement session by Prof S H Khan on the Do's and Don't s of preparing for an interview. After a month of attending seminars voluntarily, a new opportunity knocked at my door. I was chosen as one of the 10 students who would attend a 3-day seminar at IISc along with 4 teachers on Frontiers of Computer Science from 7-9 August. Awaiting to learn and have some fun!!