Hackathons – A great way to learn

I was introduced to the term Hackathons in my first month of my college. The software development society of our college (called BYLD) organised a hackathon. What I came to know was that hackathons are an event for learning. They aren’t actually about hacking. The name is a bit misleading. We actually work on making something productive and not particularly hack anything. This was my incentive to participate – I’d get to learn. Since then I have participated in two hackathons in my first 3 months, and both of them were an exhilarating experience of learning. I learned a variety of skills. Not only related to the hackathon’s theme, but also non-transferable skills that include learning how to use a particular piece of library, how to collaborate with others and team work etc.

Frameworks

In any device, plugins are an indispensable tool for customization. For e.g in a television, we can add a home theater, to enhance our experience. In any book that we read, we can add a bookmark to help us remember the last page, but it isn’t necessary. Similarly in programming a real world problem, we have several small tasks. Some of these tasks are routine one’s and have an already written piece of code, that we can reuse in our work. This is called a Library.

Internet of Facts

Recently I received several fake fact messages, and what was more interesting is the people forwarding these messages were highly educated. Today it is not uncommon to receive messages that say If we do not forward it then a decade of bad luck, or we wont ever live happily, or maybe even we’d get murdered that midnight itself by a ghost. After some thought, I realised that such things were extremely uncommon before the advent of the internet. Before the Internet existed, people relied on written sources of information. They used to read newspapers for information. Books and journals were published to demonstrate a point. These used to take effort and time to make, and rarely contained false information, because hardly anyone would take so much pain and effort to spread false messages.

Wireless World – A wonder

A long time back, when phones, were introduced, they had a manual pad and pre-programmed functions which limited their usage (only calling). At that time we didn’t even considered that making a phone controllable, and that too with a touch would be possible (and even if possible, then not feasible). Today we use smartphones and hardly see any of the primitive, only calling design phones, and control them by a touch.

QR Codes – Omnipresent

I am amused at how the world has been revolutionized by technology. Recently in my nearby supermarket, I saw a simple placard having a QR code powered by something called Paytm (it’s an acronym of Pay Through Mobile). This placard, was not only in that shop, I could see it on the cabs, petrol pumps and even in the parkings at a few places. The technology that this little placard uses is the QR code. What is more ironical is that this QR code was used by Japanese automobile companies to identify their machine parts, and now these codes are used for identifying humans – yes, you will find this code on the visiting Cards of people and even on their T-Shirts.

Rains – Boon or Catastrophe

A few days ago on a fine evening, while returning to my home from my institute on my two wheeler, suddenly it started raining heavily. I did have my raincoat and a bag cover for my rescue, but yet the downpour was heavy enough to drench me through the neck opening alone. Such a heavy rain and that too just after it had rained in the morning flooded all the roads, and soon the roads transformed into pools. I was wondering that these heavy rains must be a chaos for the people. In some way I was wrong.