It’s impossible until its done. — the Dhruv Bhatti story
“Change brings opportunity” — Nido Qubein
With the world growing so quickly, all of us are working towards keeping ourselves updated and adapted. We met the ambitious Dhruv Bhatti, who is learning programming to adapt better with his field of work and expand his field of expertise. How are these two related you ask? Read on -
Dhruv is a 2nd year Electronics and Telecommunication engineering student from Mumbai. An Intro to Programming Nanodegree student, it was incidentally Dhruv’s love of electronics got him into programming.
Back in his school days, Dhruv found Computer Programming boring. He even dropped learning C++ before within two weeks of pursuing it. When in college, he had Java in his academic credits. But this wasn’t taught well either.
Being an Electronics and Telecommunication student, Dhruv has worked on various electronics projects. His first project was the Smart Wifi which is an IoT-enabler tool.
“It’s application is only limited to your imagination”, says Dhruv. To demonstrate the device’s application, Dhruv connected it with a temperature sensor. The recorded temperature was automatically uploaded online and then we could see the data from anywhere in the world.
Dhruv could do the calculations for the projects but putting these calculations into a programming flow and programming them to work the way he wanted it to was problematic.
Right after this project, Dhruv got fascinated with the power of programming and wanted to learn it better. He wanted to work on projects where he could program and make things work. Being introduced to Udacity by one of his relatives, Dhruv enrolled for Intro to Programming Nanodegree(IPND).
Next up, Dhruv began his second electronics project — a speech recognition implementation with arduino. During this project he was familiar with how to use an Arduino but programming still perplexed him. Dhruv says, “As I moved ahead in IPND, I was able to understand the programs written by others. And I was happy because it was a big leap for me, from not being able to understand code to it becoming a simple thing for me.”
Currently, Dhruv is working on an Autonomous Quadcopter using a Raspberry Pi and Python programming. He is confident about succeeding in this project because after learning python, he can easily program the Raspberry Pi and also understand the program flow better.
Simultaneously, Dhruv is working on the Nanodegree’s capstone project, where he is building an iOS application. He is also developing a website using Python for his mother’s business on her birthday.
“With no programming experience, the Nanodegree was difficult initially. I remember when I couldn’t clear my project submission at first attempt. The reviewer was very humble and pointed my mistakes and there was a small video where they said there is no need to be demotivated as I can try again and learn more.”, says Dhruv.
Dhruv says, “But with all this what makes me think that online education will change the way people learn. The exposure we get while learning is the best. Our classroom circle is bigger and we have students of all ages, who are ready to help each other and different stories of other peers motivate you a lot. Knowing that a person started with IPND after 30 years of experience in business is so amazing, because knowing this a person is ready to learn new things at that age then what’s stopping me.”
Dhruv is also starting the Udacity for College community in his college. He believes through UCollege everybody can learn and grow together. And also show his peers how powerful coding is and can help each other achieve their goals.
The journey of not being interested in programming to programming in python has got Dhruv very interested in Computer Science.
In his words, “If you have the idea to do something you just have to put it in language that computer understands and do it.”
Want to start your journey in programming too? Check out the Intro to Programming Nanodegree.
