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Piyush VJani

What I hope to learn I CS3216?

“What did *some high-profile successful alumni of CS3216* write for this question?”

As a creature of habbit that’s what I googled when I came across this question for the first time. I took my online searching prowess to Google, Quora, Computing blogs, CS3216 blogs, and others to see what they, the overachievers wanted. I found some times interesting, sometimes banal, and sometimes even a prompt to enter password so I couldn’t read their blogs. But most of the time it was the obvious things they wanted which I will talk in the next paragraph, but my motivations are different than theirs so for me I had to look deeper than just learning how to code. I wanted to see solutions, and not apps. This is something non-obvious (for me) which I want to learn which I will address in a my second section.

The Obvious Ones:

  1. Rapid prototyping: “Dude, I have an idea, why not make an *app/website/VR hack* which will be like *X for Y* (X=Uber, Facebook, WeChat, Snapchat, Oculus, etc; Y = laundry, guitarists, dogs, Africa, etc, with many-to-many connection) This is something we hear everyday being a computing student, from our friends, or even relatives. Sometimes we ponder the same about prototyping these technologies but due to lack of time, talent, and commitment it rarely sees the light of day. Be it an iOS/Android app, website, or web app, I wish to rapid prototype it in their respective environments and pass a MVP to users to gather feedback, to iterate the design process.
  2. Code Code Code: That’s it. Be ruthless to teach myself more coding and being more shameless about asking for help when needed.
  3. Marketing: I don’t spend hours on Facebook cause it’s exciting (usually it’s depressing so I have unfollowed most of my friends who post about food, or their over-hyped life, and get just filter out info which is useful to me like: events, Facebook pages of news channel, sports updates, and getting a reminder of my old-school friend birthday). Facebook owns people’s time cause it’s always there for me with its red dot, preying on my when I am most vulnerable: bored. If I get news in a better format, I will use that app (which I do now, check out NewsInShorts which summarises news in 100 words, big advocate). If I get twitter to be less cluttered, I will use that. People go to Facebook cause it becomes second nature, to be thumb-and-dumb and watch Unilad/9gag videos to go back into the guilt trip. Without discounting on its merits, it’s a powerful platform which helps me connect to some great people I wouldn’t have interacted with otherwise but that’s little value I get out of the time I put. Is my digging in for good curated content worth my time on Facebook? There might be hundreds of other apps like Duolingo which my German teacher in school should know about, or 3D Chess which my grandmother would be glued to if she knows about it, but sometimes they fail to reach mass adoption due to various reasons like timing, or lack of funding to spur their growth, etc. I wish to learn those intangible hacks too.
  4. Write and Read more: My reading diet includes topics ranging from Philosophy (PlatoAndThePlatypus, The Myth of Sisyphus), but for me reading is absolutely passive activity unless I write. I try to retrospect about my little learnings, the changes I perceive in technology, in people’s behaviour, and sometimes even the absurdity of all. I try to bleed in writing which sometimes keep me busy on weekends and on weekday nights. To share a little secret, I have written more accounts of my life on Facebook as “Only Me” privacy settings which details a personal anecdote or an incident, than my public posts. Writing is one of the few things that makes me more human, makes me realise I can do much more than just endless digital scrolling.

The Personal Ones:

  1. Motivation: What makes people, smarter than me, tick? How do you make them stay? How do you make them a better person who work with you and under you? How to make a Googler work for you? How will I motivate CS3216 best coder to work for me than working on “Uber for Laundry” cause it’s hot? Am I happy working for a startup that is trying to deliver food in the best possible way at customer’s whim or should I take my side project of a collaboration app between NGOs and Government body as a full time stint? On contrary, I have met the smartest people without drive, high stake professional with tasteless, even poisonous, leadership, and . As with every atrocious things, it teaches you the best lessons. My worst internship experience taught me how not to treat people, and when a person can feel like a commodity. This brings me to my second point on purpose.
  2. Purpose: “Join us to change the world.” There are thousands of startups in the world, but which ones reach the masses and actually change user’s behaviour for good?

Let me tell you a story. During my last six days in the hospital in my home city, Lucknow, less than 10% people speak English, and more than 90% people know WhatsApp(or what they call a magic app). There are thousands of inefficiencies in these legacy systems in hospitals. My father, in his 50s, had to wait for few hours outside the emergency ward cause the person in duty was having lunch and he didn’t update the available beds (Hi, Machine learning meet Humans of Lucknow). It’s frustrating when you stand in queue for hours because the ‘computer guy’ forgot his glasses in some other room so he misspelt your father’s name during his discharge even though the ‘computer guy’ could have pulled his previous reports but to quote him, “Sir, ward A system is not connected to ward B system. Another incident which shred my ego in the hospital was when I had the chance to meet Tara, an agonised and disappointed lady who travelled all the way from Patna (distance between Patna and Lucknow is 541 km) to get her husband treated in the hospital. Her husband is a factory labor who earns around Rs. 200 (S$ 4)/day and has been suffering from swollen liver. For his treatment, she has been in the hospital for over a month and had spent over more than 2.5 lakh INR (equivalent to 6,000 SGD) which she got on high loans from “some traders”. She faced myriads of problems on a daily basis

  1. She couldn’t read the reports as they were mostly in English. Unfortunately even the most patients doctors got annoyed at her as she was illiterate so she couldn’t follow all of their vocabulary properly and was even scared to ask any questions to them for the fear of being scolded again. (Any app which could translate Eng to Hindi for her once she scans her mobile over the report?)
  2. She didn’t have any knowledge of how much should be the interest rate for the money she borrowed. I was appalled when she told me she took it over 20% which is atrocious as banks provide it for around 10%.
  3. She had no clue about the benefits which the government has announced for “Below Poverty Line” people like her. To make matters worse, she didn’t even know that something like this existed which could have given her free medical insurance, and covered other costs too. (Luckily, my sister helped her apply for Below Poverty Line card yesterday.) There is an app to tell people of their rights but again it brings me back to the problem of Marketing as outlined in as it is not reaching the right people.

My phone had 67 apps and most of them were serving just two purposes:

  1. To make me more lazy
  2. To capitalize on my insecurities and make me feel uncomfortable until I validate my presence on those platforms

when people like Tara couldn’t even get basic information about their basic rights.

Many of these are social problems first and then technical problems but this doesn’t excuse us from working on it.

I am not asking to work on these things to change the world but I hope to think of people like Tara, whenever and whatever we do. We can talk until we’re blue in the face about how NGOs and social enterprises are doing this work but they lack the magic wand that we have, technology and the scalability it provides. Let’s build something with greater focus and deeper purpose than just ‘another app’.

This is just to make a point as I focused on consumer facing apps, there are stellar startups which helps business, government bodies, and even militaries but purpose is what separates them. Surprisingly Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and the likes didn’t start with a purpose to change the world but people who just enjoyed what they were doing. The story of “Changing the World” was crafted later to satisfy their ego, market their brands, and sometimes, actually end up doing it but most importantly in this world of unknown unknowns, I tell myself not to change the world cause

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Apologies for puking out everything I had here, as I just came back from the hospital but If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Blog (: