2015 Year Review
While I never stopped to contemplate events in my life, I think now is the right time to do it. Time flies so quickly!
Google Summer Of Code’ 15
2015 started by involving myself a lot in open source. I was inspired by my friend Shadab Zafar. Following this guy on Github, I could see a lot of cool stuff which he was “Starring” on my feed. I explored a lot of stuff, found a lot of interesting softwares and contributed whatever I could in my capacity.
That led me to participate in GSoC’15. I was selected for Moin Moin Wiki UI/UX project, and successfully completed my project.
Instant Music
http://iyask.me/Instant-Music-Downloader/
I had written a small script in my 2nd year for querying songs on Youtube. I knew the script could be improved a lot, and perhaps could be used to discover and download songs by querying misspelled/ vague lyrical sentences. I rewrote the whole script with additional improvements like correct meta information such as id3 tags and album art.
The script quickly gained a lot of attention, it trended at #1 spot on HackerNews, Github Trending Repos, Reddit and was featured on various tech blogs.
JEEQuery
I worked with my brother Bhrigu Srivastava during summer break to build a Stackoverflow like web app for IIT-JEE aspirants. The project turned out to be pretty good! Students from all over India flooded the website with questions and we got busy revising school topics to answer those questions. JEEQuery currently has around 100 users (It was started in September).
Stalky
Another fun project I did all by myself. I reused a web crawler script I wrote while completing a Udacity course in my first year. It crawls for social profile links from various sources such as Facebook, Instagram, Google Plus, Twitter.
It can be used to instantly discover social profile links of a celebrity accurately. It trended at #1 spot on /r/UsefulWebsites.
Summarize It
https://github.com/yask123/Summarize-it
I participated in two Hackathons this year, teamed up with my college friend Vinayak Mehta and a few other students to build an interesting Slack Plugin, which summarizes the chat logs instantly.
Android Development Nanodegree
I participated in a Google Scholarship contest. It was my first official hangout interview. A senior engineer from VMware conducted my interview. I was asked a lot of challenging questions, had a lot of fun! I was selected for the scholarship. Google paid my full tuition fee for Android Nanodegree program!
Zomato Trial Week
I was selected for Zomato trial week! It was such an amazing experience. The best thing about Zomato are their engineers. Hardworking, passionate and inspiring! My mentor was Nitesh Khilwani (PhD, Loughborough University), and he asked me to work on data collection project.
* Built a software which uses Common Crawl’s petabytes of collected scraped data of websites to detect if it belongs to a restaurant. It then scrappes restaurant details such as Name,Address,Phone Number.. etc. from the scraped webpages.
* Built a search engine for Restaurants. It collects data by crawling through the restaurant’s data from Facebook Restaurant pages and Google Places. The results are cached to deliver faster response.
* Built an API for the Restaurant’s Search Engine web app.
My mentor was impressed with my work. But since I am still in my 3rd year, they referred me for a summer internship instead of a full time offer.
Taught Web Developement with Django Course
Principal sir of my college urged me to conduct a web developement summer training course for the first year students. It was my first time teaching experiance and I totally enjoyed it. I also recieved a cheque from my college as a stipend. ;)
Grofers
I was selected for winter internship at Grofers. I was given interesting projects to work on. I am currently on a sick leave, Hopefully I’ll continue from Monday.
