How I spent my summer with code!
Published in
4 min readJul 7, 2017
A glimpse into what I did this summer! March-July 2017
It has been quite long since I posted an update on my coding journey on medium, well these months were awesome and I got a lot done from chat-bots to creating a sentiment analysis tool for Chingu Cohorts. Meanwhile I found some amazing resources and would like to share them too.
Let’s go through what things I explored!
- Completed 2nd year of college! It was cool semester, learned Computer networks, got some speaking training and programmed microprocessors!
- Courses: I had vacations after exams so that was the chance to build awesomeness! but also learn awesomeness!
Some courses I did were:
Machine Learning A-Z : It was a great course, quite abstract for most part but I got introduced to some algorithms for various applications of Machine learning like recommending systems and model selection techniques. If you are new to Machine Learning then it is great! I liked how the instructor gave a visualisation at end so we know how our results really are. I got it for 10$ because of Udemy sale.
React JS — Mastering Redux: Again a great course, I got it for free with a coupon :P Really great explanation and instructor explained the working of Redux and React while writing the code which I liked the most. Really helped me get better at these libraries. Now I am very confident that I won’t stumble too much when using Redux.
Some resources:
Amazing Math oriented Deep Learning tutorials http://deeplearning.net/tutorial
Book full of algorithms for Coding contests!
https://cses.fi/book.pdf
Article on making Slack Slash commands that helped me a lot
http://www.girliemac.com/blog/2016/10/24/slack-command-bot-nodejs/ - Codeathons!
It had been long since I worked on algorithmic puzzles as I was more leaned toward project oriented learning (still think it is better), but I wanted to build my maths and interview problem skills, so I took part in Google Codejam. Cleared the round zero, with 2 solutions, and got broken hard by the round 1… couldn’t solve any!
Similar fate with Google Summer of Code, where my proposal for working on AI agents got rejected. That really hurt a lot and I still feel sad when I think of effort I put into it and how much hopes I had built. But rejection is part of life. :-)
I registered in Kickstart, in May but I missed because of a bug in their emails, I got email to join arena after it had completed :O Took part in June’s Kickstart and solved 2 questions! Going to take part in July one too, the problems in Codejam and Kickstart are always fun. I recommend everyone reading, to try solving the problems/puzzles. - Projects!
I really wanted to make something cool this summer, with Summer of Code out of way, I was a bit empty handed suddenly. But I saw that in Chingu Central, al lot of people were asking “If a channel for X topic exists?”. I thought this is a problem and need to be solved, so here I came!
Slack N Study (SNS):
@pankaja and I teamed up to build this, it was supposed to be a chatbot but for simplicity and lesser constraints on number of messages, we opted for slash command bot. There were several great problem solving sessions, we were discussing so much about different ways that users will interact with it, what are the failing cases and how to avoid those. Did a lot of testing of each case, worked with MongoDB and NodeJS, used a hacky way on the Slack API to get the automatic add command to work.
ChinguAnalyser:
As I learned NLP from the course on Udemy, I thought it is beneficial for our online community! There are several people that take up projects but then do not show up, making the rest of Build 2 Learn team feel sad. I used the recency, frequency and sentiment of members to find churns, silent and members with high sentiment. It is a great topic, there would surely be an article on it in future. This was just a test though, it is still a work in progress. - Freelance Gigs!
Nothing is better than earning money in summer as a student :P So I did a lot of proposals on Upwork and got some simple gigs that got me some money! I implemented scripts on finding churns in telecom data, finding how good a student is at a course. - Last but not the least… New Portfolio and Resume!
I had been planning a lot on making a new portfolio but I was always busy, this summer I got it done! trion.me!
I worked with forces, spring laws, vectors… but at end maths made my website look alive, as I wanted it to be.
Some images :-)
