2017: A Non-coder odyssey
From noob to eureca
I was fascinated with computers back in ‘98, when our school started off with an Air-Conditioned (in fact, this was the first time I experienced an AC and I was fascinated with that as well — I am very fascina’ble) computer lab with 6 desktops running BASIC. All the time I used to get during my schooling I used to be found hitting 10 PRINT & 20 PRINT. I used to love it, but then life happened and colleges went by without me having a fair idea of what I was supposed to do in life. After graduating as an engineer from IIT BHU, then as an MBA grad from IIM Calcutta, I landed up a cushy job as a financial consultant in a multinational firm. Life was all good, big time!
Then, one day Python happened.
Around 2016 I started dabbling in Python, writing scripts to automate financial stock trading a bit, which sad to say I was not good with, to do a bit of web-scraping and see what’s up with Refinery29, Kyrzayda and the like. Life was all good again! I used to come home from office and sneak into my study and code.
Then, one day Blockchain happened.
After a long minute of thought I decided to do what was not advised by none. I quit my job and dived into blockchain head-on. Life was all good again. I was up all night, most of the times eating, drinking, and sleeping on blockchain. You might not believe it, but there was a time when I used to dream about hashrates, SHA and the like. However, delving deep into something is not what I had been prepared for throughout my life and I was simply latched onto the idea that blockchain will revolutionise everything, and damn! if I am not a part of the revolution then what’s left to do. Life still was all good!
Then, one day my manager happened.
You don’t choose a technology and go business with it. You decide a business and go technology with it — Animish Mujumdar, the manager.
It was very difficult to be off blockchain for me and think business. Despite with an MBA, I didn’t like to think business. Weeks around mid-September, 2017, I was hit with blockchain withdrawal syndrome. It’s almost like when you get off smoking — every 10 mins you think of taking a drag. I got up some late nights and despite the warnings, did a bit of scripting with blockchain — so basically I was cheating on myself with myself. After a few meet-ups over coffee and one over barritos with AM, wherein he assisted me in coping with my withdrawal syndrome, I got back to work on actually thinking of a value proposition and then a product and then technology supporting that product.
Then, for some days nothing happened.
We decided over learning and skillset development as the choice of domain for value proposition. As I was leaning towards technology, it had to be tech-enabled. All was well till now, I knew I had dabbled with Python a bit and I was confident could learn other languages as well if and when required (grave fallacy of the overconfident, here). I started to envision the application, created blueprints for the same and started learning Swift. Then several things happened and those too simultaneously — classes, objects, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation, abstraction, composition.
I had ensconced myself so well into writing simple scripts to do automated stuff, that I didn’t know that creating a function such as function quickieSum(argument1, argument2) -> return (argument1 + argument2) is not even 101 of programming.
Ok, no worries, you still can learn these. The Swift documentations are quite rich. — Abhinav Prakash, the self.
After few caffeinated days, dreary afternoons and sleepless night, finally I had no clue about object oriented programming. The esteemed professor Paul Hegarty’s words were reminding me of what I had learnt about Doppler effect, especially when the object in consideration is moving away from the source of sound. I didn’t understand a thing.
In fact, my “Hello World” application on iOS refused to print “Hello World”. It has its own mind which it used to print lldb in my console.
Anyway, I went home. My hometown is in Ara, a remote location for people in metropolitan cities, routine though for people in Patna, ultimately all in Bihar. Therein, with my internet speed hitting lows of kbps, I chanced upon this guy — Prof. Mehran Sahami. And my oh my! did he change my life with his candies!
You have to go to the roots, such as Java and C++ to see how they evolved, to know what beauty lies in the art of Object Oriented. — Saurav Prakash, the brother.
I got immersed into the beauty of object oriented, gobbled up Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Head First Design Pattern and Head First Java. I have a habit of doing things “head first” anyway, as you could guess. Finally, my “Hello World” started printing “Hello World” and to top it all, occasionally it even said “Hello Abhinav, sup?”. I came back from home as Babe Ruth’s called shot, and got back to Paul’s, gorged on Swift docs and devoured Big Nerd Ranch Guide on Swift. Finally, I ate, drank and slept on Swift and iOS.
Development of the first version of the application, which I envision would serve as a visually immersive learning platform in order to enable learning as we have never experienced before, took 3 months, overdose of coffee & tea when I ran out of coffee, numerous discussions with friends and family over what looks good, what doesn’t and who’ll eat what, and hours of hanging out on StackOverflow and calling up a fellow coder (even his wife!) who I do not come even close to in terms of his programming knowledge and skills.
Call me anytime. Plus, I love Google. Period. — Rohit Kumar, the fellow coder.
I am counting calories— fellow coder’s wife
My mother keeps asking me, “When would we get to see our grandchild?”. So, momma, here’s eureca — your grandchild.
eureca is a visually immersive learning platform primarily catering to kids. Backed by Augmented Reality, it provides deeper learning experience by enabling interaction with various animals, objects and more in your real environment, such as within the confines of your home. After the initial set-up, adaptive challenges are created for kids to solve and progress to higher complexity.
I have built it with a lot of thought and care, and I really hope you like it. I would request you to try it out and tell me—Abhinav Prakash — what you see, what you feel, what you think needs improvement and additions. We are working tirelessly to create new modules, which will be increasingly animated and interactive, and your feedback will go a long long way to create a product which may help the process of learning, in ways unimaginable. We are at Imerzon, and a mail away from support@imerzon.com. We will get started on our publication soon enough. See you on one or more of our channels.
