Oct 28, 2018
TWTW: Oct 22 — 28 | #6
An introspection
Monday (22/10/2018)
Week started quite well. Realized GitHub was down due to storage issues, which bugged a lot of people who were working on the Hacktoberfest Challenge. Also devSwag is an awesome website to discover how to win swags through online (simple or difficult) tasks! Thanks Adithya.
In the evening I read about The Diana Award and nominated Enfa for the same as I felt she had a strong purpose to move forward with her goal to empower women to explore technology. If she deserves it, hopefully they will reach out to her for her exemplary works for PEHIA.
Nikita Uday encouraged me to apply for Mozill Tech Speaker. I applied for the same as it looked great!I would recommend you to take a look at it too. Thank you Nikita!
I wrote an article about rage control and submitted it to PaperKin blog for submission. Hope that goes well.
I planned 2 applications for app scripting, after taking Arya’s advice of working on actual projects instead of simply learning. Hope that goes well too.
Tuesday (23/10/2018)
I checked the PyCon India Slack Channel and saw how to get a proof of participation from the organizers. I mailed them for the same.
I know somewhere deep inside that if I do not give enough attention to what is being taught, I would regret in the end. I should try to find time to study to avoid difficulty when exams get closer.
I discovered that a student from NIT-C got selected for the Venkat Panchapakesan Memorial Scholarship. Awesome to have another malayali make it through for the 3rd time in a row!!
Also Saloni Garg, another scholar of this years cohort wrote a phenomenal blog post about her experience. Highly recommended! (She rejected Google’s Women Tech Maker Scholarship!! Wow)
Wednesday (24/10/2018)
Helped Steves and Devashish complete Hacktoberfest challenge. All it took was 10 minutes to explain how git-fork ->git-clone->work->git-add->git-commit->git-push->PR; worked.
Devashish improved the DEBATE Club standards. We had an extempore session and all the participants thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you Devashish for being the positive change that we all were eagerly waiting for.
Thursday (25/10/2018)
Got to see many female students from my network benefit from WITx program. The Udacity Machine Learning Nanodegree program and MECLABS deadline silently reminded me of the procrastination error I was making.
I requested Kurian Thomas of the other class if he could interact with the juniors on how to study EDC well (many find it difficult so helping them find the best perspective would help them pass). He is interested to do so. Unfortunately the juniors could not meet him because it clashed with their retest slot. Hopefully we can keep it sometime next week.
A junior that I got in touch with after the Hacktoberfest@MEC event called me and asked if it was okay to participate in technical events of MEC without any experience. I suggested that it was better to go and fail now as the experience would help you have a more significant participation next year.
Friday (26/10/2018)
Was at home due to poor health. Spent time appreciating the detail and extensive work of Red Dead Redemption II. Completed a college assignment and narrowed down the works I had to complete before November began.
Bhairavi from my class shared an interesting quote that felt apt for my level of dedication towards the teams I am involved in.
Responsibility finds a way; Irresponsibility finds an excuse
My twiiter feed was filled with opportunities for women to try. It was then that I realized that the next iteration of WIT began, under the title of WITx, a concise package to empower more women. Good work Sijo and Arya.
I applied for Mozilla Open Leaders Cohort for the idea of building better inclusive tech communities that consider the well-being of all its members better. Fingers crossed.
At college, FOSSMEC kept a help desk session during the lunch break to help students submit their 1st Pull Request for the Hacktoberfest challenge because learning is best when someone explains it to you. I felt motivated to encourage the team to keep this after my experience helping Devashish and Steve understand and complete it under 10 minutes.
Unfortunately it clashed with a lot of other activities and no one turned up. Atleast we tried :)
I applied for the next iteration of Pioneer Tournament, this time with a different idea. It involves using computer vision to make the process of developing survey forms easier.
Saturday (27/10/2018)
Took rest again. Have a lot of pending work to complete. Started App Scripting learning. Sent a status update to Arya and Sijo. Hopefully I should be able to keep this momentum long enough to work on bigger projects.
Meanwhile my friends had a great time at Google DevFest 2018 at Cochin (I did not get shortlisted, better try next time I guess). Phenomenal talks and events were there from noteworthy speakers (including Enfa and Farha!). Super happy to see a community gathering so vibrant.
I tried reading Cracking the Coding Interview and Elements of Programming Interviews. The introduction of these books convinced me the value of having a firm hold on one’s fundamentals to get a good job in the future. Also I watched this YouTube video and decided to plan my schedule to include Competitive Programming a little everyday from November 1st. (Yup, the new month resolution that would most likely fail because motivation > purpose but it feels good hoping for the best).
Around 9PM, another Junior got in touch with through the Hacktoberfest@MEC workshop called me to discuss a start-up idea that was on his mind. He wants to make a platform that connects football fanatics together,automatically creates a tournament and helps them organize it for a month on weekends. The idea seemed quite risky but I urged them to try it out nevertheless. They wanted to know the technicality involved in making it, and I was not sure. So I got them in touch with Adarsh M (good technical skills), Hariraj K (currently working on a start up himself and so understands the difficulty involved in making it work) and Pioneer tournament, an online product development eco — system for students to vote and appreciate the good ideas. I also encouraged them to not give up, and spend time researching about the Kochi attitude toward football. Hope they succeed.
In FOSSMEC, We had previously thought of creating a replica of Google Summer of Code (by calling it MEC — Winter Of Code) but organizing it would take time. So Adarsh S handpicked a few students to provide them with projects and means to empower them for GSoC next year as smaller means better results.Though this is not exactly aligned with the goal of equal opportunity for all, one must take certain measures to get quick results. Hope it turns out well.
Sunday (28/10/2018)
After a lot of StackOverFlow exploration and deep diving, I made a very simple script to send out confirmation mail to participants of a project.
Thank you Arya for suggesting to do the same. I know there is a long way to go from making optimal scripts, but for a start this looks decent :)
Also at exact 4PM, another cool thing happened!
Well, like how Sijo says, all good things take time. Let us see what encouragement can do to empower us.
Meanwhile at the college, Excel 2018 is super close and almost here — and os is the preparation and passing of the work. Hoping for the best!
This week gave me time to find extra space to think despite hard times. Hope I can convert it into productive output for next week.
Bonus Content:
I watched the talk by Damini Sathya at React Conf. I got to meet her in person at PyCon India 2018 and established a link via twitter then. She is working on developing a smarted Emotional ChatBot to help Women get over anxiety and depression. That talk is truly noteworthy and highly recommended.
Also, this lightning talk quite well overlapped with my idea about forming more inclusive communities. Do watch :)
Thank you for reading through my introspection and detailed exploration of the week that was. Let us work towards an effective tomorrow. Let me end on a question that Ayetekin Tank asked in his article.
Will you consume, or will you create?
