How to spend the Mango month?
Just a basic info about me, I am in sophomore year of Computer Science Engineering at Manipal University Jaipur(MUJ), probably one of the best things that happened to me; God, the coding culture is so damn great here!
We have been striving to lead the coding society of MUJ to extraordinary statures the past year.
If you have been wondering………. 🤔
- What’s with the ‘title’ of the article? Really? “Mango Month”?
- What am I gonna read the next 5 mins?
THE AWESOME TITLE 😃
- Let’s crack the code together. It will be fun, trust me! Knowing how legendary programmers think (Boasting 100).
- Let’s start with “Mango”. Comm’n , you know this one, man!
- “Month”- May? June? July? Yeah, I am talking about mid May till the end of the mango season.
- Yeah, we are almost there! I am talking about the summer breaks.
- How to spend your summer breaks fruitfully? (Yeah! I know this one; with mangoes! Sorry to disappoint, but I meant like career wise fruitfully..? The fruitfully that means efficiently? Get it? Yeah, you get it know.)
COMING UP NEXT
This blog will have 3 major sections.
- The Feeling
- The Recovery Plan
- The Winning Mode
So, let’s get started!
THE FEELING
You are probably in one of the situation like this:
- Wasted the complete year doing nothing but TV Series, Gaming and Sleeping.
- Couldn’t really achieve your desired targets.
- Couldn’t manage the College Academics with the things you wanted to learn.
- Applied for an internship. Got rejected.
- The hunger to learn more.
If you are in one of such situation, my dear friend, this article is for YOU!
Whenever you are in such situations, you get that feeling of disappointment, the unsatisfactory feeling, the feeling of denial, rejection, failure. Most of the students in the freshmen year have come out of their homes to the hostels for the first time. It’s difficult to gel in the environment where you have students from all across the country; place of mixed cultures. In the process of gelling along, usually you end up in the wrong friend circle. When you see your friends whom you hang out with, always busy watching TV Series, playing multiplayer games, and talking about similar stuffs while having a conversation. Now, you don’t want to feel left out. You also want to be part of those conversations, were “Who will sit on the iron throne?” is more important than “What have you planned to achieve this semester?”. This feeling of being a part of the gang, the feeling that you will be isolated, I won’t be as cool as the others, I will become the dumb nerd everyone bitches about, traps you in the rat race of being one of the cool dudes with no motivation rather than becoming a great coder, a mentor to others, a helping hand, the one of stands out. You completely waste one year of your engineering; doing nothing. You have that feeling of guilt inside you, eating you from inside. You have that feeling that I have to cover up all these sins of the past year during the summer break. But How? We will talk about it in the “The Recovery Plan”.
Even if you managed to save yourself from this trap. The big, fat syllabus of EM-1,2, 3,4 were waiting for you. You get indulged into college academics so much, you can’t balance the pressure of quizzes, the sheets of Engineering Drawing, the assignments; lab practicals and vivas wait for you with a sword in their hand. You were so busy preparing the shield, you forgot to build your weapon. The weapon of knowledge that you planned on to build, the languages you planned to learn, the frameworks you wanted to master, all you have is the To-Do list which doesn’t have a single check mark. When you started off with a project, or a language, sessionals/mid-terms came about. You left studying what you loved, and starting learning what you needed to. Again, you failed to balance the Shield and the Sword.
You know it’s good to never be satisfied. That hunger to achieve more, learn more, expand your knowledge base, gain some more experience, it should be ever lasting.
Already talking about achieving more? Expanding Knowledge Base? More Experience? Dude, I am somewhere in the first and second situation. Don’t move on to the fourth and fifth one already. Yeah, I will obviously give you a heads up on “How to get started?”.
Moving on to the part for which you have been waiting for - THE RECOVERY PLAN.
THE RECOVERY PLAN
Getting Started - FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS
After exhausting your 1 or 2 years, you have seen through the guilt that you bear inside by resonating with “The Feeling” section.
Now, It’s time to plan up everything for the mango month!
If you are complete novice to the concept of programming, you should start off by reading a few articles on C, C++, Java and Python. You will get the foundation of what these languages are, and where are each one of them majorly used.
Start off by learning C++ as your first language. Why? You will understand while you read through this article. When you decide to start learning C++, you will be confused after seeing hundreds of Books and Tutorials out there on the internet. I would recommend Book on C++ by Sumita Arora which is also in course curriculum of High School in CBSE. The book is really thorough and covers all the basics of programming in C++. You can also follow this YouTube tutorial, if you want to code and learn practically. This will probably take 30–35 days given you study 6–8 hours a day, at least.
Now, you need to practice some questions apart from the book exercises. What type of questions will you come across in a real world scenario? For this, The next step will be to go for Competitive Programming in Codechef or SPOJ. You can start solving with maximum number of submission. Start from Beginners in Practice section of Codechef. You will get your fundamentals stronger and get to brainstorm some great real world programming problems. C++ is considered as the best Competitive Programming language, because it’s really fast and the STL Library has a huge support for all the Data Structures. This is the reason why I mentioned about learning C++ as the first language, because after some practice of competitive programming, you can easily switch to any other language that you would like to learn.
If you have just started programming, or are fairly new, then you summer break will be pretty much this. Because mastering any programming language while learning it for the first time, genuinely requires a lot of time and dedication. In these 70–75 days, you can give yourself a 60-Day Challenge to learn one thing related to C++ everyday and make a note of it. By this way, you can easily keep a track of your learning curve. I always use this method while learning anything new in the Computer Science area and it has helped me a lot.
For those, who know basics of programming already, in any of the languages, you can start off by again reading some articles, but this time on some Tech Stacks.
Now, What are Tech Stacks?
Tech Stacks are those technologies that are being used in the market like Web Development, Mobile App Development, Machine Learning, Internet of Things, Blockchain, Big Data, Cyber Security, etc. Now, when you read through articles on these technologies, you may develop some inclination towards a few of them. You go on by researching more, on “What programming language you need to master in order to learn that tech stack?”
To save your time, I will tell you some of the best and necessary languages/frameworks for some of the tech stacks that I already know and have a decent command on. You can find a gist of all the mentioned technologies below here in this series of articles written by Nedheesh Hasija.
- Web Development- HTML, CSS, JavaScript, BootStrap are mandatory for even making a basic webpage. For strong FrontEnd development, you can go for Angular 7 or React JS. For Backend, you can go for NodeJS or Django or Firebase.
- App Development- Object Oriented Programming ( This is a concept and not a programming language). Languages that you can go through- Java, XML for JAVA Android or DART and Flutter for FLUTTER App Development. I would really recommend Flutter, it’s way easier to build apps with Flutter than Java.
- Machine Learning- Python
- Internet of Things- C++, Python
- Blockchain- C++, Java, GO
- Big Data- Scala
- Cyber Security- You need to know a lot of programming languages but for starters, Python, Linux (it’s an Operating System), SQL .
It’s important to understand that “What am I learning this language for, exactly?”. This is the reason I gave the above reference to the technologies and languages that you need to learn, to master them.
You will have 70–75 days, you can go for a 60-Day Challenge, and start learning the programming language or the framework that you would like to learn. Keep a note of your everyday learning in a Diary. By this way, you can easily keep a track of your learning curve. I always use this method while learning anything new in the Computer Science area and it has helped me a lot. Besides, you also would like to learn basics of Data Structures and Algorithms in the summers. For Data Structures, if you have your basics cleared, you can learn from this YouTube Channel. For Algorithms, you can learn from MITOCW video lectures on YouTube. Again, you would like to practice questions on the concepts you have learned through Data Structures and Algorithms. For that, you can solve Competitive programming questions.
Now, you have 3 things in your To-Do List:
- 1 Technology
- Data Structures
- Algorithms
The Schedule
Now, we need to figure out the efficient time division for the summer break. During the first 21–30 days, you can learn Data Structures and Algorithms during Weekdays and your technology on Weekends. After that in remaining 40–45 Days, you switch gears, and do it completely the other way round. You learn your technology during weekdays (5 Days) and practice Competitive Programming during Weekends(2 Days). This way, in the time of 70–75 days, you can easily complete your goals and get yourself prepared somewhat for the next semester too.
Whoo Hooo! We are literally all planned up, set our bars right, ready to challenge ourselves.
THE WINNING MODE
Congratulations! You are already winning by reading this article. You are really motivated to make things happen this mango month.
Now the question arises, “What will you do after completing those courses?”.
Here’s what:
- Go approach your Computer Science faculty for projects in your technological domain. It would be great if those are Research Projects, so that you get to write Research Papers as a Co-Author under him/her. This mango month, you are going to change your future and pave your path to success. Too much of dialogues to digest? Okay, Okay I will stop already😆
- You can collaborate with your friends, or seniors and work on a personal project. It will be great if that project solves a real world problem.
- You can apply for internships on Internshala and LinkedIn. Finally, just by 70 days of hard-work, you are all set for the things you have been hearing your batch mates and seniors achieve. 😄 It’s really not that tough. Just Mangoes and Coding . 😆
- Attend Hackathons, Codeathons, Workshops and other technical events that being held in and out of the University. Apply in Hackathons those technologies you have learned. Apply those Data Structures and Algorithms that you practiced. It’s time to showcase your skills that you worked hard for.
You have all the relevant details now, to make your mango months, more juicy and fruitful. I really hope this article cleared up many doubts in your mind. A gentle reminder to those who will be watching the video tutorials, watch those videos and understand the concept. Don’t try and just copy the code in the tutorial, otherwise all you will be left with is the perspective of the mentor and no self confidence over the code. You will have to refer to videos again and again. So, to avoid getting stuck in this loop, try understanding the general concept.
All the best for you mango month.
Come back being better than today.
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