Why we created a new technical society

The tech-culture in PEC is “critically-ill” and must be saved.

One of the things I have always been fascinated by is the effort put by the cultural clubs of PEC. Clubs like Dramatics, work hard and strive to be the best in their field, winning National level competitions frequently.

I always used to wonder in my first three years here that PEC is a technical University, and why doesn’t anyone put effort in technical areas. I don’t know any Google Summer of Code participant, anyone with Red/Yellow TopCoder rating, or anyone with significant amount of Open Source contributions here. Students who have even done something, haven’t been able to share their experiences and knowledge.

This feeling became even more significant after I returned back to PEC after my internship, so a small bunch of enthusiastic peeps from 3rd and final year met in the Kurukshetra Hostel and decided to do something about this. We named our initiative “Computer Science Society”.

Over the entire odd semester of ’16, a number of workshops were held on various technical topics, and an e-Feedback portal developed for internal use. At the start of this fall semester, the authorities recognized our importance and “PEC Student IT Team”, a brand new society was born.

If asked to summarize our motive, I’ll put it as follows (in no particular order):

• Introducing the culture of Competitive programming: You can’t land a decent job without having a good grasp of solving mathematical problems. We’ll be paying special attention to that.
• Building scalable, re-usable systems: Almost all of the projects made by students are dumped after they are evaluated by the teachers. The reason for this maybe poor design or implementation, which renders them useless for real world. We intend to fix this problem by bringing in a uniform development cycle, which will help discrete systems better coordinate with each other.
• Promoting the use of best practices while programming: I sincerely hope students will stop turning in assignments and projects with long and unreadable spaghetti codes.
• Helping students from non-CS background to code: We aim to provide students from other branches a full-fledged platform to get up and running with programming. It’s not that hard, trust me.
• Learning to express yourself in technical jargon: It’s not just about writing code, you must also be able to express yourself clearly. We intend to focus on writing better comments, product documentations and code documentations.
• Web development can be done (better) without PHP as well: The number of people using PHP in PEC is astonishing. In fact, it is the de facto standard when it comes to doing anything that involves web-related. Not only is this a bad idea in general, it also sows the seed of bad practices in young programmers. (I ignore anyone who starts an argument against this by saying “Facebook is written in PHP”).
• Building products for PEC’s internal use: In line with the principles above, we intend to apply practical skills in developing tools and products for PEC itself, which shall provide us a perfect environment to show our skills.

I hope that this initiative will allow us to rejuvenate technical culture inside our beloved tech University. :)

“It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.” — George Eliot

P.S: We’re recruiting! Apply here: https://goo.gl/forms/GGTl6CtJWGtC6PN83