TWTW : Sept 16–22 of 2018 | #1

TWTW : Sept 16–22 of 2018 | #1

The last 7 days were extremely eventful! Hope I do not miss out on anything.

16.09.2018 (Sunday)

I open my phone to find it flooded with notifications on twitter from SKG. Via our last email correspondence he got to know about my participation in the Pioneer Tournament (about which I plan to write a detailed article next month) and took the extra mile to appreciate my video documentation of progress.

And from this thread, Sijo introduced me to the team behind Recipe Book, the award winning app with an innovative take in cooking. Though I remembered vaguely reading about the app previously in one of Sijo’s tweets, this was the first time I took a closer look and I sure was surprised! Recipe book: Recipes & Shopping List - Apps on Google Play_Trying to cook a quick meal or making a grand dinning experience? Then use RecipeBook, choose from the widest range of…_play.google.comThoroughly overjoyed yet mildly tensed, I expressed my interest to talk to them and that was it. Thank you Sijo for joining the dots within your network :)

17.09.2018 (Monday)

We organized a session about Google Summer of Code with the 1st year students of our college, where GSoC 2018 scholars shared their experience and tips on how anyone can get started on the coding track. You can click here to get a gist about the event. Bhairavi, Farha and Anusree expressed their interest to conduct a women — exclusive session for girls to introduce them to several opportunities that they discovered from Women in Tech program that Arya is leading. Feel free to click here to read what the united women power is all about. That day evening Anusree discovered that she received Google’s Women Tech Maker Scholarship, and that is another major achievement! She is one of the few to receive it from Kerala. Congratulations Anusree!This all the more motivated me to ensure that in the future a session is taken for the female students of MEC about the various opportunities they have to propel in their career. For example our senior Nikita is currently at Houston Texas, attending Grace Hopper Celebration. You can click here to read about her experience. Today was also the day I gave a shot at teaching the kid next door computer science fundamentals from 12th grade. He needed some help in pointers and asked if I could help last week. At first I was a bit scared to try because I was a Biology student in school and thought he was knocking the wrong door. But after I went through his textbook and understood what he needs to learn, I knew it was not beyond me to teach. I learned these concepts at college so it was easy. He came in the evening and we started exploring the idea of how pointers work. I also found it interesting and a good revision of fundamentals. Apart from the difference in syntax between C and C++, I was able to elaborate the concepts.

18.09.2018 (Tuesday)

The idea of conducting a Hacktoberfest at our college started to form in my mind. For those who do not know, Hacktoberfest is an open online event organized by Digital Ocean to encourage students to contribute to the open source by providing incentives. This year the challenge is to complete 5 Pull requests on GitHub within October to win some stickers and a cool T-Shirt all the way from the US. Hacktoberfest 2018 - DigitalOcean_Hacktoberfest is a month-long celebration of open source software._hacktoberfest.digitalocean.comThey also provide an option to host a local event where we gather and conduct activities to encourage the art of contributing to the open source. I feel organizing this for the 1st year students would be a good starting point, especially for those (similar to me a few months ago:) ) who are not confident to get started in coding due to preconceived notions such as _coding is for the real pro’s. _I discussed the idea with Seniors and peers and they all seemed quite interested. After class we had the first D.E.B.A.T.E. Club session at our college. It is a club where students enhance their speaking and team working skills via simple activities. It went quite well and everyone enjoyed.

19.09.2018 (Wednesday)

Today was the last working day of the week because the next two days were public holidays. All the classes and labs went smoothly and I returned home with a lot of backlog to cover up from college. While browsing through twitter, I saw Felix Josemon share an image of him being featured in a TEDx talk. Interested, I took a closer look and saw that the speaker was Sijo! So eager to know the message he had, I went to YouTube and found it: I got featured too at 6:10 :) !!! He explained how connecting people with available opportunities empowers even those around them to improve and gain exposure at a greater platform. It was very engaging and when he mentioned my name, it was a true surprise!! True to the facts, he explained my attempts to apply for Google’s Venkat Panchapakesan Memorial Scholarship and how documenting it made resources for others to use. This talk inspired me to start writing TWTW (The Week That Was) and this is the first. I hope I keep a good momentum in my endeavors to have quality content to mention :)

20.09.2018 (Thursday)

At FOSSMEC, our next objective was to classify students into beginners, intermediate and experts in programming to provide corresponding suitable support to improve their technical skills. But making a conventional Google Form to filter between these was not easy. If we asked for any text based questions, it would be intimidating for beginners but if we ask too basic yes or no questions, the experts cannot better explain their stack. So we decided to embrace the power of decision tree based survey forms — the kind where the response to question 1 would alter the next set of questions you get. For example, those who say “no” to “are you experienced in programming” would be redirected to a new page where beginner type questions were asked while those who answer “yes” are taken to a more technical array of questions. That is, we ask the right questions to the right people. To make decision tree style survey form, I was familiar with typeform, the elegant forms that have this feature. But while getting down to making it we realized using logic jumps and decision trees were paid features. Dis-heartened, we explored for open sourced alternatives but could not find any. Eventually Bharath Kumar said that Google forms has a feature to break the form into multiple sections and redirect them from one section to another (like pointers/ linked list). This was precisely what we needed! A moment of immense joy! Though Google forms do not provide a visual tools to see how the redirections take place, Bharat took a lot of time and effort to make a sample on paper and then got down to making it. He ensured that MCQ redirected beginners and pro’s to different pages where more suitable questions are are asked.

21.09.2018 (Friday)

Bharat finally completed it. The google form had 49 sections!! And it was so thorough that he considered all possible cases of responses, both for those with no skills yet and for those with multiple skills (by providing an option to back trace to the beginning at the end of each route). We released the form at 7PM and the responses were very encouraging. Students were able to introspect and see what they wished to learn. He plans on documenting his experience and so when he does I shall link it here. The data they provided will be used by FOSSMEC in the future to provide personalized support. Kudos Bharat for pulling this off! :)

22.09.2018(Saturday)

So it is the end of the week! So much happened in the time that elapsed. I am preparing for the first series exam happening in October and trying to sort things out to organize Hacktoberfest at College on a weekend (fingers crossed). Also, I realized that Shin Lim won America’s Got Talent 2018! He has an inspirational story of how despite having severe health issue he worked hard and achieved this feat. He is by far one of the best close-up magicians I have ever seen. Well, this is just a bonus fact: The Final Act that left everyone amazed