Weak Interactions : My Memoir

- 3 mins
memoir college

Why does this exist?

This memoir acts as a personal reminder of my achievements in the short period of the last 6-7 years. Further, I hope this proves useful for others who plan to embark on a similar journey. I swear that everything mentioned here is accurate. I have kept boasting to the absolute minimal possible :P

High School

I was an above-average kid in school. Computers fascinated me from my childhood. Okay, hear me! Wait, I know it sounds cliche coming from a software engineer but it is true. My father taught computer science at the local government school, so I had a computer at home from an early age. I used to only play games at first but later got introduced to programming, and I loved it. I wrote my first program in Visual Basic at the age of 12. So 5 years later, when I had to choose what career to pursue. I picked software engineering without any doubts.

Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Phase

TL; DR: JEE completely fucked destroyed changed my life. [ I am planning to publish a detail accounts of events in a separate blog post. I will link it here in the future ]

College - Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Kalyani

First Semester

  1. A friend created a whatsapp group named “IIIT freshers coding”. He added me along with few of the other tech savvy newcomers. This would have a very large impact of on my college life :)
  2. I learnt about open-source and git. Participated in Hacktoberfest and made many pull requests. Spoiler alert: those pull requests never got merged :P (proof) . The t-shirt turned out to be of very low quality, but the learning and the stickers made it worth it.
  3. Spent many weekends trying to build a pacman clone. I wanted it to be exact clone down to the path planning of the ghosts. I read a lot of reversed engineered assembly code from the classic pacman. Spoiler Alert: four years later, it is still incomplete. (link to github repo)
  4. Learnt about competitive programming. Participated in my first Codechef contest. It was lunchtime. AFAIR I ranked first in college (those days there were no divisions). I asked on the “IIIT freshers coding” group searching for possible teammates for ICPC. AFAIR nobody agreed.
  5. I participated in Topcoder Humblefool hackathon. AFAIR I never did anything after registering, still got a t-shirt. I made that t-shirt my pocha the day it arrived.
  6. I thought too highly of myself back then. I was a fool :)
  7. I got a C in Analog Electronics lab. Apart from that, I breezed through the academics.

Second Semester

  1. I along with some of my friends formed a team for Smart India Hackathon and submitted this idea (link). We never got selected :(
  2. Spent a lot of time discussing about college fests, hackathons, and coding competitions.
  3. I became the technical advisor to the technical committee of IIIT Kalyani. I never knew what was my job neither do I remember performing it, but I used to mention this on my resume till last year :’) .
  4. Tried real hard to get into Google Summer of Code. I applied to Scipy with this proposal (link). I didn’t get selected, as I mentioned my college summer vacation schedule and the other guy didn’t. Cried about it while watching Avengers Infinity War with friends in a theater.
  5. Achieved 4 stars rating on Codechef.

Third Semester

  1. I along with some of my friends formed a team for Smart India Hackathon and submitted this idea (link). We never got selected :(
Anubhav Patel

Anubhav Patel

Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you. 💯

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