Attending ReactFoo Conference 2018 and Exploring the City of Pune

One morning, some days ago, I was offered (read persuaded) by our manager to go and attend this software developers’ event happening in Pune, Maharashtra. The name was ReactFoo, and it was a developers’ meetup, with talks and workshops around the popular web design framework, ReactJS.

Now let me tell you, I’m not an avid traveler. Though I reckon that traveling to new places has almost always rewarded me with some great experiences, I am not one of those who would volunteer for the tasks that involve travel.

But this prospective Pune trip was something I really started to look forward to. Not only I had the urge to learn more about ReactJS and meet fellow JS devs, but also after so many years I finally had the occasion to catch up with my very good (read one of the best) friend from school days, Trisha Mukherjee, who happens to live in Pune!

I and one of my teammates were chosen to go for the conference. This was my very first trip to such an event on the behalf of a company. Thrilled about how the things will unfold, I boarded the flight to Pune on the evening of 18th January. This post recites about my time there, that is from 19th to 21st of January, 2018.

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On Securing an Internship Before Graduation & Leaving College to Work

It has been quite a long time since I posted and I think some happy posts are overdue… Yes, I have great news – one which I should have posted some months ago, but couldn’t just gather the words for it. Here’s a narrative of how the year 2017 brought a change in the life of a Computer Science student.

My Latest Project – A Note-Taking Web App

It has been a long time since I updated the Wall. As usual, I was quite busy with college work and my new project, called ng-notes. It is a comprehensive web app for taking notes and quickly capturing what is on your mind – ideas, pictures, lists and more.

Use the app | View code on GitHub

It has a simple, clutter-free interface that can keep you focussed on your work. Moreover, this app is friends with all your devices. Just write a note once, and access it from anywhere on any device – be it your laptop, tablet or smartphone.

It is loaded with all the features we crave in a notes app – attach images and files with a note, format text, dictate notes and insert emoji on the tap of a button.

The inspiration behind its design is Google Keep, which my favorite note-taking app out there.​​​​​​​​

I have built ng-notes with MEAN stack (MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node.js). The UX is largely based on AngularJS, hence the name ng-notes. 🙂

The project was started in January this year as a practice of my Web Development classes, but it grew exponentially. Now, after hundreds of GitHub commits, it has finally taken the shape of a decent notes app. It was also displayed in my college during projects display this semester.​​​​

I have deployed it on Heroku and you can use it at ngnotes.herokuapp.com. In fact, I am writing this post in my ng-notes account itself and believe me, it feels awesome! 😉

How I Spent the Christmas of 2016

About a month ago, in November, just before the end-term exams, our batch was told that this winter, extra classes will be scheduled for us and the winter break (earlier scheduled from December 25th onwards) has been postponed till December 31st. Being a hosteler, this meant I had to stay in the college during the beautiful holiday season… The thought was disheartening.

Well, here is a brief account of how my days went by.

Won the Unisys Campus Connect Tech Masters Quiz

Unisys recently conducted the Tech Masters Quiz contest in our college on November 22, and I am glad to say that our team bagged the first position. The quiz had questions related to the field of Information Technology. I and my teammate, Ajay, got merit certificates and gift voucher from Amazon worth 5000 INR.

Me and Ajay after the contest

The quiz was held in two rounds – preliminary written round followed by the finals. Our team was announced to be the highest scorer in the preliminary round (23 out of 25 questions correct). We went on stage with high hopes for the final round, along with seven other teams.

After a lot of intriguing questions from various topics (computer security, web design, programming, networking, and so on), we again emerged as the top scorers.

Certificate and Prize

I have always found myself concerned about technical trivia and it paid lot that day! It was an awesome experience.

10k Apart Contest 2016: Building a Website Under 10KB

There is a very interesting web design contest going on online, called 10k Apart. It puts emphasis on building a website “optimizing every little byte like your life depends on it and ensuring your site can work, no matter what”. Their challenge is to build such an optimized site that your pages load under 10KB size limit! The contest is open till September 30th.

I have participated in the contest and my entry is just as “random” as it gets – it is about randomness! It’s a quite minimally designed, single-page website made with HTML5, CSS3 and some JavaScript, and shows that you can build a pretty site with pretty simple code! It has got some optimization hacks too, like optimized URLs, use of character entities as icons and so on. Very little JS is used with fallback options. Total cost: 7.02 KB. 😀

Visit the site | View source on GitHub

Paper Published in IEEE CICN 2015

Last year, my paper on Anatomy and Utilities of an Artificial Intelligence Conversational Entity was selected in CICN (International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Communication Networks) 2015 and after a long editing process, it has finally been published in the IEEE Xplore Library (here).

Really glad to see my name in the IEEE publication. 🙂

Paper Selected in Springer ICACIE 2016

I’m happy to announce that my research paper, Designing Natural Language Processing Systems with QuickScript as a Platform, has been accepted in the International Conference on Advanced Computing and Intelligent Engineering (ICACIE) 2016.

I, along with three of my friends, have written the paper discussing about the QuickScript Project (which we have developed) and its usage in creating natural language systems. Proceedings of the conference will be published in the Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing (AISC) series of Springer.

Working on Some Exciting New Projects

It has been a while since I updated the Wall. Actually, I have been really busy in engineering life lately – working on one project after another. I think it’s time to write something about my recent endeavors here on the blog.

New Logo Designed for the Wall

Recently I designed a brand new logo for this blog, Wall of Wonders and I am now presenting it here. It is a simple – yet creative 🙂 – monochrome design and draws inspiration from the famous WordPress logo. It is created completely in the Adobe Photoshop CC and I have mainly used the calligraphic brushes to design it.

Here comes the logo.

The new WOW logo

I have lately started using the logo on the Wall and have set it as the favicon. Feel free to write your thoughts about the new logo in comments!