Learning the open source way at dgplug!

I still remember a first-year college student who, in 2014, somehow got to know of dgplug through Quora, and just jumped on the ship.

I still have that post that I wrote that time just like this one! https://thisisashwanipandey.blogspot.in/2014/07/my-experience-with-dgplug-summer.html

But I couldn't attend more than 5-6 sessions as I had to go to college then, and I was using chatzilla, and I got stuck with proxy problems. And that was a very big problem for that kid. I tried it a few times, but by then a lot had already happened in the training sessions. I have to leave it then!

Fast forward 2 years, and here you see the same boy writing this post while determined enough to not leave in between this time whatsoever!  And yes, to learn a lot more this time.

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Regarding the current session going on, I got to have a virtual session with one core python developer, and I got to know about rst, bash and sphinx. I already was a little bit familiar with rst, but sphinx and bash are totally new and cool things for me. I would be reading and learning more about them as many related things are not yet clear to me!

Many other things did happen too in the sessions, and you can read about them at the link that I gave at the very starting.

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I am really excited to see and learn the upcoming things in the training session. If all this excite you too, do join us at dglpug. And a big thanks to the dgplug team, who take out their precious time to teach others all this exciting stuff.

No more Quora for the rest of the rest of the year, and a few more stuff !

I discovered Quora sometime in 2013, and from then till now, I have been highly active on it. Not in the sense of writing many answers, but reading loads of them!

But recently, I didn't really like my feed which was full of life experience related questions. And plus even if I unfollow that topic, I am not really interested in knowing how to learn X, or the resources for something.

For the past few months, the only people whose answers I have reading thoroughly are Balaji Viswanathan and Richard Muller. That's it.

I am not interested in knowing how to get started in open source development or competitive programming, or what life lessons have you learnt, or your most embarrassing moment. Damn, I am not even interested in random facts.

As of now, I am more interested in learning novel facts, and I realised I would get more of it by reading some awesome books. So, the rest of the year would be full of books. The one I am reading right now is "The Little Schemer".

So, does that mean I am going to sacrifice the great articles by Balaji. Not at all. I have started using feedly for the same, to read from time to time, the contents of my favourite blogs.

So, this was all with Quora. See you next year!


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Now for the second part of the title - "a few more stuff". Basically, this is about my final decision to post all my writings on Blogger only.

In the past few months, I have tried a lot of things, including a blog on Quora, a wordpress blog, one on Medium, and so on.

But it's just not possible to maintain all of them. And since I was able to fix the problem of commenting on Blogger with Disqus, and it happened to be the major problem that forced me to look for other option, I am only going to write here from now on. No more mirrors!

As for the concern of followers, I don't yet write something that anyone would like to follow. And if anyone wants to follow this blog, one can just follow by email as per the option given on the main blog page, or with feedly.

I mainly write for myself. And for people, who might someday land on and like this unknown part of the web! :)

Bye!

Why you should not study CSE at NIT Silchar?

One reason!

Because it's awful when it comes to academics!

Now before the alumni and present students of NITS jump on to post some hateful comment, I just want to make it clear that all I am talking about here is related to academics and the quality of faculty, nothing else.

I do agree that NITS has got pretty good infrastructure, it is getting better every year when it comes to placements, or any other thing you can come up with in favour of NITS.

And if you are going to college just to get a job, or "enjoy your life", I will say that you go anywhere, it doesn't really matter.

But if you are dreaming of learning something in CSE, NITS is really a bad choice to be! You are not going to learn anything.

Only one or two faculty in the CSE department do have Phd, and the rest just go on to take random subjects every semester, and teach first few chapters of the course, and anyone can complete the entire course the night before the exam. Yeah, it sucks that much.

I can surely go on to rant of the professors targeting them one by one, but presently being a student in college, that would do more harm to me than anyone else. But I promise you I will do that once I get out of here.

To those who are attacking me with the argument that same is the case with all the institutes, you are wrong buddy.

If you, the one reading this, happens to be applying to colleges, follow this advice, and you can verify this by talking to some good seniors of yours. So here it is :

• If you are having the option to select NIT Silchar, I am assuming you have a very good rank in JEE-Mains or AIEEE, whatever you call it, if you are coming from other state.
  
  Look out for a few private colleges. I mean, seriously. I am not joking. When you are just out of high school, most of us just care about the IIT or NIT tag. Trust me, it doesn't matter even a bit.
  
  I can't give you a list of all colleges, but colleges like DAIICT, BITS Hyderabad, Thapar University, Anna University are way better than government college like NITS.
  
  You might not have heard these names, so you might be feeling I am talking shit but I am not. And as I said, you can also talk with some "good" ( focus on the word ) seniors of yours.
  
  
• Don't give too much priority to NITs. A few of them are awesome but the rest of them sucks.
  I have met students from NIT Allahabad, NIT Delhi, NIT trichy, NIT Warrangal, and NIT Surathkal, and all of them were awesome at their domains. I can't say anything about the rest.
  
  I might have forgotten to name a few good NITs. Ping me if that's the case.

Make your choices wisely. I learnt quite many a things in NITS, but not a single thing from any of the professors ( actually it's a shame to even call them a prof ! ). I learnt mainly from a few friends and seniors of mine, and thankfully "outside-the-classroom" learning opportunities that I got.

But well, one can get these "outside-the-classroom" learning opportunities in other colleges too. Why risk your academics?

IITH Internship Diary - Week 2 : Troublesome Implementation

Week 2 passed by like a flash with nothing much done from my side. And if this continues on, I guess I would have achieved at the end of my internship.

On Monday, I met my PhD mentor Aarghya sir, and he made a lot of basics clear, and also made me understand the basics of research paper, and what actually I need to do on the implementation side. And it was followed by a short meet with Vineeth sir on Wednesday, with almost nothing done from my side in between these two meetings.

Then, I started with the basics of Lua, followed by that of Torch. I am currently reading and trying to understand ML implementation with Torch from these two sources.

• https://github.com/soumith/cvpr2015/blob/master/Deep%20Learning%20with%20Torch.ipynb
• https://web.archive.org/web/20160216003701/http://code.madbits.com/wiki/doku.php?id=tutorial_basics

On weekend, I went to visit Hyderabad, but due to such long commute to reach there, I probably won't be going anywhere in the city for the next few weeks. It was tiring.

For the next week, I would mainly continue with the above mentioned links and speed up my work with my main focus on this only, which I wasn't able to give for the past week.

IITH Internship Diary - Week 1 : Getting the basics slowly

Well, the week started with a meeting with my mentor professor Dr. Vineeth sir for the first time on Tuesday. I was really excited about it, and my excitement for the project and machine learning in general only increased after meeting. He is really an enthusiastic person to meet. He basically told all of the interns more about their work, and what all new things are happening in the field of ML.

After that day, I started with learning logistic regression from the Ng's course. But then switched on to learning the basics of neural networks from here. Michael Nielsen really made the concepts very clear in the first go! But somehow, it still took me around three days completing the first chapter only. Later I also saw his TED talk on open science.

I guess it took me three days because I was not having any feedback loop to tell myself what all I have achieved everyday. I have already included this thing in my list from now on, so things will hopefully speed up from now on.

On Saturday, I raced through the later end of the first chapter. I would come back to the implementation discussion that he did, later on.

Sunday was a day well spent, learning about LSTMs. Christopher Olah has a really awesome blog. You must definitely check that out. And later part of the day was spent reading research paper. Although only bits of the paper were clear, I was happy that atleast something was clear this second time.

Also, I somehow landed on some of the amazing pages on the web, and I have saved all those links and I am definitely gonna read all of them soon. I would share them as I go on reading them one by one!

Bye!

IITH Internship Diary - Week 0 : Health Problems

Week 0 is nothing, but about the week just before I arrived at IIT Hyderabad.

And I wish I had some title other that than "Health Problems". But this is the truth, the hard one.

Although in the past few weeks, I learnt the basics of regression, and gradient descent, and also watched a video on neural networks, this was far less than satisfactory.

I hope the next diary entries will be mostly related to my first research experience and not something stupid like this.

My health took a toll around two weeks back which started as normal fever, but then turned into heat fever causing a lot of weakness. And the best was yet to came, and it was the great grand eye infection that brought tears to my eyes for no reason.

Also I had some strange feeling when I first arrived here. I wrote more about it here : http://thisisashwanipandey.blogspot.in/2016/05/strange-feeling-of-loneliness-at-iith.html

Thankfully things are back to normal now. And there are a lot of mountains to climb.

Bye!

Strange feeling of loneliness at IITH

Yesterday when I arrived at IIT Hyderabad, a strange feeling crossed my body, and to tell you the truth it was very strange and horrible.

I am writing this post to make myself understand what actually happened.

So what actually happened? What made me feel like I should go back to my home as soon as possible?

Actually my room-mate who is from NIT Trichy went to the city, so there was no one in the room. And even when he was there, he was talking to his other friend in Telugu, and most of the people here communicate in their native language only when talking among themselves. Obvious, it is.

Then, the sweeper lady knew only Telugu, and it was a hard moment making her understand what I want to say.

But this language barrier couldn't bring all this strange feelings. Let me see what else happened.

In the morning, I had a meeting with an M.Tech student, who made me question my decision of coming here for research internship. He asked me what I know in Machine Learning already, and what sort of project and research work I would be doing. And I was completely blank.

I guess this was one trigger.

Then, in the afternoon, I wasn't feeling very well. I had eye infection a few days back, and I guess the eye drops that the doctor prescribed has taken a toll on my eye sight. It was a lot blurry yesterday, although it's better now.

I guess these two things mainly triggered the fear.

I couldn't do anything after that. So, I went to sleep after that. But alas, the heat and the lack of mattress didn't allow that. I was all sweating when I woke up.

Thankfully, things seemed normal by evening.

But all this has made me realize the importance of why human form relationships. Maybe we do so evolutionary, because it suppress the fear of the unknown, that there would be someone if something bad happens. We start enjoying our time with the people, and so the fear hides insides.

But remember, it's not gone. It's there. I just got to see a sight of that and it was horrifying.

It was the fear of the unknown that troubled me yesterday.

But, what can be done for that? I don't know right now. It came and went by. I hope my future would have the answer for the same.