Everything I learnt outside class at GGSIPU

So on Wednesday I posted this on Facebook: “first time in life BTECH ALL CLEAR, 0 pending backs”. Yes! Four years of B.Tech CSE at GGSIPU, Delhi, and for the first time ever I don’t owe the university a single paper. :D

So I thought this is a good time to write down what these four years actually looked like. Me and the syllabus were never really close friends, and honestly most of what I know today I picked up on the side. I went through my old Facebook posts, my tweets, a folder full of certificates and some old mails to put this together.

2010: a batch album and a Facebook page with 2,800 fans

I passed out of school in 2010, and by October I was in engineering college. On 1 October I posted 64 photos in an album called “B.tech CSE 2010 batch” and asked if anyone else on Facebook was from the same college. A month later the sessionals date sheet was out, and of course the first exam was maths. Classic.

Seven college friends sitting together on a low wall outside a mall Our first bunk ever, 28 October 2010.

But what I was really spending my time on that year was a Facebook page for my school’s students and alumni.

It started as a page for just our Rohini branch. In June 2010 I made it a common page for every branch, and then I got slightly obsessed with the numbers:

700 fans in August 2010 (“love u all… keep inviting”)
1,000 in September
1,313 in October, when I posted the exact count because I was “being superstitious”
1,600 in November
2,500 in June 2011
2,800 in March 2012

In July 2010 another admin joined, so it wasn’t only me posting anymore. Some of what we posted was actually useful: good-luck posts on board exam days for each stream (Business Studies, Accounts, History, Physics) and the CBSE results link on the morning results came out. A lot of it was forwarded jokes and quotes, not gonna lie. That’s also most of my Twitter from 2010 and 2011, because the page posts got cross-posted there as fb.me links.

It was the first time I had an audience, and the posts people really cared about were the ones they needed that day, like the results link. In October 2010 I was also posting “suggest suggest suggest this page to all GMPCE’s scholars lol” (yes, I got my own college’s initials wrong).

The GGSIPU part

Every IP University student already knows this bit, so I’ll keep it short.

In May 2012 I shared a “Reality of #GGSIPU in words of Hitler” video (one of those Downfall subtitle parodies) and called it “Ultimate”. In December 2012 I tweeted “‘IP University’ - Ruining Christmas and New Year since 1998”. In May 2013 there was a #LivingOnTheEdge hashtag going around with #NokiaLumia720, and two of my entries were literally just my life:

Finishing whole course in one night before engineering exam #LivingOnTheEdge

Still showing up in external exams with 9% attendance ;-) #LivingOnTheEdge

The very next day, during #lifekaplanb, I tweeted “MBA #lifekaplanb cos Btech aint enough”. Lol.

The one subject I genuinely enjoyed was programming. In September 2011 I wrote that I had nailed C++ “all the way” and wished every subject was programming (“wish saare subjects programming ke he ho jaye”). Trust me, that wish pretty much sums up the last three years.

2011: Baja, a training and one night at a call centre

In April 2011 I posted “Baja SAE 2012… on the way to you baby”. Our college had a team for Baja SAEINDIA, the off-road vehicle competition, and I have a certificate saying I took part in Virtual BAJA SAEINDIA at Dayananda Sagar Institutions, Bangalore, on 19 and 20 August 2011, representing my college.

In June 2011 I was “off to Greater Noida for 3 days software training”. That was a Baja SAE workshop at Galgotias, and I went with friends.

A hall at the workshop: a projector screen under a banner, a presenter at a laptop on the left, and attendees seen from behind

Three friends with workshop badges around their necks, standing in the atrium of the campus

The Baja SAE workshop in Greater Noida, 25 June 2011.

Back in March I had also launched a website, a gadget blog called TechSalvos (“still in beta mode”), and by July I was writing Nokia rants on it, like my Nokia E6 piece and whether Nokia was dying. That blog deserves its own post someday.

And then there was the call centre. On 11 July 2011 I did one night shift at a call centre and posted that it was a “superb experience”. On 12 July I posted “aaj resign kardia” (resigned today). Dad was angry about the night shift, and that was the end of my BPO career. Total tenure: ONE night. :P

2012: an “expert” in two days, custom ROMs and DRDO

On 8 March 2012 I registered by mail for a workshop on cloud computing and IPv6 services at IGIT, also under GGSIPU. It was run by a company called VMDD Technologies, and the certificate I got at the end, dated 10 and 11 March, says in big letters “Certified Cloud Developer & IPv6 Expert”. Two days, and I’m an expert! I’ll take it. ;)

Two friends seen from behind, looking out over a lake towards a fort wall climbing a hill at Amer The college trip to Jaipur, 1 March 2012.

The real learning that year happened on phones though. In February I flashed a CyanogenMod 9 release candidate on an LG Optimus One and wrote a preview of it. By April I had a Galaxy S2 and was “already rockin a custom rom with custom kernel”, with a full backup of the original ROM in ClockworkMod recovery in case anything went wrong. That May I summed it up for a friend as “getting ics before it us released via custom rom, blocking adds from the phone, changing boot animation etc”.

A phone home screen on an Ice Cream Sandwich custom ROM, with a Google search bar, an analog clock widget and a driftwood beach wallpaper The ICS custom ROM home screen I sent to friends in May 2012.

A good chunk of my Twitter replies that summer were me talking friends through rooting: how to freeze bloatware, take a nandroid backup, flash a kernel zip from recovery, and how a USB jig gets you back into download mode if you brick the phone.

Summer training after second year had two parts. In June 2012 I posted that I was “having fun as Trainee” at Quatrro, and that the first day started with a cab ride down NH8. I also did a six-week study project at DRDO’s Institute for System Studies and Analyses (ISSA) in Delhi, June to July 2012, titled “Task Scheduling”. The letter I got on 13 July says I did a literature survey on scheduling strategies and identified approaches to the problem. I was still mailing them about the project report in October!

In August 2012 I told a friend I was missing Google Now a lot (it had arrived with Jelly Bean). Later that month I applied to be a Microsoft Student Partner and asked everyone I knew to like and comment on my application. In September I did an Android development workshop.

2013: the year it clicked

On 25 April I posted “Finally Windows 8 enterprise edition”, and on the 26th I told Nokia Developer I was “a beginner” who had “just submitted 3apps to marketplace”. On 29 April my first Windows Phone app, Hanuman Chalisa, passed Store certification. :)

On Saturday 4 May I sat Microsoft exam 070-480, Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, at an Aptech centre. I posted that I finished the 2.5 hour exam in 18 minutes. Yes, 18 minutes. The score report says 850, with 700 needed to pass. Around the same time a letter came saying I had been selected as a Microsoft Student Partner for my college, and in June I went to MSP Bootcamp 2013. As an MSP I’ve run workshops in college on cloud computing and hybrid apps, which is kinda funny after that two-day “expert” certificate.

Not everything worked out though. On 31 May I applied for the BlackBerry 10 Summer Internship at Startup Village in Kochi, and sent them documents twice in June. On 19 June the reply came: not selected, “seats being limited”.

So that summer I did two other things instead. From 15 June to 29 July 2013 I was an intern at Skylogic Technologies in Delhi, as a Technical Support Officer. And from 20 June to 31 July I did industrial training at Hackveda Appsec Labs, which turned out to be VMDD Technologies again, the same guys behind the IGIT workshop. The experience letter lists Java, Android development, bootloader configuration, kernel compilation and reverse engineering of Android apps. On 31 July I also got a letter saying I had won Best Presentation for Summer Training 2013.

A few days into that training, on 23 June, I started a learn-Android-in-public blog series: “Day 0: It all Begins” and “Day 1: Android Linux Java Overview Theory”, then “Day 2: Setting up your Machine with Java and Android SDK” and “Day 3: Creating Basic Java Programs - the Conventional way” on the 26th. There was no Day 4. Oops.

The posts were my notes from the Hackveda training, and when the training wrapped up, so did the series.

What took over was Windows Phone. I kept building apps through the rest of 2013, and by January 2014 I was ranked #6 in India on DVLUP, Nokia’s developer rewards program, where the rewards include actual Lumias. And this week a Lumia 1520 arrived from DVLUP! Somewhere in between I also started doing some freelance web design.

The certificates folder

And since I mentioned a folder full of certificates, here are some of them:

So, what did college teach me?

Not much from the lectures, if I’m being honest. In four years I ran a Facebook page to 2,800 fans, quit a job after one night, collected an “expert” certificate in two days, rooted and flashed phones (mine and my friends’), did a project at DRDO, got into MSP, passed 70-480, got turned down by BlackBerry and shipped apps to the Windows Phone Store. College gave me a degree (well, soon). The rest I had to go and find myself.

There’s one semester left. No company has come to our campus to hire, so the plan is open drives at other colleges and whatever off-campus I can find. Let’s see how that goes. Fingers crossed!