Prashanth seems to have lots of time these days. Not only does he have time to frequently update his blog, but he’s also started co-authoring desitech.in.He promises to focus on IT in india rather than his usual posts about other men’s wives and romance between diplomats.
Good luck dude!
Well, Time seems to fly with one of those out of service mach-3 planes these days. It’s already been more than a year since I tricked Amazon into thinking I know shit. To commemorate this grand event, I thought I’d bring this blog back from coma to post something.
This one year has probably been the best in my life so far. You might think that’s exaggerating, but try throwing in a couple of years of wasted childhood, a rural high school and four years of struggling to pass in college and you’d see my point.
But it’s not just me, ask anyone working for Amazon Chennai and they’d tell you the same thing. The brain power here is astounding. Everyone is a rock star. It’s a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that you’re probably the dumbest person in the crowd. To really tell you how cool Amazon is, I’ll have to write a 1000-page book with a 100 page appendix on why each character is cool.
But I digress.
Coming back to our headlines today, these are a list of lessons I learnt the hard way (that’s a fancy way to say that I was caught with my pants down). These mistakes were caught by highly trained individuals. Do not attempt to repeat them at home, or anywhere else.
This is the first thing I learnt out of college. You don’t need to spend 4 hours writing code for an optimal implementation if can get a sub-optimal one working in 30 minutes. You will normally have 10 other things to worry about when you’re working on this one. Just get the easiest, right way to completion. Measure. Improve. Repeat as necessary.
It’s easy to lose focus on the larger picture when you’re lost in the woods of detail. Here’s a simple solution – Whenever you take any decision, see how it helps you progress in the overall vision.
Within Amazon especially, you’ll quickly learn that numbers are your friends. If you’re crazy idea has enough numbers to back it up, you’ll suddenly find that it’s not that crazy anymore.
I’ve seen real war stories based on this one. Even if you can’t improve the code base, try not it add more filth into it. Overtime the percentage of good code will push you to clean up the remaining filth
I confess. I don’t practice this myself. Well, at least not exactly. It’s usually Code – Test – Code – Test for me. I usually write out simple happy cases and then use test cases to fill in my test cases. Now that I’ve preached it, I’m now forced to practice it.
)
“I think grown-ups just act like they know what they’re doing” – Calvin
I can’t agree more. Wait, maybe that’s because I never grew up 
Anyways, it’s been fun staying alive for the past 22 years and I hope this body can take the same amount of abuse (if not more) for another good 50 years.
And, a very happy birthday to my classmate Pradeep who’s also celebrating his birthday today.
P.S: Special thanks to JP who had the Calvin quote in this jabber status message
A little late this week. Better late than never I guess 
I recently saw Mark Chu-Carroll friday random ten articles and liked the idea. So here’s the Indianized(or rather tamilianized) version for your taking – My Pick of the week! A list of five songs that have fascinated me over the week.
And the winners of the inaugral edition are…
I frankly did not know much about what Amazon does until i attended their pre-placement talk. I should honestly say that I’m now very excited by the great work they’re doing which, by the way ranges from online Stores to Custom Online Computing and Storage solutions. And in case you missed it, that was my not-subtle-hint that i was given an offer at Amazon
We were called in for an off-campus interview at their swanky office here in Ascendos, Chennai.We had one written and three face-to-face interviews. All of really did great(a fact that even Amazon could testify). At the end of it though, only me and my good friend Rajiv Mathews got offers.Although only two of us were hired, Amazon’ assertion that the standard of our class was very high was something i was very happy about.
The interview itself was really an enjoyable process, with some of our “All star” Alumni like Dharma and Prasanna(who were just legends uptil then) interviewing us. My inteview by itself wasn’t too hard as the questions were mostly on OO Design.
One question, from Dharma that swept all of us, off our feet:
Given a doubly linked list where
Write an algorithm to make a copy of this list.
Amazon simply had almost anything and everything a good programmer could wish for
)P.S : Thanks to Vijay Nagaraj, the man behind the title!
I always wanted something that will automatically insert a few header files and macro definitions for newly opened C/C++ files. NOT that i solve too many problems these days(it’s been a looooooong time now 
) but the lazy programmer in me wouldn’t stop craving for one. Lot of people asked me to switch to emacs which apparently has something builtin for this purpose, but G0SUB came to my rescue and showed me this plugin for Vim.
And trust me, it works like a charm
It’s has been a long time since i blogged, I got lost in my laziness(again ). I sincerely apologize to all the my fans for keeping you waiting Anyway, here’s a quick update on what’s been going on all this while.
) After Note : The Hackzor link is currently down, We’re in the process of bringing it up and it will take some time.(we’re in the middle of our exams).
Prashanth Mohan recently posted on the recent “raids” and the “rules” that have come into affect in the recent past. He has clearly done all the raving and ranting i wanted to do, so lets dig a little deeper beyond the problems of today and analyse on what’s wrong and what’s right with our college.
Let’s start with the easy part,
).Now for the hard part.
A lot of things. A lot of them aren’t critical in the sense that they aren’t going to disrupt the status quo of things as they are. BUT, they are the biggest barriers, that prevents a CEGian from realizing his true potential.
The way we approach learning:
Ok, with a CGPA that’s hovering just above 7.5, I might not be the most qualified person to talk about this, but after three years of ‘trying to score’, i have learnt a thing or two. The main problems with our approach towards learning stems from the fact that our selection process which is very heavily biased towards the State board syllabus, which inturn favours student who have the abillity to ‘mug up’ text from the text books. This is not to say that guys who make it on the top are not smart, it just means that they did not become smart because of the system, they were able to do it inspite of it .
Most of the students i’ve seen in college lack the real zest for what they study. Hey, you don’t have to be Donald Knuth to appreciate the beauty in recursion. And yet. they simply go make it through the course without it having any impact on them. The only thing i’ve seen them care about is assessments, Grades and Cumulative grades. I’m saddened to see many of my fellow students still haven’t discovered the pleasure of coding, the pride you get in creating something that ‘comes alive’ on completion. Everything we study is abstract in a way and yet, you can ’see’ it work. A rare perk that we Computer Science engineers alone are blessed with.
It is only when Placements come knocking on our doors that a few of us wake up, but before you know it, It’s too late for you to ‘prepare’. The concept of ‘preparing’ for placements is on that irks me the most. By meaning to prepare, they start looking at the general algorithms, data structures that…hold your breath….will be asked in the interview question papers! Never do we look beyond the interviews and really think about what we’ll be doing after we get that job.
The worst of this lot happen to be the hostellers. Back when i was a hosteller, I tried real hard to get an internet connection going with a couple of my fellow class mates and start working on sites like MIPT to get some coding practise. They simply weren’t interested(not to mention the problems with my hostel office, but more on that below). I put in the part of that effort to a few day-scholars during a summer job at MIT, chrompet and they, on the other hand caught on like wild fire. ALL of them now, have job offers with 6+ annual salaries. Pardon me for making a cruel discrimination against the hostellers, but this is the hard truth.
The attitude of the administration:
Inspite of being one of the best Colleges in Tamil Nadu, the way the Administration(mind you, NOT the people who teach) work is well, shocking! It is only when you see the administration that you’re reminded that CEG is after all, a government run institution. The admin is the typical stuff slow, bureaucratic Govt. offices are made of.Take for instance, the Hostel Office. There is only one word that can describe them fully – “Primitive”.
In a time when private colleges offer a 4 mbps internet connection that you can straight away access from the LAN, My college has none of these(not even a LAN) and the worst part is that we once shelled out our own money and tried to put up a LAN and a really slow internet connection through a reliance WLL phone, and the Hostel office wouldn’t even let us do that. It was apparently termed “Misusing the computer” Within Hostel premises. Even before we actually got to use it!
Personally, i don’t think i knew shit before quitting the hostel. (and thank god for the divine intervention ). To tell you the importance of the internet connection to a CS undergrad is another post by itself. Suffice to say, its like a Formula one team without a pit crew. Our college will gladly ape the ban on vehicles inside the campus from IITs but they wont even think about the possibility of vital facilities like these, which are commonplace in most good colleges. Instead they would ask us to use the Ramanujam computing centre, a lab filed with sun sparcs that had nothing except Netscape navigator 4.7(the last time i checked). I’m not even going to talk about state of the hardware that is there. Although, they will still demand Rs. 500 if you fail to return their card(a piece of paper, that) when passing out of college.
I frankly can’t figure out the problems that the College admin have. It might be because they’re scared to make changes. Or it simply could be their lack of interest. What ever it is, It’s seriously hurting us.
