I always talk about how I am a huge nerd when it comes to tech. So, what better way to start my engineering blog than talking about “why tech?”. Here we go then…


>_Intial affiar

It was just another summer evening of 1998, I was around 5 years old and my dad took us for a stroll to my uncle’s house nearby.

Backdrop: My uncle had a shop in the famous R.K. Puram market and was just starting to deal in computing devices, pheripherals and printers, and had some good office fulfillment contracts.

As we reached, uncle was just finished assembling a brand new PC (Personal computers, as they were called back in the day).

Configuration?

  • Pentium II - 300 Mhz processer
  • 32 MB of RAM (yes, MegaBytes)
  • A huge 4 GB HDD.

Windows 95 PC

Figure 1 - It looked like this.

He was finished putting all the cables, connected the CPU to a good’ol UPS and hit the power button. The 15” CRT color monitor (which felt huge back in the day), came to life with a flicker and I was the Windows 95 bootscreen. My uncle then switched on the 56K baud modem and plugged his MTNL landline’s cable into it which initiated a sequence of weird bleeps and blurps to connect to the Internet.

And, that was it!

I instantly fell in love with that machine. I knew it that time itself, that I am going to have a much more personal relationship with future computing. Everyone at that used to say “Computer is the future!”. We still say the same without realising how far we have come in just 20 years.

>_Let’s make it personal

My affair with this glorious machine started then and there but it wasn’t until 8 years later till 2005, when I got my own PC (courtesy: a deal to score over 90% in my 8th class, which I did!). Still had to put in multiple requests to my dad from all over my family explaining how a PC will boost my performance in studies. In reality, I just wanted to play games and stuff. (Shh, don’t tell my dad). :P

Once my dad agreed, I had a chance to assemble my own PC and I went berserk researching on CPU components in my locality cybercafe for hours/days/weeks before finalising a configuration. This time, things were changed. I managed a get rig with the following specs:

  • Pentium IV - 2.8 GHz*
  • 512 MB RAM - 2 x 256 MB
  • 40 GB HDD (Ha! I made 4 partitions of 5 GB each)
  • 17” CRT Monitor - Slim edition (Wasn’t slim TBH)
  • Windows XP - Professional

*Core 2 Duo was still another year away :(

I just adored that machine. I remember being anxious in school computer lab using the pleb celeron machines with 64 MB RAM and Windows 98 and used to wait eagerly to boot mine at home, load up the GTA III Liberty City with insane graphics and kill them pedestrians with “GUNSGUNSGUNS”.

>_But how does it work?

Being a curious soul, I am guilty of deleting some useless files from the holy C:\Windows\System32 folder more times than I would like to admit here. By this time, I also tried dual booting some Linux distros I heard from kids in my block. Ubuntu and Linux Mint were the firsts of my adventures with unlocking the raw power of my machine, but I was too n00b to understand it that time.

But then, one glorious evening, I met a friend who’s Orkut name was “T3C#N0_HAXXOR” and was pretty badass in blurbing out tech-jargon. I made him my mentor and asked him to teach me. He handed me an old issue of Digit magazine (yes, thinkDigit we all know and love).

Digit magazine

Figure 2 - A 2009 Nov edition.

I got home and finished that magazine that night itself, and that was the first time I ever read something with such interest! That was another domino fall which setup a whole new horizon in motion and I ended up being Digit’s lifelong subscriber (yes, till today).

Initially, the couple of CDs (DVDs really) were the golden items, but as I started reading more articles in details, I became curious about the backstage of all this computing scene. I developed a good knowledge base about internals of computer and became the “Ideal Troubleshooter” in my society. I could just fix absolutely anything, either by hook or crook, but I got things done, usually.

>_Hello, world!

One day, while browsing the contents of Digit DVDs (while I was still in 9th), I stumbled upon something known as Microsoft Frontpage which could ideally help in creating your own websites. This kickstarted my web-development journey as made countless local HTML pages for my movie directory, keeping a track of my songs collection etc.

I also learnt the very basics of Macromedia Flash and start making stupid animations only to embed them back in my aforesaid HTML pages.

The whole experience of creating something usable was really cool and got me hooked like a drug.

Then, one day, I again met the “T3C#N0HAXXOR”, and showed him my creations. He laughed at me and said _HTML is not real programming! You should come at my place and I will show you how you can create your own software. REAL SOFTWARE!. Surely enough, I followed him to his home and he opened up a DOS-LIKE blue screen.

Turbo C++ Compiler

Figure 3 - Turbo CPP compiler

He started typing what was the basic hello world program in C++.

#include<iostream.h>
#include<conio.h>

void main()
{
	clrscr();
	cout<<"Hello World!";
	getch();
}

And then he executed this, the whole screen went black and it printed “Hello World!” on the top. I was again HOOKED!. I got a copy of iconic “Let us C++ by Yashavant Kanetkar” issued from my school’s library and I was set to explore the compiler world. While my peers were learning basic HTML, I was already writing code to print first n prime numbers and pi digits. The possibilities were endless!

>_Building the base

So, obviously I ended up taking Computer science in my high school with Science or as we call it “Non-Medical with Computer Science” in India. It was a fun ride, we started with C in 11th and graduated to C++ in 12th standard. Funilly enough my intested diverged from Maths to Coding so fast that while I was scoring almost full marks in my C/C++ exams I was barely passing in other “science” subjects.

That’s when I knew that going forward this is going to be the focal point of my career.

One of my friend’s dad who was a computer architect suggested me to focus on building the base around data structures and algorithms as they are the key and syntax is just the sugar. This felt logical as computers at the end of the day work on just basic transistors with logic gate to compute and if your code is not efficient, it’s close to useless.

I bought the Introduction to Algorithms by Thomas Cormen and I was all set to explore the Space/Time complexities for the universe! I spent the next 2 years learning about the memory allocation and how one should avoid the exponential runtimes and favour logirthmic ones.

>_College happened

Due to my affinity for tech, I ended up taking B.Tech CSE (Computer science engineering) despite my dad’s push for EEE (Electrical and Electronics Engineering) or MAE (Mechanical and Automation Engineering) as they are supposed to be “core-evergreen” branches. Yes, 2008’s recession is to be blamed too, IT sector wasn’t very favourable during that era. But, I took a leap of faith and went ahead with CSE.

College was college, people were still eager to cram the notes and were obsessive with numbers on that paper sheet more than the innovate side of engineering. It’s true, in India, everyone (students/faculties) is more concerned with scoring well and getting that degree for sake of it than actually understand the crux of engineering. Just a little rant.

Anyway, I picked up mobile application development in my college and started developing apps, pushing code on Github, contributing to peer’s projects and it kind of accerated the learning and growth and rest of the stuff just picked up from there…

I will stop now, as we are entering the resume teritorry, you can catch the rest of the story on my LinkedIn.

>_Summing up!

As you can see, growing up, I was almost obsessive towards tech, and I still am. I developed a keen taste towards intrinsic of how it all works, partially thanks to my dad who was always quick enough to get his screwdriver and open up anything which was broken and fixed it in a jiffy.

My dad being an engineer himself, taught me how after the end of the day, everything is built by us, Humans, and can be modularized and solved efficiently, which coincidentally is also the crux of the Computer Science!

So, that’s why - Tech!

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p.s: Oh, I am not missing the “;” in the post title, just using python’s syntax. ;)