Write easy. Write often.

Things that I was busy with

1. WordCamp Jabalpur 2011 – This was one of those awesome events that I’ve attended in my life. I was invited as a speaker and I spoke on the topic bbPress. There I met many amazing people, whom I had been willing to meet for long. It was a very nice experience for me. I’d really like to thank the organising team.
2. CyberFundu – A YouTube channel of various cyber related videos, started with my schoolmates.

Things that I’ve been doing

1. DatumDroid – An Android application that I’m developing for IITB TechFest Appsurd event. Should be over by October or November.
2. fests.in – Check the site to know more! I hope it’s big! Launch date is probably the first day of 2012.
3. AIMUN – Amity International Model United Nations, to be held in November.
4. Discover I – As mentioned in a previous post, this is a project that I’m working on as a part of Youth Power.
5. SpaceSet – A project in which we’ve to design a full Space settlement. The deadline keeps getting extended and we keep missing it. Next is November 15.
6. Studies – CBSE’s CCE has really proven to be exhaustive, than stress relieving.

Things I’d be doing

1. Google Code-in ’11: I’d be participating in this year’s Google Code-in too! And try to make it to the Googleplex again to take the pictures I couldn’t, or forgot to. ps. I’ve also made it to the front page of the competition’s site, check it out!
2. TCS IT Wiz: One of the competitions, I really like to attend. Would be held on 12 November, so I better prepare.
3. Amity 46 MUN – Our school’s very own MUN to be held in December.
4. Learn Java, Python and C++

Following all this, I had also deactivated my Facebook account as that really used to eat up a lot of my time and has wasted months of my life. I changed it’s password to something that I myself didn’t know, tried to reactivate it today for my birthday via forgot password, and it has asked me to wait for 24 hours – when all the fun would have got over. Though it looks like it has been activated, but I’m still locked out. When I again have access to it, I would probably permanently delete it.

Future Plans

In India and elsewhere, one really needs to study hard to get into a good university. I would probably do the same as it would help me get my skills polished and do even better in life. Being over-confident is bad. For that I would study more of Physics, Chemistry and Maths (subjects which I like the most) in the following two years – XI and XII, than coding. I would still like to continue with a project or two but not with that pace.

More things follow as soon as they hit my mind. Just want to make sure that it’s published at 00:00 IST.

Update: As Shobhan tells me, our dear moon has revolved around me 204 times.

The trip to Google was one of the most memorable and happiest moments of my life. I got to meet all the intelligent high-school coders from around the world, meet all the amazing Googlers and learn from them, receive a beautiful (but heavy ) trophy, have a lunch at Charlie’s Cafe at Google HQ, hack around the Google buildings, clicking pictures in photography-prohibited areas (well, kidding ), getting the Google Goodies (which included bottles, chocolates, pens, notebooks, books, stickers, big android plushie aka bugdroid, souvenirs, shirts, jackets and a blanket), buying Google Schwag (mouse, torch, key chain, USB port hub and other geeky stuff), having wonderful dinners at restaurants, touring the California Academy of Sciences and riding those cool Segways. It all amounted to be a whole ton of fun and enjoyment, but wouldn’t of course not have been possible without the efforts and hard work of Carol, Stephanie and the whole Google team, to which I salute!

A picture says a thousand words and, I have ~150 pictures uploaded on Picasa. That amounts to 150,000 words! OMG! Here is a slideshow of all of the pics that I took.

Google is inviting 14 participants instead of the pre-announced 10 to their Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California. This would happen somewhere in May. Anybody whom I could meet?

Devils’ Workshop has also published an article on me. It’s a blog for which I used to do guest blogging, and I’m really happy of my name being there in one of the India’s topped ranked blogs.

Hindustan (Hindi) paper also published an article in their newspaper, here is the clipping.

Hindustan - 19 March 2011 - Our Gautam is no less than a computer (Hindi)

I’ve tried to put all my thoughts into this single post, so you might find it a bit long, filled with a lot of emoticons.

What is Google Code-in? And what does it have to do with me?

Ctrl+C & Ctrl+Ving (the thing which I’m best at) from Google Code-in’s FAQ:

Following on from the success of the Google Summer of Code™ program, Google is holding a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students) with the aim of encouraging young people to participate in open source. We will work with open source organizations, each of whom will provide a list of tasks to be completed by student contestants. Tasks can be anything a project needs help with, from bug fixes to writing documentation to user experience research.

Coming back to what it has to do with me, I’m a pre-university student enrolled in a high school and 15 years old. Did I just say 15, yes I did!

I mainly participated in this competition because (and got to know about it when) the organisation WordPress announced that it was participating in this competition – and as I’m very much familiar with their code base and especially bbPress‘s (because it has been almost more than a year since I’ve been developing on it), I looked forward to this, participated in the competition and finally acquired a good rank.

And what all did I do in it?

Coding tasks for the bbPress project (and having a lot of fun doing that and bugging John James Jacoby, my mentor, all the time ) and some translation tasks. As far as I remember, I was the only one (except 1 or 2 – who did a task each) who took up bbPress tasks. So, I feel a bit proud of myself that other people found it difficult – I know, my assumption might be wrong ). You may search bbPress Changesets for “props to GautamGupta via GCI” on the bbPress Trac itself (while logged in) or go here to see the list of tasks done by me.

And what all did I achieve?

1. Knowledge – Really, I didn’t know all the things I did at first and didn’t have that pace which I acquired later – I tried, I did and I learnt new things.
2. Experience – The experience working under a the cool mentor John James Jacoby.
3. Trip to Google Headquarters, Mountain View, California as I came in the top 10!
4. 500 USD and a Google T-shirt (more details about the prizes here).
5. And as a I mentioned earlier, I got the 5^th rank out of the participating 360 students (view rankings) by acquiring 112 points from 34 tasks though I had expected myself to come in the top 4 (first three were way ahead), I couldn’t because of my school work etc.

What will I do now?

1. The first thing on my to-do is writing some tutorial blog posts, of the things I did in the tasks. Done: #1, more to come.
2. Complete the last task which I wasn’t able to due to time restrictions – forum reply counts. Done.
3. Contribute more. Doing. (Forever)
4. Test out NetBeans (on JJJ’s recommendation). maybelater. Probably, will wait till it has proper Trac/SVN support – didn’t work for me, or I was too lazy to not read the docs properly. Started using it on my Mac.
5. Complete my school work which has got a lot pending. Done.
6. And sleep. Done.

* The list of official winners would be announced on 14 Feb 2011, but it would be based on the rank list and I’m pretty much sure that it would remain the same or at least I’d be in there. The winners have been announced.

What are the discounts?

Wow, but how to register?

You can register from either of these ways:

1. Directly go to the signup page (has our coupon code, so you wont need to enter it yourself).
   OR
2. Go to the normal signup page, and enter the coupon code GAUTAM456 when asked.

Here is the screenshot of the updated page rank:

You can check you website’s page rank by going here. Do tell us if you have got a page rank update by commenting in the form below!