For a really long time, I had no clue what was the passion of my life. I just followed the masses and took the tried and tested approach. I never bothered to take any risks and try something outside my comfort zone. When I was in school, I took a non-medical course path just because all my elder brothers had done the same. When I got selected for one of the most prestigious engineering institutes in India, I opted for Computer Science because my elder brother had done the same. I did well in my college and got one of the most coveted computer science jobs in India. But I never really developed the passion for my chosen field. I just went about doing my job because it paid well and sustained a good lifestyle for me. I guess I was just like thousands of other Indian students who get into the software industry for wrong reasons. But, as generally happens, after a couple of years the well known mid-life crisis in the life of a software engineer kicked in . Work became easy, less appealing and the restlessness grew with every passing second. I lost any interest in Computer Science, that I ever had. Desperate situations call for desperate measures, they say. I decided to go for higher studies. I was aware of 1000 reasons why I should not take this step. But I wanted to try one last time to re-ignite my interest in Computer Science. Looking back, I am really grateful that I took that decision.

I joined the renowned University of Wisconsin, Madison as a graduate student in Department of Computer Sciences. The extremely vibrant education ecosystem has definitely rekindled my interest in Computer Science once more. The thing that impressed me the most was that students here are always looking to solve one problem or the other. Be it some Core Computer Science research problem or some real-world issue, the common denominator was always their passion and determination to solve it. Education for them extends way beyond the classroom assignments. Having attended a couple of hackathons and having personally witnessed the startup-centric culture here, I am overwhelmed with the innovative ideas and problems that students are constantly trying to solve. I have realized that being a software engineer is not only about solving problems for your firm, but also life-hacking : building small things that can improve your and others life in general. It’s amazing to see the side-projects of all the students and engineers here. All of them have come up with some idea to make some aspect of their or other’s life simpler and better or just solve some problem which has been worrying them for some time. Interacting with such people has also motivated me to hack new things outside my curriculum (besides doing some cool core computer science projects in the courses itself), solve some problems which might make world a better place or just improve your life in general.

So, finally I am in the hack or ABC mode. I have started by hacking/solving a couple of small issues that I know are dear to me. I have also a long list of small tasks planned, that I intend to finish sooner than latter. It is said that you should make your goals public, so that you have an added impetus to finish it. Here are some of the apps/scripts/problems that I wanted to solve. I have finished some of them but I still have a long way to go :

1. (Done) Fix dead links in YouTube playlist : I live, breathe and sleep music. I spend a lot of time developing curated playlists on YouTube. The one thing that has always annoyed me is the appearance of dead links in your playlist, when the underlying song is deleted or made private. I came up with a simple Python script that finds all the dead link songs in your youtube playlists, deletes them, searches alternate youtube videos for the same song and adds it to your playlist.  I used YouTube data API for this. Making it work end-to-end was so satisfying. I got a really good response from fellow hackers when I posted my solution on Quora. I would be really happy if Quora also implements this feature in their application sometime in the future.
2. (Done) Collect all news articles written by my sister and setup a RSS feed : My sister is a journalist and I really love reading her articles. Unfortunately, there is no RSS mechanism provided by the site of the news agency for which she works. I wanted to collect all the articles written by her and be notified whenever a new article is written by her. I used Google Custom Search API to collect all the latest articles written by her. I have hosted the basic version of the app here.
3. Job search platform for University of Wisconsin, Madison : Currently there is no central platform to search for student jobs in UW Madison. Jobcenter has very few job openings and leaves a lot to be desired. Ever since I struggled with this issue when I was searching for funding in first semester, I have always wanted to build such a platform that can crowdsource job opportunities across campus and help students get part-time jobs to fund their education.
4. Analyze my gtalk status : I love changing my gtalk status message. Often it is a song or some quotation that is a reflection of my mood. I feel I can retrace my life if I can collect all my gtalk status messages. Recently I came across Google Takeout, which is an archive of your activity on google products. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have data for gtalk status messages.
5. Music aggregation engine : As mentioned above, I love listening to music. Often I listen to music on various channels like YouTube, Rdio, Spotify, Pandora etc. I keep collecting good music on all these services. It would be great if I could create a music aggregation engine which collects my playlists and favorite videos from all these sources into one centralized location. Then I can use this as a one-stop place for all my music needs.
6. (Done) Analyze my music taste : I listen to anything and everything that sounds good to me. People often ask me what genre of music do you prefer. And I generally don’t have a concrete answer. This is because I myself don’t know the precise answer. It is said, “Data never lies ..“. I have a huge collection of songs in my youtube playlists. If I can find a way to figure out the genre or tags of each song, I can let the data analytics speak for itself.
7. Mobile app for Scrubs quotes : If you haven’t seen Scrubs TV series, you should definitely watch it. I love philosophy and quotations. And Scrubs, along with One Tree Hill, have the most thought provoking quotes. It would be fun to build a mobile application for all the quotes, catalogued by season and episode.
8. University Buzz : A simple app that can filter the twitter feeds from all the universities to find the general buzz among various universities. Students can see what their fellow university students are most talking about today, hot topics on campus etc.

I am excited at this rekindled passion for computer science in general and building cool stuff in particular. I feel so much better about my field when I know and see that my work solves a lot of common problems faced by my friends etc. Without further adieu, let the hacking begin. Lets’ create something cool !!

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