blog/content/Pages/me.md

Title: Me
Date: 2014-02-17 10:08
Author: bendtherules

Hi, I'm Abhas.

I'm in my second year at University (namely, [BESU](http://www.becs.ac.in)) and I love to code. No, not you algorithm-kinda guy, but more like a tinkerer. I love to learn new technologies and use them for personal experiments. Also, I often have a hard time resolving some of my friends query about whats going on on my laptop screen.

My latest love is <span class="highlight">Web Development.</span>

And here goes my love-hate story with programming and everything else:

*(Its a long one, just saying)*

I started out with <span class="highlight">C</span> in Class XI at a local computer training center. I used to stare at the softwares I used at that time trying to figure out how they worked, atleast at a higher level. Then after about half a year, I tried out <span class="highlight">Game Develoment</span> because all those star patterns in C felt stupid and didnt give me a feel of what real applications do. So, there I was making my small puny games and *feeling amazed* (fb style). It was easy to get into and went well for about a year.

And then again I felt like I was wasting my time, and had so much to learn. So, I googled about which programming language most applications are programmed in and got a mixed response. But Python clearly stood out as the beginners weapon of choice. Thus entered <span class="highlight">Python</span>, my second *real* programming language. But unfortunately, this time it was a short adventure -about a few days. My high school finals were close and there was some pressure for getting into a good college.

In these pre-college days, I was blessed with a <span class="highlight">mobile network</span> that pumped out 8 kBps on avg and 20kBps was simply god-send. I could literally see downloads progressing by each kB and wondered how things look on the faster side of the internet. I would open multiple (whenever I say multiple, I mean a lot of) tabs to keep things loading while I was doing something else and then read them later. In some effect, I was manually pre-fetching all those pages. Obviously, this technique helped me do things faster but never did I know how much pain it would save me from later. Meanwhile I was also blogged for a few months at [uselessprogrammer.blogspot.com](http://uselessprogrammer.blogspot.com) and then discontinued it without any notice.

Enter <span class="highlight">College days.</span> I couldnt manage to get into the coveted Computer Science aka CST Dept. Not that I didnt choose that dept, my results simply werent good enough. Apart from that, a lot of family and friends talked about how the golden IT industry in India is going to lose all its shine in the coming years. That is *not* my excuse for not joining CST. I still felt carved out for that industry somehow.

I also liked mechanics during high school days and so added <span class="highlight">Aerospace Engg.</span> and Mechanical Engg. as my later depts. of choices. I was quite sure that I wont be able to get into the former one as it sounded like a Elite Dept. But, as it happened, mine was the last rank to get accepted. I suck at spacecraft simulation games and still remember how my spaceship never left the atmosphere even after using up all the fuel which was meant for reaching the moon. So, there I was joining the college with the dream of defeating those effing simulators.

Reality strikes. You have to learn all the common subjects in the first year.

So, back to square one aka programming. I met one of my seniors, Diptoman who had similar interests about gamedev (game development) and we chatted for some time about organizing gamdev workshops, how laziness (lyadh) eventually gets to everyone at college and a lot of simiar stuffs. About 6 months went and thanks to my friend, Binayak, (btw, I never bothered to correct your contact name from **V**inayak to **B**inayak) I decided to take <span class="highlight">another stint at Python</span>. Took me 2 days to read up on most of the core syntax (except the advance-ish topics), few days to study python game development and rest of the long vacation watching a lot of PyCon videos on different advance topics (sans the object-oriented part) and a few interesting libraries related to regexp, scraping, logging, text processing (a little bit). Slowly, I started reading up on the Object-oriented approach of python and it was actually very interesting, contrary to what I thought. I started realizing how beautifully most Python libraries are built. Most libraries present the user with a beautiful API, dealing with all the crap themselves. Watching all the magic of Python revealing infront of your eyes is very pleasing, at the very least.

Around this time, the game development tool I used called Game Maker went totally Cross-Platform, from a begginers' play tool to a full professional product, prices went soaring high and all the time its API never got any more beautiful. The community acts like a fan-girl, I am sorry to say, whenever someone points at the shortcomings of the tool. (I plan to document all my complaints against it at some later time.) With this new-found sense of beauty, I thought of doing a clone in Python sans all the bad designs it had. Its called [<span class="highlight">pyFun</span>](http://github.com/bendtherules/pyfun) (link) and I wish to resume the project soon.

During this time, inspite of all my attempts, I failed to design a time-stopping machine and so, there I was in my second year of college wondering how all the time went by.

<span class="highlight">New year, new programming bug.</span> I felt like I have a decent knowledge of Python and wanted to have a go at some other type of programming (I know how vague it sounds -thats exactly how I felt). For the last few months, I noticed that more and more web development-related posts started appearing around the internet and also, in the few Python weeklies I subscribed for. The buzz terms were Django and Html5. Javascript was claimed as the most popular programming language. I felt stupid for knowing nothing about these cool kids on the street. All this bits of articles teased me to have a go at it.

I <span class="highlight">tried out Django first</span>, expecting that being a Python library, I should be able to learn it fairly quickly. I couldnt be any more wrong. I could "get it", but not understand it inside out without the basics of html. So, <span class="highlight">back to Html</span>. It took me a few days to go through the syntax of html, but I soon realized that html alone wont help me make those beautiful websites. It is just the bone, CSS is the meat that brings all the beauty. And javascript is the neuron that brings reaction to certain actions. So, another vacation it was - going through all of CSS, reading Eric Meyers book on CSS, reading up on fluid grids, responsive web design and cool CSS tricks.

Now, I wanted to apply all these new-learnt CSS goodness - and so came up the idea of <span class="highlight">designing my own website</span> (including a blog) from scratch. It would be static, atleast for now. Github was my host of choice, without any doubt. They recommend using Jekyll, which is a ruby-based static site generator - basically takes in markdown posts, spits out html in structured folders. But I wanted complete control over the development stack, just in case. And so, Jekyll being written in Ruby (which I dont know) wasnt my perfect choice. Again, Google to rescue - I find this similar python-powered project called <span class="highlight">Pelican</span> - just what i need.

Then I spent about 15 days designing the blog page, modifying the design on the way and making it responsive. Now, the only thing remaining is fully integrating that design (as a pelican theme) with Pelican itself.

<span class="highlight">** Enter today **</span>

[Blog still in beta]