Google Code-in 2019: Week 3
Again, this post is a day late. But hey, at least I posted!
Well, I did slow down this week. I knew it. The good thing is I saw it coming.
Coming to where I ended my previous blogpost, the mentor finally reviewed my task at 4:30 PM on that same Sunday (15th Dec '19). I had an exam the next day (Monday, 16th Dec '19) and had to prepare for it; Organic Chemistry was on the test. So, I ended up not doing anything on that Sunday. However, the phobia that someone will claim my next task was creeping up, and I impulsively claimed a 5-day long task at 8:00 PM on Sunday for some reason. I picked up the "Write a simple online app in WebIO and Interact" task and I decided I will make a transverse wave simulator. I stopped studying for the exam and did what I like: the task. I tried to make a dynamic UI for my simulator, but the entire evening passed by, and I barely had any idea of what I was doing. I was ready to abandon my task.
On Monday evening, I was finally done with my test and came home with a fresh mind. I started working on my task as soon as I got home. I continued my work on the task that I impulsively picked up the previous evening. I looked at others' work and saw that they did something very basic: a slider and a button and that's it. I wanted to go above and beyond. So, I messaged my friends on Slack: Abhinav Kaushalya, and K Fung. Abhinav was also busy with the same task and apparently missed my messages. K Fung, however, tried to understand my idea and tried to help me. By 1 hour 20 minutes, K Fung completely solved my problem! He so simply solved an issue I was sitting on for the last 24 hours! I cannot thank him more.
So, I started making the UI for the simulator, and almost finished the UI by 11:30 PM on Monday. I finally made some progress. Then, while staring at my notes for Transverse waves and their properties, I realized that my UI had a major problem: There were lots of unnecessary fields that were not needed to simulate the wave. We could use one characteristic of the wave to calculate the other. The next day (Tuesday, 17th Dec '19), I quickly remade part of the UI and added the formulae and calculation part to the code. This was not as quick as the text suggests though. I slept at 11:30 again.
I woke up the next day (Wednesday, 18th Dec '19), came back from school with the sole intention to finish my task. Again, K Fung messaged me on slack and asked for help with LightGraphs. I told him I was kinda busy and wanted to finish the task, but asked him to go on. He asked me what was taking me so long to do the task. I told him that I made my app complex so that I favor quality over quantity, and K Fung asked a question that made me reconsider my decisions: "does quality mean difficulty essentially?" I said I'll talk about this in my blogpost and helped him out with his issue. I pondered over that, but I realized I needed to keep going and finish my task. I finished my app and started writing the documentation for my web-app. By 11:15PM on Wednesday 18th Dec, I had submitted my task for review.
My mentor asked me to add references for my web-app the next day (Thursday, 19th Dec) at 10PM, and I did so promptly. By 11:30 the same night, the task was finally approved. More than half of the week had passed by, and I had made almost no progress except that one task. I needed to speed up.
Though I made no progress in terms of tasks on Thursday, I did talk to K Fung about SATs, Subject Tests, etc. I looked for other tasks and decided I'll do a task where I make my own Twitter Bot. I applied for a Twitter Dev Account, and it got accepted the same night. I tried to write some code for it, but the API was made for all languages and I couldn't figure it out quickly. I had no idea which tasks to pick up next. I picked up the "Write a blog about GIS datasets (vectors and raster) and how to process it in Julia" task the same Thursday night out of fear that someone else will claim it before me. It was the only task I could bang out in a day and regain my speed.
I went to sleep and woke up the next day: 20th Dec, Friday. SAT Subject Test scores were going to come out that day, and I had to attend the 15th Anniversary of Qualcomm Hyderabad that night. It was quite a packed day, to be honest. I went to school groggily (I hadn't had enough sleep the last few days because I needed to complete tasks), and couldn't concentrate the entire day in school since I was so hyped for both my scores and the event. Finally, at 5:15 PM, I reached home. I found out that the first batch of scores come out at 5:30 PM IST, and I quickly changed and awaited my result. I sat down and logged into my account, and voila! 800 on both Physics and Math Level 2! I was very happy since my work finally paid off. All the staying up late and studying electromagnetism, all the endless practice tests, all the forgetting random derivations, all the furious button-slamming on the calculator, all the forgetting to put the calculator in degree/radian mode, all of it had finally paid off.
Now, I got dressed up and headed to the Qualcomm event. They had a concert planned, some cultural events, along with dinner. When I reached there, I waited for some time, attended the cultural events, and then had dinner. The sleepiness from last week had begun to set in. The concert started, while I just sat there sleepily. I almost fell asleep in a loud indoor concert! Other people began looking at me as if I'm some kind of weirdo, so I tried to keep myself awake. An hour later, it was 12AM and the event was finally over. I went home quickly and went straight to sleep; I had school the next day and needed to wake up at 6AM.
The next day, Saturday, 21st Dec, I finally started and finished my second task of the week. I submitted the task by 10PM that day and submitted it for review. I contacted others on the leaderboard on Slack and asked them how many tasks they had done. 2 of them had already done 10 around tasks, and others claimed to be done with 15+, while the rest just completed 5. I networked a lot with others. I returned to doing tasks again. To my disappointment, the mentor asked me to post the blog post on medium before reviewing my task. I said I'll do it the next morning, and started working on another task since posting it on Medium was just copy-paste work. My next task was: "Animate the Julia Logo". I came up with 5 different animation styles and rendered each one of them. I hadn't caught up on sleep and rendered them sleepily. This detail will be important later.
That Sunday (22nd Dec), my school (which I had been in from 3rd Grade to 10th Grade) had arranged an "Alumni meet". I got ready by 10AM and posted my blog post on Medium. I told my mentor about it. I really wanted to catch up on some tasks that day, but I had a lot planned that day.
At the Alumni meet, I caught up with a few classmates, but one of my closest friends couldn't be there since he wasn't aware of this meet. Anyways, it was a good time, and I returned home at 3PM.
On coming home, I looked at my animations, ready to submit them. Then, I noticed a small anomaly: In all my animations, the bottom two circles of the Julia logo were switched up! I quickly remade all my animations and rendered them properly this time. By 5:00PM, I was ready with my animations.
My mentor still hadn't reviewed my task, and I was starting to get a bit annoyed. But, it was neither my fault nor his: our time zones were exactly 12 hours out of sync! So, if he requests changes in his morning, I would get up hours later, and make the changes, and send it back to him, then he would get up hours later, and this entire process delayed the review process. I continued and finished another task without claiming it. I finished the "Create a short Julia Code Snippet for 30-seconds-of-Julia" task. Then, both K Fung and Madhav Sharma told me about how one of the other participants was claiming tasks at light speed and their unclaimed task work all went straight into the trash. This made me even more phobic of my work being discarded. Madhav Sharma was one of the people on the leader board that I messaged, and turned out to be a very nice guy!
He does a lot of ML tasks which take a lot of time, and I respect that. He is great at his craft in fact. His resume is crazy impressive. He is not one of those people who just ignore you even if you are junior to him, or have completed lesser tasks than you. I am just impressed such a human being exists. He actually inspires me to try learning AI/ML. Apart from being incredibly cool, it also has a lot of quality tasks based on it in Google Code-in. I hope I get time to learn something completely new in this race of light-speed task claiming.
The task that I picked up next ("Create a short Julia Code Snippet for 30-seconds-of-Julia") was a 5-day task and was suspiciously easy. I spent time on that task and tried to go above and beyond the task requirements. I added 4 new intermediate difficulty snippets while others were adding one beginner snippets and their tasks were getting approved. I was free for a few hours, but as usual, I had to prepare for the Monday test again, so I started studying.
I went to sleep, while my mentor was still taking time to evaluate my task. The task was approved overnight (for the millionth time), and I got up the next Monday.
On Monday morning, I hurriedly typed a description for my "Animate the Julia Logo" task and submitted it. For the first time ever, my task was not approved overnight, but during school. I gave my exam (which surprisingly, I did decently in), came home, and then gave my "Create a short Julia Code Snippet for 30-seconds-of-Julia" task some finishing touches and submitted it. Again, logankilpatrick reviewed my task at an impressive speed, and I could move on to my next task. However, I took some time out and wrote this blog post instead of that. Logan said he was very happy I was going, and I quote "above and beyond the task description", and that one sentence made me feel like every second I spent on making my task quality paid off.
I don't know why the phrase "above and beyond" is stuck in my head, but I guess it is because of all the Spotify Trance ads I'm getting asking me to listen to "Trance Top 1000". Why the top 1000?! Who listens to 1000 songs? That too of the same Genre? Why did a Trance artist name himself "Above and Beyond"? How did Logan use the exact same phrase I was thinking of all day? That feeling is extremely weird. Also, I had a Deja Vu today in class. I don't know why I mentioned that, but it happened, and it used to happen to me very often before (like every week), but this was like the first time in the last couple of months. Weird Stuff. Anyways, back to Google Code-in.
Yes, I did include Monday in my Week 3. I don't want to say I did 2 tasks this week!
Looking back at this week, it was quite an eventful week: I hit double-digit tasks (I'm at 11 now), I networked with a lot of new people, I was praised for the quality of my tasks, I met a new and extremely talented friend, I picked up the pace again, I met old friends, I got my SAT Subject Test scores and I attended an exciting event.
The next week is going to be nice I think, but stressful. I have a lot of time to do tasks now, but my final quarterly tests are approaching (10th Jan), and I don't know how to feel about it. New Decade! I will forever miss the 2010s, the best part of my life. Also, only the hard tasks are left, with a bunch of Raspberry Pi and ML tasks inaccessible to me for now, and I need to go through the rest and try my hand at them. No events next week other than some holidays, so it feels a little empty. Anyways, that concludes Week 3 of Google Code-in. This week was arguably one of my best weeks, and I hope I can keep up my pace.
Oh yeah, and Differential Calculus is over, we might finish Organic Chemistry this week (FINALLY!!), and we will finish Mechanics this week. Hyderabad is starting to get colder, and my feet are literally freezing while I sit down and code. Also, new skillset acquired: I can kill mosquitoes with one hand by grabbing them in my left hand and yeeting them away like an alpha while I type/use the mouse with my other hand.
Well, I did slow down this week. I knew it. The good thing is I saw it coming.
Coming to where I ended my previous blogpost, the mentor finally reviewed my task at 4:30 PM on that same Sunday (15th Dec '19). I had an exam the next day (Monday, 16th Dec '19) and had to prepare for it; Organic Chemistry was on the test. So, I ended up not doing anything on that Sunday. However, the phobia that someone will claim my next task was creeping up, and I impulsively claimed a 5-day long task at 8:00 PM on Sunday for some reason. I picked up the "Write a simple online app in WebIO and Interact" task and I decided I will make a transverse wave simulator. I stopped studying for the exam and did what I like: the task. I tried to make a dynamic UI for my simulator, but the entire evening passed by, and I barely had any idea of what I was doing. I was ready to abandon my task.
On Monday evening, I was finally done with my test and came home with a fresh mind. I started working on my task as soon as I got home. I continued my work on the task that I impulsively picked up the previous evening. I looked at others' work and saw that they did something very basic: a slider and a button and that's it. I wanted to go above and beyond. So, I messaged my friends on Slack: Abhinav Kaushalya, and K Fung. Abhinav was also busy with the same task and apparently missed my messages. K Fung, however, tried to understand my idea and tried to help me. By 1 hour 20 minutes, K Fung completely solved my problem! He so simply solved an issue I was sitting on for the last 24 hours! I cannot thank him more.
So, I started making the UI for the simulator, and almost finished the UI by 11:30 PM on Monday. I finally made some progress. Then, while staring at my notes for Transverse waves and their properties, I realized that my UI had a major problem: There were lots of unnecessary fields that were not needed to simulate the wave. We could use one characteristic of the wave to calculate the other. The next day (Tuesday, 17th Dec '19), I quickly remade part of the UI and added the formulae and calculation part to the code. This was not as quick as the text suggests though. I slept at 11:30 again.
I woke up the next day (Wednesday, 18th Dec '19), came back from school with the sole intention to finish my task. Again, K Fung messaged me on slack and asked for help with LightGraphs. I told him I was kinda busy and wanted to finish the task, but asked him to go on. He asked me what was taking me so long to do the task. I told him that I made my app complex so that I favor quality over quantity, and K Fung asked a question that made me reconsider my decisions: "does quality mean difficulty essentially?" I said I'll talk about this in my blogpost and helped him out with his issue. I pondered over that, but I realized I needed to keep going and finish my task. I finished my app and started writing the documentation for my web-app. By 11:15PM on Wednesday 18th Dec, I had submitted my task for review.
My mentor asked me to add references for my web-app the next day (Thursday, 19th Dec) at 10PM, and I did so promptly. By 11:30 the same night, the task was finally approved. More than half of the week had passed by, and I had made almost no progress except that one task. I needed to speed up.
Though I made no progress in terms of tasks on Thursday, I did talk to K Fung about SATs, Subject Tests, etc. I looked for other tasks and decided I'll do a task where I make my own Twitter Bot. I applied for a Twitter Dev Account, and it got accepted the same night. I tried to write some code for it, but the API was made for all languages and I couldn't figure it out quickly. I had no idea which tasks to pick up next. I picked up the "Write a blog about GIS datasets (vectors and raster) and how to process it in Julia" task the same Thursday night out of fear that someone else will claim it before me. It was the only task I could bang out in a day and regain my speed.
I went to sleep and woke up the next day: 20th Dec, Friday. SAT Subject Test scores were going to come out that day, and I had to attend the 15th Anniversary of Qualcomm Hyderabad that night. It was quite a packed day, to be honest. I went to school groggily (I hadn't had enough sleep the last few days because I needed to complete tasks), and couldn't concentrate the entire day in school since I was so hyped for both my scores and the event. Finally, at 5:15 PM, I reached home. I found out that the first batch of scores come out at 5:30 PM IST, and I quickly changed and awaited my result. I sat down and logged into my account, and voila! 800 on both Physics and Math Level 2! I was very happy since my work finally paid off. All the staying up late and studying electromagnetism, all the endless practice tests, all the forgetting random derivations, all the furious button-slamming on the calculator, all the forgetting to put the calculator in degree/radian mode, all of it had finally paid off.
Now, I got dressed up and headed to the Qualcomm event. They had a concert planned, some cultural events, along with dinner. When I reached there, I waited for some time, attended the cultural events, and then had dinner. The sleepiness from last week had begun to set in. The concert started, while I just sat there sleepily. I almost fell asleep in a loud indoor concert! Other people began looking at me as if I'm some kind of weirdo, so I tried to keep myself awake. An hour later, it was 12AM and the event was finally over. I went home quickly and went straight to sleep; I had school the next day and needed to wake up at 6AM.
The next day, Saturday, 21st Dec, I finally started and finished my second task of the week. I submitted the task by 10PM that day and submitted it for review. I contacted others on the leaderboard on Slack and asked them how many tasks they had done. 2 of them had already done 10 around tasks, and others claimed to be done with 15+, while the rest just completed 5. I networked a lot with others. I returned to doing tasks again. To my disappointment, the mentor asked me to post the blog post on medium before reviewing my task. I said I'll do it the next morning, and started working on another task since posting it on Medium was just copy-paste work. My next task was: "Animate the Julia Logo". I came up with 5 different animation styles and rendered each one of them. I hadn't caught up on sleep and rendered them sleepily. This detail will be important later.
That Sunday (22nd Dec), my school (which I had been in from 3rd Grade to 10th Grade) had arranged an "Alumni meet". I got ready by 10AM and posted my blog post on Medium. I told my mentor about it. I really wanted to catch up on some tasks that day, but I had a lot planned that day.
At the Alumni meet, I caught up with a few classmates, but one of my closest friends couldn't be there since he wasn't aware of this meet. Anyways, it was a good time, and I returned home at 3PM.
On coming home, I looked at my animations, ready to submit them. Then, I noticed a small anomaly: In all my animations, the bottom two circles of the Julia logo were switched up! I quickly remade all my animations and rendered them properly this time. By 5:00PM, I was ready with my animations.
My mentor still hadn't reviewed my task, and I was starting to get a bit annoyed. But, it was neither my fault nor his: our time zones were exactly 12 hours out of sync! So, if he requests changes in his morning, I would get up hours later, and make the changes, and send it back to him, then he would get up hours later, and this entire process delayed the review process. I continued and finished another task without claiming it. I finished the "Create a short Julia Code Snippet for 30-seconds-of-Julia" task. Then, both K Fung and Madhav Sharma told me about how one of the other participants was claiming tasks at light speed and their unclaimed task work all went straight into the trash. This made me even more phobic of my work being discarded. Madhav Sharma was one of the people on the leader board that I messaged, and turned out to be a very nice guy!
He does a lot of ML tasks which take a lot of time, and I respect that. He is great at his craft in fact. His resume is crazy impressive. He is not one of those people who just ignore you even if you are junior to him, or have completed lesser tasks than you. I am just impressed such a human being exists. He actually inspires me to try learning AI/ML. Apart from being incredibly cool, it also has a lot of quality tasks based on it in Google Code-in. I hope I get time to learn something completely new in this race of light-speed task claiming.
The task that I picked up next ("Create a short Julia Code Snippet for 30-seconds-of-Julia") was a 5-day task and was suspiciously easy. I spent time on that task and tried to go above and beyond the task requirements. I added 4 new intermediate difficulty snippets while others were adding one beginner snippets and their tasks were getting approved. I was free for a few hours, but as usual, I had to prepare for the Monday test again, so I started studying.
I went to sleep, while my mentor was still taking time to evaluate my task. The task was approved overnight (for the millionth time), and I got up the next Monday.
On Monday morning, I hurriedly typed a description for my "Animate the Julia Logo" task and submitted it. For the first time ever, my task was not approved overnight, but during school. I gave my exam (which surprisingly, I did decently in), came home, and then gave my "Create a short Julia Code Snippet for 30-seconds-of-Julia" task some finishing touches and submitted it. Again, logankilpatrick reviewed my task at an impressive speed, and I could move on to my next task. However, I took some time out and wrote this blog post instead of that. Logan said he was very happy I was going, and I quote "above and beyond the task description", and that one sentence made me feel like every second I spent on making my task quality paid off.
I don't know why the phrase "above and beyond" is stuck in my head, but I guess it is because of all the Spotify Trance ads I'm getting asking me to listen to "Trance Top 1000". Why the top 1000?! Who listens to 1000 songs? That too of the same Genre? Why did a Trance artist name himself "Above and Beyond"? How did Logan use the exact same phrase I was thinking of all day? That feeling is extremely weird. Also, I had a Deja Vu today in class. I don't know why I mentioned that, but it happened, and it used to happen to me very often before (like every week), but this was like the first time in the last couple of months. Weird Stuff. Anyways, back to Google Code-in.
Yes, I did include Monday in my Week 3. I don't want to say I did 2 tasks this week!
Looking back at this week, it was quite an eventful week: I hit double-digit tasks (I'm at 11 now), I networked with a lot of new people, I was praised for the quality of my tasks, I met a new and extremely talented friend, I picked up the pace again, I met old friends, I got my SAT Subject Test scores and I attended an exciting event.
The next week is going to be nice I think, but stressful. I have a lot of time to do tasks now, but my final quarterly tests are approaching (10th Jan), and I don't know how to feel about it. New Decade! I will forever miss the 2010s, the best part of my life. Also, only the hard tasks are left, with a bunch of Raspberry Pi and ML tasks inaccessible to me for now, and I need to go through the rest and try my hand at them. No events next week other than some holidays, so it feels a little empty. Anyways, that concludes Week 3 of Google Code-in. This week was arguably one of my best weeks, and I hope I can keep up my pace.
Oh yeah, and Differential Calculus is over, we might finish Organic Chemistry this week (FINALLY!!), and we will finish Mechanics this week. Hyderabad is starting to get colder, and my feet are literally freezing while I sit down and code. Also, new skillset acquired: I can kill mosquitoes with one hand by grabbing them in my left hand and yeeting them away like an alpha while I type/use the mouse with my other hand.
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