Raghu Mohan

If you were to go to an engineering college today, you will often see electronics engineers being placed in software companies. You'd even find some of them complaining about a lack of core companies during placement season. But you will also see a few students, who've embraced the era of computer science and code. Take Vithya Kannapan, from SanDisk, for example.

Her love affair with coding started from her days as an intern. She said, "When I started as intern in a company, I got to know that in future, embedded software would be key for electronics systems and an electronics engineer would be incomplete without coding knowledge."

This is Vithya Kannapan's story.

"Women are good executors!"

Vithya is very logical. She says, "I always try to solve the problems logically and coding is in line with this. It is because of this that I love to code and implement functionality in devices or systems."

Vithya loves seeing her code in production and being recognized. She says, "I converted some of my ideas into practical devices and systems using programming thus leading to some patents in SanDisk Inc., I felt most satisfied during these moments."

Vithya believes that a lot of women are just as logical as their male counter parts. Being execution-driven, Vithya feels that computer science is her calling. She says, "Since women are precise in thinking and efficient in execution, the IT industry is the most suitable industry for them. I personally feel that being a woman I get motivated by new challenges everyday (both at work as well as at home) and solve them effectively."

"Women are discouraged from technical work"

A lot of women are discourage from taking up a career in technology. She says, "Despite excelling in school/college, women in India traditionally chose jobs that were not technical in fields like medicine and education as a career. However, in the last decade, there was a rise in the number of women who chose technical careers, thanks to the growing IT industry. I am sure more women will be seen in the tech industry in the coming years."

During her own journey, she's faced adversity being a woman in tech. She says, "During the initial years of my career, I had a lot of challenges in balancing work and life. Especially the expectations from my family put a lot of pressure on me. At some point of time I decided to talk to family and explained the importance of my career. Eventually I got their full support."

Learn, grow, and achieve Going forward, Vithya wants to be an experienced professional. She says, "I would like to excel in my technical knowledge as well as in managerial capabilities. In 10 years I would like to see myself as a technical director and manage complex projects."Her advice to young professionals is three-fold. She says:

• "Learn: Learn new things every day along with the technical and leadership skills necessary to be efficient in your job.
• Grow: Grow your career along with your team.
• Achieve: Exceed the expectations and achieve your goals quicker and smarter.

Positive people are a pleasure to deal with. Their demeanor and approach to is infectious! It is the same positivity that helps them advance in their careers. In many ways, this is the story of Shwetha Kashyap, software engineer at Harman Connected Services.

We caught up with Shwetha to know more about her journey as a techie, and more importantly, her journey as a woman in tech.

Coding and motherhood

Like good old school techies, Shwetha her career with assembly-language coding.

"Coding started just before college, however, those trials never made me understand what my school teachers meant when they said “Computers understand zeros and ones” My first time with assembly-language coding and manually translating code into machine instructions during college opened up the whole digital world for me. This kindled my interest in coding."

It was particularly endearing to see her equate coding with motherhood. When asked why she loves coding, she said, "Coding is as good as teaching a child (in our case, a computer) what, when, and how to do something. And the joy of watching your "baby" perform tasks as instructed and perform it quickly is what keeps me motivated."

What she enjoys the most is solving tough problems. When asked about her most satisfying moment as a programmer, she said, "They say “To bug is human, to debug is divine!” To debug a coding problem is the best way to experience adventures. My most satisfying moments are when I have debugged those "non-recreatable" in-house crash issues with no clear call stack information and absolutely no takers for the bug."

We cannot agree more.

Being a woman in tech

Shwetha is enthusiastic about the state of women in tech in India. She says, "IT in India is definitely warming up to women. There is a lot less gender prejudice than there was earlier. Having said that, there is much more to go. To date, I hear about recruiters being skeptical about hiring women who are married because they can’t work late! The number of women in coding is still very less and there are very few examples at the top of the ladder to look up to. But, I am sure this will change soon."

While most women might be apprehensive about being a part of the minority group, Shwetha doesn't mind it. She says, "So, far I’ve loved being the only woman among the male developers. You are offered seats in meeting rooms and drops when you work late. That’s not such a bad thing!"

On a more serious note, she has some interesting insight into why there are so few women in technology. She says, "Development has always been portrayed as a job that requires you to burn the midnight oil. This is especially threatening for married women, who are scared that their work-life balance will be lost if they ever step into coding.

The more our industry works towards respecting work-life balance of its workers, the more women they will see in coding. Facilities like “Work from home for mothers” are still considered impossible-to-give facilities, which is very discouraging for those women who want to pursue a career in programming. The lack of support from the industry is one of the key factors for the lack of women in tech."

The solution to this, according to her, is simple—treat coding like any other job. She says, "Society has now convinced itself that IT jobs are a slaughter house. I’ve been asked “Why don’t you take up a teaching job, so that your timings are fixed and there is less pressure? “ However, these things don’t matter. In today's world, no job is a cakewalk. Teachers too have the similar pressures of meeting the deadlines. Once you make your family aware of this, they won’t worry anymore. Coding is like any other job."

On ambitions and growth

Her ambitions are interesting. She says, "My dad learnt 2 types of Vedas just for hobby. I wondered, how many ways of praising God does one have to learn? Nowadays I feel crippled not knowing many languages in which I can communicate with my computer. I want to learn as many languages as I possibly can to talk to my computer differently each time. That’s probably what went through my dad’s mind as well!"

In the future, Shwetha aims to become a technical architect. "10 years from now, I see myself working for groups that are trying to promote Kannada in the Information Technology field," she concluded.

We wish Shwetha all the best in her future endeavors.

The hackathon, from it's humble beginnings in small companies and college common rooms, has meteorically risen to prominence over the last decade. Never before has there been a way to bring a fragmented set of developers to build products in a short period of time.HackerEarth in its continued effort to engage its growing developer community has launched a platform to manage and conduct hackathons online in a scalable manner. This platform can be used to conduct a variety of hackathons and enable the global community of developers to participate in hackathons based on their areas of interests.HackerEarth Sprint is a first-of-its-kind hackathon-management platform that is designed for conducting hackathons with minimum effort and time. The product is designed to automate most aspects of such sprints, such as:

• Teams: Participants can create teams
• Collaboration: Provides an online collaborative development environment
• Showcase submissions: Allows participants to showcase their products/submissions
• Track progress: Enables admins to track the progress of each team
• Peer review: Facilitates peer review between teams
• Voting: Allows the general public to vote for submissions
• Easy evaluation: Provides an interface to the judges to evaluate submissions and see a demo online
• Leaderboard: Creates a leaderboard for all the submissions that is updated in real-time and can be viewed by anyone
• Integration for easy hosting: Can be integrated with platforms like Github, Heroku, AWS etc. providing developers, tools for easy code hosting and deployment

Sprint also provides a larger value proposition to organizers by enabling them to reach out to our rapidly growing global community of developers. Most importantly the platform makes hackathons more scalable as they can be conducted online enabling participation from anywhere in the world.Ravi Gururaj, Chairman, NASSCOM Product & Executive Council, said, “Hackathons are now a critical element of all technology companies to enable community outreach, talent recruiting, ideation and internal team development exercises, and platform/API evangelization.

The best hackmasters run great events by employing a range of robust web tools, manage the process with agility and flexibility, communicating with participants in real-time with rich information feeds, hot wiring everyone up to social media, delivering frictionless devops, ensuring high levels of fun, engagement, and participation. HackerEarth's new offering captures all of these key ingredients in a simple yet powerful cloud-based platform, which ensures that all hackmasters can deliver world class hackathons experiences.”

In the past, we have conducted many internal Hackathons for Wipro. In his experience with us, G S Nathan, GM - Open Innovation, CTO Office, Wipro Ltd, said, “We partnered with HackerEarth to conduct an internal coding event at Wipro, earlier this year. Titled Wipro Code Storm, the week-long initiative saw participating Wipro employees navigate their way through eight diverse challenges, each set at different levels of complexity. 4000 employees from across 22 countries participated in the event.

HackerEarth provides a very useful solution, which makes the task of conducting such codeathons very simple and allows us to scale it across thousands of users.”

Various hackathons (across different domains) have been conducted using Sprint. You can view the list of upcoming hackathons here.

If you would like to conduct your own Hackathon, write to us contact@hackerearth.com.

So the question is Python vs Ruby. Before we actually make a choice on this, let's just say that there is a lot of talk about this, and to an extent, you could say that the debate has been laid to rest. However, here in India, apart from the small fraction of people involved in competitive coding or open-source contributions, this is still a burning question: Which of these two languages, both rapidly increasing in popularity, should one learn to get a job?

India is an interesting programming ecosystem. Most software skill adoption is directly related to its usefulness in landing a job. I have personally come across students who've told me that they'd been advised to learn Python or Ruby over the other because it will help them get a job. They aren't wrong, as they're speaking from what they know.

But let's do some research. To understand why a job would require you to learn one of these languages, I think it is important to understand the differences between the two languages.

How are the two different from each other?

The two programming languages have philosophical differences. While Python believes in having only one way to do something, Ruby is built around the philosophy of having many ways of doing the same thing.

Python is modelled after the Fortran line; there is a clear distinction between expressions and statements, and between code and data. This makes it faster and better suited to top-down programming. It is a lot easier to learn and to understand when reading it.

Ruby, on the other hand, is modelled after Lisp; there is no difference between expressions and statements, and code and data. The most striking commonality is how similar Ruby's blocks are to Lisp's closures. This makes it easier to do metaprogramming to solve problems, and so it is more suited to bottom-up programming.

There are many detailed blogs regarding the differences between the two languages. I liked this one the best — A Rubyist's Confession on Python.

And which of these will get you a job?

Let's get one thing straight — if you're good at something, there is always a job for you. However, good is a measure of industry demand. Less demand means the bar for good is much higher when compared to more demand, where the definition of good is slightly lesser.

With that in mind, some basic trends analysis on Indeed.com, a job search engine, says that the number of job postings on their site for Ruby on Rails is far more than the postings for Django, a popular web framework on Python. However, job searches for Python, the language, as a skill far outclass Ruby. This tells us a few things.

Web or not

By the looks of it, Python seems to be a more popular language than Ruby, but the demand for their corresponding web frameworks is vice versa. This could also be because Python is a very popular backend language, as opposed to Ruby.

So where does that put you, the job seeker? Many people say that learning Python is easier than Ruby. But when it comes to the web frameworks, Ruby on Rails is very powerful and it does a lot of work for the developer, leaving the coder to think more about the business logic of the application being built.

I think at the end of the day, it's a call on whether you want to work completely on web or do you want to work on backend code as well. If you want to work only on web, then you might have a better chance of landing a job with Ruby, as you can learn Ruby on Rails with relative ease after that. Python, on the other hand, can get you a lot of backend jobs and if you put in the time to learn Django, you can work on web applications also.

The 15th of September is celebrated as Engineer's Day in memory of India's engineering icon M. Visvesvaraya. A highly disciplined engineer, he was known for his sincerity, time management and unsurpassable devotion to a cause. He was a civil engineer and his work involved everything from building roadways, to dams and anti-flood systems.

In his life as an engineer, Visvesvaraya engineered many systems to reality. Here are some of his great achievements -

1. In 1895, he designed and carried out the water works of the Municipality of Sukkur in Sind
2. In 1903, he designed and constructed Automatic Gates, patented by him at Lake Fife Storage Reservoir, to at the Khadakvasla Reservoir near Pune. These gates were employed to raise the flood supply level of storage in the reservoir to the highest level likely to be attained by a flood without causing any damage to the dam.
3. Based on the success of these gates, the same system was installed at the Tigra Dam in Gwalior and the Krishna Raja Sagara (KRS) Dam in Mandya/ Mysore,Karnataka.
4. Introduced block irrigation system, which is still used in golf courses from around the world to maintain the quality of grass.
5. Designed and developed and anti-flooding system for the city of Hyderabad which was frequently tormented by floods caused by the river Musi.
6. He had a great stint working with the state of Mysore. He's regarded as the father of modern day Mysore and rightly so. He was responsible for the founding of the Mysore Soap Factory, the Parasitoide Laboratory, the Mysore Iron & Steel Works (now known as Visvesvaraya Iron and Steel Limited) in Bhadravathi, the Sri Jayachamarajendra Polytechnic Institute, the Bangalore Agricultural University, the State Bank of Mysore, The Century Club, Mysore Chambers of Commerce and numerous other industrial ventures. This was in 1909.
7. He was instrumental in the founding of the Government Engineering College at Bangalore in 1917, one of the first engineering institutes in India. This institution was later named the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE)

A consummate engineer, Visvesvaraya never stopped learning. He would often be sent to other countries, like China, Canada, USA, Russia, Egypt etc, where he would study various engineering practices and solve problems in India using the learnt technologies. He holds a unique distinction of obtaining Membership of London Institution of Civil Engineers for an unbroken 50 years. Post Independence, he was also awarded India's highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.Visvesvaraya died at a grand old age of 101, in the year 1962, and to this day, 15th September of every year in India has been celebrating a century of engineering brilliance.What Visvesvaraya stood for, was the spirit of problem solving, the unquenchable zeal to learn, passion towards a cause, unquestionable dedication and resolute discipline. The characteristics define the spirit of engineering.On this day, it is important to remember, that engineering is not an educational qualification. It is a way of thinking. A way of thinking that is in every problem solver in the world. It is a way of life.There is an engineer in everyone and today goes out to the problem solver in you.

Content source - Wikipedia

Mobile apps have well and truly arrived and the demand for mobile application developers is now higher than what it has ever been. India being the software development engine of the dot com era has smoothly transitioned into the mobile world as well and we're seeing some good mobile app development companies emerge in the recent past.

But back in the dot com days, India never saw too many software product companies. More emphasis was laid on the software services front. This was because distribution was complicated and most entrepreneurs stuck to getting paid for building software and not worrying about distribution and marketing of a software product.

That has changed now. The concept of the app store has made it a level playing field. Simply uploading an app on an app store now makes an app available to anyone in the world with an internet enabled smartphone. Furthermore, internet marketing has greatly evolved and monetisation is also reaching some sort of maturity.

All this has given rise to mobile product companies from India. If you're a mobile developer in India, here are 5 companies that you must try your chances with (in no particular order)

Zomato

When I first spoke to Pankaj Chaddha, one of the founders of Zomato, he told me that in the developer community, they're still considered a mobile app company from Mumbai. True, they have a very popular website that sees a lot of traffic, but over 70% of their usage in on their mobile client.

With close to 5 million downloads, Zomato is used in many countries and as a mobile developer, gives rise to a lot of exciting work. Furthermore, the mobile app itself is undergoing constant change on the front end, which will give developers a unique experience of getting to understand behaviour mobile users from around the world.

All this awesomeness and it's made with love in India.

Newshunt

When you have any internet property that records a billion page views a month, anyone would sit up and take notice. Verse Innovation's mobile app Newshunt is exactly that. This app serves news from hundreds of english and local language newspapers on a simple, readable mobile app.

The mobile app is available across platforms and records massive usage and is growing at breakneck speeds. Across all platforms, the app has close to 67 million downloads and the company is looking to add another 100 million users in the coming year. All the right signs for a mobile developer to board this rocket ship.

Probably the most 'indian' app out there, in a vernacular sense.

Flipkart

In a recent press interaction, Flipkart revealed that over 50% of their sales revenues are coming from their mobile app. That's close to 500 million dollars USD from their mobile app, so you can be rest assured that a lot of work is going into it. Flipkart will give you vantage point as a developer in the incredibly rapidly evolving m-commerce market.

Furthermore, this is again an app that is used by millions of users in India, which comes with it's set of learning benefits from a developer's point of view. Furthermore, it's a large engineering team and there will be a lot of handshakes between web and mobile technologies that a mobile developer will be exposed to.

If you can make it to Flipkart as a mobile engineer, you're in for some serious learning.

SignEasy

This is a controversial choice, as it's not in the same league as the aforementioned apps, in terms of downloads and usage. However, this is one of the few independent enterprise facing apps in India, let alone the world. This app allows you to sign documents digitally. It is a very basic problem in the corporate world and is beginning to see some good traction.

The app is available across all platforms and it was even featured on the Apple app store. There are some niche technologies that a developer will be exposed to while working with this company and also will give a developer an understand of the enterprise user. With a maturing consumer mobile app space, the next space to go to is the enterprise space.

Choose SignEasy for some exciting tech work and insight into a new consumer segment.

Hike

Bharti SoftBank is home to one of India's most widely used mobile apps - Hike Messenger. The app, on Android alone has over 20 million downloads and is available across iOS, Windows Phone, and even Symbian. There's a lot of ad money that's going into marketing the app, so you can only expect the user count to go up.

The mobile messenger market itself is very hot. Apart from Hike, there's Line and WeChat that are also growing rapidly in the same region. This sort of competition will usher new innovation and the people at the helm of this development will be the mobile app developer. Need more reason to join?

Choose Hike simple because of the amazing traction the instant messaging market is seeing.