2012: Year in review

2012 was a great year for me for 3 reasons:

1. The world didn’t end.
2. 4 Hackathon victories: 3rd prize at Greylock, an award at an internal hackday at LinkedIn, 1st prize at the Facebook Hackathon at UIUC and 2nd prize at the Facebook Hackathon finals. We were also one of the finalists for the LinkedIn Intern Hackday 2012.I worked with Sam and Onur on all the hackathons apart from the LinkedIn internal hackday for which I worked with my awesome mentor Jim.I also love how our Computer Vision technology evolved over time for each hack: we started with object tracking using colors (we wore  colored socks on our hands for dance()), next we were able to pull of object tracking within a bounded region (we were able to track a finger in ABSees) and finally for StreetCoders we were able to have a system that didn’t require colored socks or a bounded region!

   I’m extremely proud of what Sam, Onur and I achieved and it was great working with them.

   What didn’t improve though was the quality of our Javascript code :(. Each of our hackathon projects started with us working on the computer vision first. This usually took the most time. Once we were pretty confident that our computer vision components worked locally (no images coming over the network), we started working on the Javascript portions of the code that actually talked to the computer vision servers. It was also at this point that we used to realize that we have 10-12 hours to build a majority of our application. This scramble to the finish line usually ended up with us having Javascript code that is functional but littered with code smells. Our overall tiredness towards the end didn’t help either. Oh well.

3. I got an opportunity to intern at an awesome company. My Summer at LinkedIn was phenomenal.
4. There was a new addition to my family.

Looking forward to a great 2013.