the lost logbook

Last week, me and 2 of my friends decided to go to the university hackathon organized by eBay. It was fun! We built a python-django based web app called BuildMyPc, a vertical shopping app, something like SparkBuy, but built using eBay data.

Why? Because if you want to customize a desktop at home, there is nothing like buying cheap parts from eBay!

And our app was judged 2nd! The first prize went to an app built with some awesome javascript + eBay API hackery. Read the rest of this entry »

Very interesting read about fixed intelligence and incremental intelligence covering one of the aspects, which is effort.

“Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life.  Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it.”

6. The Meaning of Effort
Fixed Entity Intelligence: In fixed intelligence making a lot of effort or struggling means your dumb. Its only the winners who feel smart, and only if they didn’t have to work to hard to win.

This is sad because students may never come to value effort. Effort gives meaning to life. It means you care about something, that it is important, and you are willing to work for it.

Incremental/Maleable: In Incremental intelligence effort is what turns on peoples intelligence and allows them to use it to their full advantage. + it can foster a more collaborative atmosphere among students because everyone can feel smart by applying their intellectual abilities to the problems they face.

Source: Carol Dwek- Growth Mindsets and Motivation

What is Area42?
1. Area: Taken from Area51, because its secret and very important/interesting people can be a part of it.
2. 42: We will share knowledge here. “The Answer to Life (tech), the Universe (tech) and Everything (tech)”.
3. Its uniqueness lies in less number of members == less noise.
4. All members have sudo rights!

Where is it?
Yeah right! It’s a secret!

Stumbled on this awesome 3 video playlist on Event Driven Programming in Java!

Also, Node.js is one of the new event driven framework, which is freaking fast! A very good guide to understanding what is Node.js and Event driven programming in it self is very well documented here:

1. Node.js, Doctor’s Offices and Fast Food Restaurants – Understanding Event-driven Programming

2. A Programmer’s Tutorial on Event-Driven Programming, Asynchronous Input/Output, and the Bamboo DHT

Just out of curiosity, I created this poll about the text editors and IDEs used by the awesome HackerNews community. I posted it on HackerNews and got 3005 responses. If you are interested in seeing the excel sheet, you can look it up here (it would be interesting if some one can mine this data to get more relevant and useful information).

Anyway, time for some results!!
Read the rest of this entry »