ABOUT

I am pursuing my Masters in Data Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. I moved to the United States in June 2019. My undergrad degree is in Computer Engineering(2014-2018) from Kadi Sarva Vishwavidyalay, Gandhinagar, India. Right now, I am working as a Graduate Research Assistant at Rutgers School of Social Work. I work with technologies like SQL, Python, and MS Excel in my day to day work.

HOW I DECIDED TO BECOME A PROGRAMMER

I developed an interest in computer science when I was in 4th or 5th grade. While playing all time popular game, Age of Empires, I became curious about the under the hood process to make such a perfect, addictive game. That was the first time I interacted with an AI i.e., a boss or a CPU. The game nicely depicted various civilizations but I wanted it to include mine, the Indian civilization as well. So my only goal from that day was to get a job in Microsoft Games and include Indian civilization into the game. But destiny had it's own plans, the 3rd version of Age of Empires came with a title, "Asian Dynasties" which featured India very satisfactorily, so thanks to that, my passion towards game development gradually decreased, I tried out many beginners platforms for game development like, MIT Scratch and HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript. During the process, I liked working with JavaScript, due to it's friendly and flexible nature. That introduced me to the web domain. I got interested in web development field and learned front end technologies from sites like Edx, W3schools, Udacity, Free Code Camp Front-end web path and Codecademy. During my bachelors in fifth semester I learned the back end language PHP, and while working on projects with dynamic sites, I had a chance to self-learn a lot of stuff, especially when I made a fansite for Sitarist Anoushka Shankar. This was a CMS (Content management system) enabled site, where I also explored the database operations and SQL language. I learned a lot of new web app plugins and libraries like Twitter Bootstrap, jQuery, mobile supportive website building, APIs and other techniques from blog platforms like Medium and sites dedicated to the front end. I also got selected in Udacity's Google India Scholarship in the first round for Mobile web specialist course. The Web is a creative field and while taking a challenge called 30days30sites, as the name suggests, I was required to make 30 different websites for 30 days, on the 15th day, I realized that I enjoy behind the curtains processes more than the front end decorative and creative stuff, instead of designing a beautiful website, I enjoyed to code a Tic tac toe game or Simen says game on JavaScript more. I found a need to use my web skills to use it more for math and less for the arts, more logic and less assumptions, something beyond login, sign up and forgot password functionality apart from the content and its grandiose representation. And that's when I started exploring the Java language, chatbot technologies, speech to text functionality, which introduced me to a new language Python.