My Experience of Mission RnD Summer Course at IIITH

Hi everyone, I am super excited to release my first blog post. In this, I would like to share my experience of Mission RnD Summer Course at IIITH. It was really an amazing experience to be at IIITH for almost a month.

With much excitement, random thoughts and fear of hostel life entered IIITH for Mission RnD Summer Course. The day when I got to know that I was selected for mission rnd summer course, I was totally surprised and was on cloud nine. 24th of May was my boarding day to IIITH. With all arrangements, I landed at IIITH hostel on 24th May afternoon.

The first class started at 3 PM. We were divided into teams with a condition that no two students in the team should be from same college and I was into team 6. As soon as I entered the class I took initiative and introduced myself to the team. The class started in a funny way. We were asked to represent our names in the form of pictures and objects and other members in the team had to guess it. As our team members already knew every other's name, we easily guessed the names. The entire first day I was thinking how the remaining days were going to be at IIITH.

Mission RnD summer course was divided into two tracks. Systems track and apps track. The first 10 days we had Systems course which included problem solving, excel implementation, file system implementation, compiler design etc., and the remaining days we had Apps course where we learnt building of web apps using Django framework. Each team was assigned with two mentors. I am thankful to our mentor Chakradhar annaya who really supported us. When we were struck at some point or we didn't understand something he helped us in all ways.

I felt Systems course as challenging. We used to be awake till 1 or 2 A.M. to complete the given tasks. The initial days started with problem solving. Mentors used to give us some problems and we solved them in the specified time. Earlier I was afraid of recursion and backtracking. But through Karthik annaya's way of explanation, my fear was gone. Our mentors insisted us to develop a logic before jumping into code as coding without logic is useless. The complexity of coding increased with excel implementation. Bhageerath anna gave the excel spec and asked us to implement it. Initially everything seemed easy and we started coding. But at the later stages more and more functionalities were added to the spec and we realized the data structure which we chose earlier wouldn't fit for the later functionalities. Again I changed the whole program and what I wrote till then was useless. By this I understood the code should be written by thinking of all possibilities and it should be modular such that adding of something new doesn't require to change the existing code.

File Systems implementation is one such topic I liked the most. Rohini Sir explained them very clearly. One of my friends, Manideep helped me in debugging my file systems code. We all as a team discussed the design part and then jumped into code. After file systems, we had Peri Sir's class where he explained us how to design a basic compiler using C. We were asked to write a C program to generate intermediate code from Assembly language which is level 1 of compiler design. On that day we didn't even sleep properly to complete the task and the systems course ended with B trees taken by OLN Sir. It was really amusing to know how B trees are used in databases.

And then the apps course was started for which I had eagerly waited. It's because of two reasons, one is I love developing applications and the other reason is that it was taken by KC sir. We built web apps using Django framework. Apart from regular class, we also had other activities like group discussions on various topics, individual code reviews, EFT, team activity to build the highest tower, Alumni talks etc.,

Last two days we had a hackathon where we were asked to build a clone of IPL app. It had total 9 levels and a large amount of data had to be inserted into database from excel sheet. My very old laptop couldn't handle that much data and troubled me a lot on that day. My laptop was too slow to work and my anger level was on peak. Later my friend Rishabh fixed the issue to some extent and I could do my work after that.

My Learnings from Mission RnD :

1. Earlier I never knew the importance of debugging, After excel implementation and compiler design I realized debugger is life saver of programmer.
2. When KC sir asked us to add functionalities to the existing game, I understood the importance of writing neat code. Always write meaningful code in such a way that it is easy for someone to read it.
3. It's okay to do experiments with code. Unless we are curious to know what is happening inside, We can't develop that 'learn new things' attitude
4. KC sir's gyan classes are beyond everything. It has changed my perception towards life. He told us the reality of companies after joining them.
5. There are many ways to make money. But the ultimate goal of life is to be happy all the time.
6. As said by Peri sir, Parents are the only one who deserve a lot more than respect . Never ever hurt them and always make them happy.
7. Never ever give up and always have courage to start something new. Believe in yourself.

Mission RnD 2019 Batch

I felt lucky to be in team 6. Whenever we were asked to discuss on something, there was active participation of each and every teammate. I always used to start the discussion and asked for everyone's opinion.

I never thought that I would get a chance to visit a research centre at IIITH. I should thank my friend Manideep who met a research student at canteen and with his help we got an opportunity to visit an Earthquake Engineering Research Centre.

The whole MRnD summer course has given me a life time experience. I never thought that 25 days of life away from home could bring that much change in a person both technically and personally. It's like blessing to meet great personality like Peri Sir and have classes from KC Sir. I made many new friends in the class. I am lucky to have friends like Keerthana, Pravalika, Lahari, Lohitha, Sirisha, Ramya, Unnati, Fayaz, Manideep, Rishabh, Sanjay and the list goes on.....I am really gonna miss those sleepless nights, late night coffee, crazy night walks, oreo milkshake and lot more.

Every journey has to end some day that is why it's called as experience. Though MRnD journey has ended, the beautiful memories and learnings will always remain in my heart.