Bhardwaj Rish

My love for Android is never ending. I've thought of putting a complete halt to all Android development over thrice in the last year*, and haven't been able to so far. One major reason is the sort of things Android allows people to come up with! The endless number of libraries, both for UI, or development. Here's a list of super useful libraries you may not have heard of. Android Annotations I stumbled upon Android Annotations about an hour ago, and I'm hooked. It's an Android library that helps in making code smaller and easier to read. True. Android is based on Java, and we all know how Java, unlike Python likes things big and explicitly written. Annotations are those '@' marks followed by a keyword you see above method or variables in several languages. ButterKnife uses them to inject views instead of writing long lines of the same code. Annotations are also used to mark methods like so - @Override. Android Annotations takes this to a whole new le...

Man man man! I've been smiling like a fool staring at my screen the past 4 hours or so. And feel like shouting out loud every time I read more about the work they've done. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Firebase. Fireflies in my stomach. This is too good to be true!  One product that does everything . After yesterday's Google I/O keynote, there were a whole lot of notifications to my developer account. A major one was Google backing Firebase, notifying developers to update analytics, cloud messaging, and ads display to Firebase. What's Firebase? A platform to build applications with no server side code, stores everything in JSON. Firebase handles it all for you. Similar to Parse, which declared shutdown early this year ('16), people that used it were literally on the street. Yup. This happened to a whole lot of developers.  Including me. Startups too, including Social Cops . For those who know what (and how awe...

This is a super short post on a very interesting article I found online. Markov chains. The guy's written a brilliant article, and makes it super easy to understand what they are, and what they're used for. He's taken the example of Markov chains being used in text prediction. The introduction reads as follows: This is my shot at explaining Markov chains in a palatable and maybe even enjoyable way. How do I want to make this article enjoyable? Two things: Actual code. Donald Trump. He makes autogenerated tweets using his existing tweets. Wouldn't this make you want to read it? :D Go here .

You can cry your heart out. You can scold yourself for making initial wrong choices and continuing to work on them. But you just can't go back in time and tell yourself you're making a mistake. This is a post for future self. You can stop reading here. It has a lot of rant. It has a lot of shallow thoughts. It has written descriptions of thoughts, an hour after not getting selected. Why am I publishing publically then? I just want this to be out there. - If you aren't me, stop reading. - Seriously. Close the tab. - - For the first 45 minutes, I had no thoughts. The only occasional thought was, some days aren't yours. The past couple of days, that feeling of joy never struck. I did not feel like a winner. Just like the day I gave my bitsat examination 3 years ago. I worked my ass off for two years, was crazy about it, dreamt of how it'd be at BITS every night, wrote the university's name on every book, every floor tile, my whiteboard, but starting a c...

Second grade memories. Pick a flower, pluck a petal. And another. She loves me, she loves me not.  That's the exact state of my mind right now. I applied to BuildmLearn for Google Summer of Code '16. For the past month, every other day or so, the thought of whether I'll get in brings me back to that second grade lover state.  For a minute, my shoulder angel tells me I'm in, I start to think of what life will be like once I get selected, of all the things I'll do. The next minute, the shoulder devil takes over and tells me, do you really think you'll make it? It's 19:08 UTC. Results come out at 19:00 UTC. I will not check until I complete this blog. I've put email notifications on mute. This feeling inside has wasted a good number of hours of mine every week and I really need to write this down. I hear someone shouting in Gujarati in the corridor, exclaiming he got in. Even more nervous now. The reason I know I will get in is because I...

Background : I have been doing Android dev for the past 2 years and know a good deal of webdev. I have decent experience in various frameworks; python flask and the MEAN stack, and have scratched the surface in React and Django, though haven't built a full fledged webapp in either. First things first. I love backend. APIs specifically . I love creating APIs, and use python flask for APIs all the time. Database and API architecture is where webdev is fun. And there are brilliant tools for the same. Jexia, a startup trying to make making APIs without code contacted me recently to test their tool. It is in beta currently. Do have a look if willing :). They've built an excellent tool, though it's the best for simple APIs, and not complicated ones. The mess is in webdev is the front end! Oh, the wretched HTML! Why do all frameworks still have HTML!? Yes, there's jade, and other similar alternatives but they all essentially follow the same idea. People think they kn...

Out of the millions of things taught to us at our JEE coaching center, there is this one line our inorganic chemistry teacher said that's stuck on, till date. He was one funny chap, spoke in the most hilarious accent and had the spirit of a teenager. But what he said to us one day continues to prick me till date. At the end of JEE, everyone's going to ask you just one question. Tera hua kya?  No one is going to care how many hours you spent per day, how hard you worked, or how many books you read, agar nahi hua. If you're gifted, you'd have probably spent less time than the hard workers who make up for it by putting in long hours. At the very end, the only question that'll arise is, did you get through? And that is how human society is. No one really cares how you made it. The 'how' part only comes in if you're successful. Before that, your story is just another person's story. Have a look at 21 pilots. Before their music became famous, y...

Ever wondered why you haven't been able to find good music on YouTube of late? Or how you're repeatedly suggested music you've already heard oh-so-many times on Youtube? I saw a feedback section on the website today. And this is what I sent them. -- YouTube puts me into this bubble that classifies things I've discovered so far, and the things I haven't. Your recommendation system, I feel, is limiting me from exploring new things. Almost as if you don't want me to see new things unless I explicitly search for it; and only then does my bubble grow. Let's take music for example. I have been listening to a lot of 21 pilots of late. And surprisingly out of the 15 odd recommended videos list on the right, apart from 1 or 2 fresh videos of a completely different genre (a different category altogether), Youtube repeatedly suggests me 4-5 of 21 pilots' songs that I've listened to several times already, and the rest are other songs that I discovered in ...

Junior Year Summers.  Summer Sixteen. I had such high hopes for these 3 months (starting May '16). My last true summer vacation before we graduate and become clothed monkeys in this big world. Some will end up here, there, some doing what they want, some not doing anything at all. I've been lucky to have done productive and meaningful work during my freshman and sophomore summers. I'm going to write about the work I've done so far (excluding personal projects), and the work I wish to be doing this summer. Freshman Summer. (May '14) I interned at a university startup that aimed at making books more accessible amongst students within the university. A stroke of luck, and I kick started my journey into Android dev. I learnt how to design, develop and publish Android based applications. I was given a choice on what platform I'd like to work on, and I chose Android thinking I'd be given a phone to test my applications on. I had a Windows phone then, and ab...

Given a short 10 minute video by your favorite YouTube channel (or say your favorite director) or a 5 page article written by the best author (or again, your favorite author) on the same topic, which medium would you prefer? A blog is in my opinion, not read by as many people as a series of videos on the same topic.   People are inherently lazy . Unless you're an avid reader, you are most probable to watch the video rather than reading the same thing. Or maybe it's context dependent. I would rather prefer reading Oliver Twist than watching it. But I'd rather watch a video on my univ cryptography course than read a chapter from the prescribed book. Last year I spent over 4 hours on my train journey from college to home, writing about every project I've ever worked on. Do go through my  /portfolio section here . Chances are, if you opened the link above, you would have just skimmed through the titles, maybe read a couple that interested you. Analytics on the websi...