IIIT Allahabad Tech Diaries
2017 is off to a great start, and we at IIIT Allahabad have been very busy living up to our name as the “Centre of Excellence for Information Technology”. Open source, competitive coding, capture-the-flag tournaments, and many quick talks to get people coding: you name it, we’ve done it.
1. Quick Talks
Quick Talks powered by Github were a means to spread knowledge about upcoming topics among the college students, all done within the easy-to-handle 30 minutes.
-
Vishnu K.S., gave a quick talk on his experiences with Open Source development and to inspire people to get started with Open Source development.
-
Gautham Santhosh, Co-ordinator of the FOSS Wing, unfurled the complexities of a chatbot and built a fully functioning one within 30 minutes, which was a sight to behold.
-
Abhishek Deora, co-ordinator at Geekhaven (our technical society), enlightened us all with him making a game in 30 minutes using the p5.js platform.
-
Chaitanya Yadav, founder of the startup BitNotes, went all out on how to go from zero to deploying an actual website.
-
IIIT Allahabad has been one of the biggest proponents for getting women to code, with a Code Queens event coming up this Aparoksha (specifically for women) and Neha Kandpal (Member of the Web Development Wing, Geekhaven) delivering a Quick Talk on Web Scraping.
-
Himanshu Shekhar, Member of the FOSS Wing, Geekhaven delivered a powerful talk on how to supercharge the humble VIM text editor, and made everyone wonder how the humble CLI editor became a Sublime-toppling monster, with all functionality one could think of.
-
Aseem Shrey, member of the Cyber Security wing, Geekhaven, explained various website vulnerabilities with a step-by-step demonstration of a website being hacked in real time.
2. OpenCode
A month long event, Opencode, was held by the Free and Open Source Software Wing of Geekhaven to get more people involved in open source development. It was a Google Summer of Code style event, which witnessed great participation (mostly from first year students) and got everyone to think about the vastness and breadth of open source. For an in-depth analysis of the event, do visit Gautham Santhosh’s blog post on it.
3. TriHacker Cup
To give the first years a well-deserved taste of various fields within programming, the TriHacker cup was held this year as well, with many rounds:
- Competitive Coding
- Android app development with Graphics Designing
- Capture-the-flag tournament
- Web Development and Open Source (yet to be held)
Preliminary workshops were held by the respective wings to ensure everyone had a thorough idea about the events beforehand. There was a roaring response from the rookie programmers with various teams shining in a different events. Overall, it was a great event with the effect of having fully initiated the first years into programming, and having given them enough experience for them to now choose their own arenas within software development; and to get acquainted with the rigor involved in doing so.
4. Workshops
Various workshops were held on the currently “in” topics such as Android App Development and working on Github (and git in general), so that the students could get an in-depth view and to expand their horizons in their particular areas of interest.