Last time I was at home, I wanted to ensure that my ma or papa are comfortable enough in our absence. Most importantly Ma. Ma has been busy all these days raising all of us, sending us to schools, doing our homework, washing our clothes and preparing our food.

All of a sudden, 3 years ago; everything changed inside our home. It was natural. It was something that we all knew will happen. Still, no one was prepared for it. We all moved out. We were happy. We found new friends, new work to do and new ideas to bounce off.

But on the other hand, Ma lost her routine. She had no kids to take care of. Imagine your celebrating your birthday by cutting a cake and blowing candles all alone. Scary. Creepy. That is the life of our mothers daily after we leave homes.

Some of them pick up some jobs. Some of them involve themselves in cooking, gardening, teaching etc. Some follow their interests like...

Q: How do you feel?

A: Like collapsing.

Q: Collapsing towards what?

A: Nothingness.

Q: Nothingness? Is there nothing around you?

A: There is nothing around “nothingness”.

A: On second thought YES.

Q: What’s that?

A: Music. Sounds.

(Pause)

Q: Are you tired or exhausted?

A: No. Not at all. In fact, I can work 24 hours today if the sound is music and/or people the musicians.

Q: Are you frustrated, confused or lost?

A: No there is peace around this nothingness. Sounds that are silent.

Q: Will you be happy when you come out of this nothingness?

A: I feel I will never come out of this.

A: But I am better now.

Q: By better, you mean happy or satisfied?

A: None. Just a better person.

Hi Devesh,

25 years old. You are young. At this age, you are bound to have opinions about almost everything in life. That’s normal and natural. But forcing your opinion on someone is not a good habit.

Most importantly, believing and pursuing your current opinion always can lead you to a state where you will only know one part of the picture. Unlearning is hard. So, if your mind starts following one ideology, it will resist unlearning what you have learnt. In such a scenario, you will be easily diverted by a politically motivated opinion. In such a situation, you will start classifying people as supporters and opponents; when they just have a different view. This is bad. You keep saying to others today, that you are not aligned to one political thought. But sooner or later, unknowingly you will be aligned and then misaligned.

How to prevent this?

1. Create a diverse set of group...

Sister,

Our parents and relatives have told each one of us that this is the last thing (exam, course or interview), we have to face. That is such a big lie that I assume even you now have a good laugh about it. Truth is even our parents don’t know most of the things, like us. However, we know one thing that is so rare. We are super fortunate to get such parents.

Now finally the moment has come when you will be sitting for your placements. Getting great placements are hard. Just getting placed is a joke. Now mostly you will be on your own (though I am sure Ma will keep calling you).

Except for the name of the relationship that we were given, we never connected. There was no reason till we found one during the last Imagine Cup. Participating in one competition and having the same goal for some duration of time helped us to connect, look into something with the same eye and most...

Highlighting the reasons why creating at least one game from scratch is essential for developers in general and front-end web developers in particular.

In recent times, there has been a lot of emphases given to learning how to code. This may be because lots of startups and companies want good coders. Or our generation has come to a point where they believe programming is one of the top needs for progress. This has given birth to many startups including Codeacademy (one of the first), CodeSchool (my favourite!), Learnstreet (funded by Vinod Khosla) etc. and a revolution at Code.org

“Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think. — Steve Jobs”

If programming is so important, then what’s the problem — the pain point. They are these two kinds of people: Those who don’t know programming and the others didn’t enjoy their first...

Some best practices that I have learnt the hard way.

The last couple of months have been critical. I sat down for a long time in front of my computer, to push and build the final thing (first product of WhiteShark). In this process, I learnt a few important things regarding the development of a product (a web-based software precisely). I sincerely hope if you are one of those, whose problem statement matches with mine, then this might be helpful for you as well.

Let’s start. Or if you want a cup of coffee, get that now.

1) API’s are fantastic (and necessary).

Coming from a PHP - MySQL background and always developing quick - fast websites, it’s not very hard to find API’s entirely useless. It’s understandable since we use PHP and several other languages on both server side and client side. And that means if I have to, for instance, delete an item I can directly write code directly...