April 23, 2012
At 5 PM last Friday, roughly one hundred Bruins descended upon the Career Center to take part in the Facebook Hackathon at UCLA. With the help of friendly Facebook engineers and ridiculous amounts of food and caffeinated beverages, teams of up to four students worked through the night to build a project that would then be presented in a two-minute demo at the end of the competition. After 24 insane hours of designing, coding, debugging, and polishing, Team Out and About (Angela, Samir, Prasanth, and myself) took first place with our app Classyfy. Classyfy is a fun way to take... Read more
April 12, 2012
I am writing this blog post from my lab on a nondescript Dell desktop computer running Ubuntu. That's not how I would typically write a blog post, if I were one for doing such a thing with any frequency. Normally I'm inseparable from my trusty three-year-old MacBook Pro, but today that machine in the care of the Geniuses at the Century City Apple Store. (Apple employee 2994584XX and whoever is in charge of AppleCare: I wish I could buy you both beers.) This is because over several months of frustrating lockups and troubleshooting I have determined that for some reason... Read more
January 11, 2012
I love winter break. It's my chance to recover from final exams, visit family and friends, and spend time doing things I've had to put off all quarter. This year I got a lot of reading done in between interviewing for summer internships and watching Stanford CS 193P lectures. Here are the books I read, and a quick review of each of them: Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson: Though I think Isaacson's unfamiliarity with Silicon Valley was detrimental to the biography, his unprecedented access helps give the reader good insights into the complex person that Steve really was. Hackers and Painters,... Read more
October 30, 2011
(Before I start this post, I have a confession to make: I'm probably the last person on Earth to realize that this blogging thing is hard to get into regularly. I've been doing a lot lately that's worth blogging about--research, hackathons, and the like--but you wouldn't know it by my lack of posts. I'll try to be better in the future, I promise!) After recovering from an unpleasant case of pneumonia, last Saturday I was lucky enough to attend Startup School 2011. Produced by Y Combinator and Stanford University's BASES and held this year at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium, Startup School... Read more
July 13, 2011
The Setup, curated by @waferbaby, is a fascinating collection of interviews with people from all over the Internet. In one of these interviews the subject simply describes the software and hardware that they use in their personal and professional lives. I've been following site since its genesis and I am inexplicably fascinated by each and every detail shared by the site's often Internet-famous interviewees. In the spirit of introduction, I humbly present my own answers to the questions posed by The Setup. UPDATE: @waferbaby was kind enough to link to this post on the Community page of The Setup. Thanks... Read more
