A testimonial to one of the best mentors I have had

I have previously written about my internship at IBM in this post and this post. The first post makes it pretty clear that the internship was a very productive (very likely most productive) part of my engineering student life. The second post briefly talks about Gautham Pai as being my guru. Both are very much true and I am thankful to Gautham for having provided me the opportunity to be on the Eclifox team. Although I have expressed my gratitude to Gautham a few times, I never really wrote it down anywhere, neither in my blog nor on any social n/w site. A few months ago Gautham started his own company Jnaapti, which is a technical skill development company. Basically he is doing what he is very good at, i.e. bringing the best out of anyone willing to learn and succeed. As part of the company operations he conducts training sessions for various corporate clients and also mentors engineering students helping them understand their subjects better using some useful project as a means of teaching. He is experimenting with various educational methodologies and different ways to teach/mentor students remotely. I am very confident that his efforts are going to change the landscape of computer science engineering education vastly. Having been mentored and guided by Gautham at various points, I thought now would be a good time to pen down a testimonial and finally put that gratitude in words. So here it goes :

Every software engineer who has been in the industry, even for a small amount of time, surely knows the gap between academic teaching and the industry requirements and the initial uphill task of coping up when a fresh engineering graduate joins any company. It would not have been different for me, if not for Gautham's guidance as my senior at college and my mentor at IBM during my internship. With Gautham's mentoring, the internship was probably one of the most productive spans in my 4 years of engineering studies and also the one packed with maximum learning. Additionally it opened up a number of opportunities for me which I previously did not even know existed - like my participation in Google Summer code and later being with the Mozilla community for quite some time and many others.

Traits like general intelligence, theoretical understanding of the subjects and the ability to solve problems are undoubtedly necessary, but not sufficient. An engineer should be able to think not just about the next line of the code that he is going to write but also think about product that he is building or helping build. He should also know that any technology is just a tool to get the work done and not something that limits you. That way you just pick any new tool that you come across and find useful or necessary for the job. This also means you keep up with the latest happenings in the tech world via blogs, articles, mailing lists etc. Above all the zeal to do more, to come up with new ideas, to start executing those ideas and the persistence to see them through, in the course carefully managing a team as a leader, are what will make an engineer truly successful.

I, of course, did not realize or understand all this during my internship. These were not handed out to me in bulleted list of To-Dos. Rather it was all nicely baked into the project that I (with a few friends) carried out and I was set on the right path without any additional effort. More than that, all of this was demonstrated to us in practice by Gautham himself and some of it just rubbed off on me, making me a much better problem solver, much better product developer, much better ENGINEER, than I would have been otherwise. Now when I look back at my internship days and my days as an engineer after that, I clearly see the impact and how much it has helped. That's Gautham and his way of mentoring. Thank you Gautham for letting me be part of the Eclifox team and for your guidance till date and the future too. :). (For the readers : Eclifox was what we built during our internship - http://buzypi.in/2007/10/11/eclifox-bringing-eclipse-to-the-browser/  and I am very proud of it.)

 In case you are wondering where did all of this finally land me, here is my linkedIn profile. :)
Keep up the great work Gautham. Wish you all the success and happiness.

Mozilla @ SJCE : Static Analysis projects

It has been a very long time since I posted anything about the Mozilla related activities going on at my college SJCE, Mysore. That in no way means absence of any activity. In a previous post I mentioned that along with the attempt to introduce Mozilla as a standard course I was working to get the current final year students (who are enrolled under the larger VTU University) to start working on Mozilla, using their final semester project as a means. Well I am happy to say that this has materialized. 8 final semester students from CS expressed interest in working with the Mozilla community as part of their final year project and it's been a month nearly since they started their work. Here is a brief write up about that.

As is with most of the Computer Science students in India approaching the Mozilla community, these 8 students also wanted to do something related to compilers. The JS engine and static analysis are two projects in Mozilla which would come under the compiler banner. These 8 students wanted to work on something substantial which can be presented by two teams of 4 students each as their final semester project. So the bugs that they would be working on had to be related. This was possible only with static analysis as there are a lot of related tasks available. Also static analysis would be something new to the students and it would give them an opportunity to understand the internals of the compiler (GCC here) like the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) and other representations of the code. Moreover the static analysis APIs are exposed in JS and hence the analysis scripts would be written in JS. That way students would learn JS also. Above all these students would be doing something genuinely new.

The students could not be asked to start working on the bugs directly. They were new to open source development, the tools used there like the bugzilla, using email as a formal medium of communication, the source control system (to add to the complexity Mozilla now uses a distributed RCS - Mercurial [hg]), using IRC, the linux development environment etc. It has been these things that the students have been learning for this part month or so. This learning has been in the form of accomplishing the tasks which form the prerequisites for the actual static analysis work. These are things like downloading gcc and mozilla sources from the ftp hosts and from the mercurial repository respectively, applying the mozilla specific patches to gcc for plugin support etc, etc... These are all listed here. Note that some things like installing all the dependency packages for building these applications from sources, learning to use the linux command line itself and others are not on that page but were new to these students nonetheless.

All the students have been putting in substantial effort and have picked up the traits of an open source hacker pretty soon. We have had a few IRC meetings and a lot of formal communications over emails. In parallel we were also working towards shortlisting 8 static analysis bugs. Based on the feasibility of the bug being completed by an amateur developer within a span of 2.5 months and based on the students' interest we finally decided on these 8 bugs :

1. Bug 525063 - Analysis to produce an error on uninitialized class members
   
2. Bug 500874 - Static analysis to find heap allocations that could be stack allocations
   
3. Bug 500866 - Warn about base classes with non-virtual destructors
   
4. Bug 500864 - Warn on passing large objects by value
   
5. Bug 528206 - Warn on unnecessary float->double conversion
   
6. Bug 526309 - Basic check for memory leaks
   
7. Bug 542364 - Create a static analysis script for detecting reentrancy on a function
   
8. Bug 500875 - Find literal strings/arrays/data that should be const static
   

These tasks are good, challenging and provide an opportunity to understand compilers very closely.

Currently the students have downloaded gcc, applied the patches, built it along with the dehydra plugin support and are ready to run static analysis on the mozilla code. They are now trying to run simple analysis scripts like listing all classes in mozilla code and all classes and their corresponding member functions. It is still quite a long way to go, but it has been a real good start. Let's wait and watch what great feats are in the pipeline.

I hope to keep this blog updated at the same pace at which the students are working.

Good luck to the students. :-)

Mozilla @ SJCE -- Contributing to Mozilla informally - Final semester student projects

Along with the attempt to introduce Mozilla as a formal elective at SJCE I have been working on getting some development work started informally too. The current final year students are enrolled under the central university - VTU and hence cannot be offered any new subject. However they are expected to do a project as part of the course completion. I thought of using this to get students to do their final semester project with Mozilla. Also Mozilla labs organizes this program named Design Challenge where enthusiasts -- students, teachers, academicians, software developers, etc, are invited to submit innovative ideas to make the Firefox web browser a better software and the Internet in general a better place. This has received tremendous participation from the student community across the globe. The best part about this program is that this is not just a competition. The selected students are trained on various Mozilla related technologies by the very Mozilla developers who are developing those technologies. After such mentoring the students can start contributing code to Mozilla and products based on it. And not to mention the wealth of knowledge they stand to gain and how much of positive influence it will have with prospective employers or while applying for higher studies. This suited very well for the final year and also the pre-final year students.

So when I visited my college last Saturday (14-Nov-2009) to meet my HoD and the coordinating lecturer, related to the Mozilla elective to be offered, I decided to talk to final and pre-final year students and motivate a few of them to participate in the upcoming design challenge (Nov - 09 to Mar - 10) and also take up Mozilla work for final year projects. I talked to the coordinating lecturer (Shri P M Shivamurthy) and asked to him make an announcement regarding this and have the students assembled in one of the classrooms or the seminar hall. After going to the college I got to know that the pre-final year (5th sem) students would not be available as they have their internal assessment tests starting from Monday. HoD suggested that I should stay back till Monday evening and address the 5th sem students on Monday after that day's tests. That was not possible for me and I decided to visit the college again on the next Saturday for that and I would talk to the final year (7th sem) students for now. As a result I decided to stick to the final year project only. Things were set up in the Network Lab and there were about 30 students.

Standing in front of them I blabbered a bunch of things about Mozilla, Open Source software, how engineers graduating are not really industry ready and the fact that they do not have any experience on working with real world applications with huge code base and contributions from a large number of developers and finally how participating in Mozilla would help them fill that gap. I also told them the vast amount of options that Mozilla provides in terms of technologies and that they could find some work or the other which lies in their area of interest. At the end I asked if anyone had any questions and as expected nobody did. Then on asking how many would be willing to try something like this I saw something like 3 to 4 half-hands rising up in the air. This was certainly not a good sign. So I started with the "motivational" speech. "This will really help you guys to be ahead of students from other colleges. You will be industry ready where as other will require a lot more training and mentoring. This is all HoD pre-approved... and on and on and on" for a few more minutes. That really did the trick. After this I had about 10 - 12 hands, full ones. Quite satisfied I told them to get my contact details from PMS sir and contact me for any queries. Till now I have received emails from 6 students (one of them representing a project group of 4 students. so 9 students actually). I have sent them a couple of links to start reading. None of them have responded after that. But I am still hopeful.

A little later I was talking to some of the students offline and I got to know some facts which would have been very useful to me in positioning this Mozilla project idea in a much stronger way.

1) Campus recruitment is pretty bad this time. Only 6 students in Computer Science have got job offers, compared to a daily average of 20 - 25 students a couple of years back. --- I could have talked about how open source development experience will help them with jobs. It did help me.
2) Project teams (generally of 3 to 4 students) have already been formed and a guide (a member of the faculty) has been assigned. This has two effects:
    a) Some teams have already been given the project work, which is a small part of the guide's doctorate thesis/research. The guide will now not happily approve of students under him/her pursuing a difference project.  -- We could talk to HoD and reason out with the guide. I could have told the students that such a thing is very much possible.

    b) In a project team of 4, generally one or two students are the smart ones and others will be banking on them for the project to be completed. I had told them that in Mozilla it is generally individual contribution or a team of 2 at the max. The teams, like those mentioned earlier, cannot be divided as the dependent folks will get into a problematic position. -- I could have told them that Mozilla does not bother if the work done by one student is present by 4 as a team work. So let the team enroll for a Mozilla project. Either all or a few in the team will work. If its all of them each one will have a bug assigned or the bug will be assigned to one guy with all of them working on it. If it is just one or two of them then there are no issues.

    c) On a related not to the above two points, some students told me that they would like to do a Mozilla project in addition to an already assigned final semester project. This really delighted me. But it also was, sort of, a matter of concern, as it appeared to me that people were desperate to do something like this with the hope that it will add a line to their resume and help them get a job. I might be wrong and I wish and hope I am. Students doing open source development just out of pure interest and not part of any course requirements is the best thing. But let me see what it turns out to be.

3) I did not make an announcement about the design challenge because the mentoring classes for that goes on from Dec-09 to Feb - 10 and these guys have their exams in the second  half of December. But I later got to know that no mentoring classes will be held from approximately 21st Dec to 4th Jan because of the holiday season in the US. So I talked to a smaller number guys, those who stayed back to talk to me, about the design challenge and am hoping to have 1 to 3 ideas being submitted.

I am going to use these points during my next visit, this coming Saturday.

Mozilla @ SJCE -- Modern teaching methods are still a stigma and considered unreliable.

In my effort to get open source development into main stream academics at my engineering college SJCE, I have been working with the Mozilla Education team for some time now. With our college getting the autonomous status and also with great help from the MozEdu folks like Prof David Humphrey and Frank Hecker and after considerable persuasion (more about that in a different post) I could get an elective named "Learning Open Source Software with Mozilla" added to the curriculum of the 6th semester students. We (me and the members of the college faculty) decided to roll out this elective in the year of 2010. The next step for me, I thought, was to get at least one lecturer trained with the curriculum and in general get that lecturer involved with Mozilla development and practices. Also with Prof David making the videos of his lecture sessions available on the internet, freely for everyone's use, my plan was to give the lecturer a head start (w.r.t students) so that with the beginning of the next semester he could start teaching the students those parts which he has already learnt. In the mean time he himself can continue his learning by going through David's lecture sessions and other resources that would be available on the internet. I would be visiting the college on alternate weekends. I thought, may be I could take a couple of hours of classes on Saturday for both students and also the lecturer(s). I could have used my presence to answer the queries that the students and the lecturers had, or at least I could point them in the right direction. Apart from these fortnightly visits I planned to be in touch with the college folks continuously on the internet -- email, irc, skype, etc. I would be actively involved the first time this subject is taught. After that the lecturer would be considerably capable and also the subsequent batch of students would have their seniors to help them out. At that point the program will not greatly depend on me and will be sort of self-sufficient with people directly talking to the Mozilla developers and the community in general. As a bonus the students who studied this subject would get to carry out their final year project work with Mozilla, either in terms of some feature implementation or certain bug fixes or any such task. It appeared like a sound plan and I had even decided that we would try to get about 15 students for the first time and gradually increase the number.

Last Saturday (14-Nov-2009) I went to meet the HoD and the lecturer who was coordinating this from the college side to get things started. The meeting was a big disappointment. Our HoD made it absolutely clear that the this elective will be offered only if 50% of the students (which translates to about 70 - 80 students) take up the elective. So the idea of first starting with a small number so that coordinating things on the internet will be easier and all that was just blown away. The reason for this is apparently because there are not enough class rooms to teach more than 2 groups of students from the same semester.!! It has to be a 50-50 division between two electives. So though there are 5 or 6 electives available to the students, they actually have to choose from just 2 of them, based on the majority and not interest.

Well my plan was not killed completely, yet, as the ideas in it were sort of the perfect solution for "the lack of classrooms" problem. I put forth the rest of my idea saying the remote teaching and a lot of learning on an individual basis (by reading up the resources on the internet and interacting with the Mozilla devs) would virtually the necessity of a full blown class room teaching always. But the HoD flatly rejected this idea and said that he understood what I was suggesting but there are rules saying classes must be conducted for a fixed number of hours for any subject offered and it has to be the traditional way. Also the idea of training the lecturers in a, sort of, asynchronous manner was also not acceptable. He would want a training session to be conducted - typically a week to a month long session, may be with a certification at the end of the session. Moreover currently I have one lecturer ready to take this up but department mandates at least 2 or 3. Now I have an additional task of motivating at leat two more faculty members. For this I have to prepare a write up explaining what the lectures stand to learn/gain by taking up this new thing. After that if any of them express their interest in taking this up, I will have to train them and probably it has to be in the traditional way - not sure yet.

Another problem is the pace. The next semester will be starting some time in Feb or Mar 2010 and my HoD keeps saying "Lets go slowly at first and see. If not in 2010 we will offer this in 2011" !!.. :-( . I hope we can get this thing started in 2010 itself. Another year of idle waiting might just terminate the interest that I currently have.

All in all, the wall between open source and my college is appearing to be more and more thick. I intend to meet the HoD the coming Saturday again and try to convince him to give his approval for the "internet based learning" approach. Lets see how it works out.

Apart from this I talked to a bunch of final year students about carrying out their final year project with Mozilla and also about participation the upcoming design challenge. More about that in another post.

Getting Open Source/Mozilla in my college - SJCE - Part I

Earlier I had written about my first Mozilla Education Status Call in which I mentioned my interest to bring Open source software in general and Mozilla in specific to my college, SJCE. Well, good news, it did not stop at that blog post. Actually speaking it had not started with that blog post either. It has been a long standing wish of mine, even from my college days when I participated in the Google Summer of Code 2007. (More about  it here). Back then there were a lot of short-comings, both from my side and the institution's side to actually make this idea into reality. Nevertheless, past is past and no point in brooding about it now. The good thing is that now both I and my institution have overcome our short-comings and we have started working towards making that idea into a reality.

Now for some background aka story telling (which I like the most :) )

As stated earlier nothing happened about this idea when I was in my college. Then after passing out of the college and having worked in the industry for about 12-18 months it hit me, very hard, that I did not learn a lot of things during my life as an engineering student which otherwise would have helped me a lot in my professional life. Also I learnt that I was not competent enough as an engineering graduate as compared to some of my foreign counterparts and also those from some of the "famed premier" engineering institutions of the country. It was not just one thing or two, but I saw differences in many aspects, both theoretical and practical. Gradually it occurred to me that these two aspects are inter-related. Since we did not have proper practical experience and exposure to real world software development we never really appreciated the basic theoretical concepts of computer science, which formed our regular syllabus. Note that here I am saying "we" and not "I". This part of the story talks about the state of most of my classmates and that is the worst part. Nevertheless, the moral of the story is the good old philosophy of teaching that the theory and practice should go hand in hand.

Now there is another part to this story. Before I start with it let me tell you that whatever I am putting here is based on what I have perceived. I may be wrong, but I personally don't think so. And this is absolutely not about boasting about myself. So the other part of the story is that, my association with Open Source development communities, Mozilla to be specific, has greatly helped me in my professional life. I am not going to give examples, but it has really really helped me a lot. Also it has sort of put me ahead of several other capable classmates and most juniors of mine (with the difference being considerably more in the case of juniors). The only differentiating factor between me and them was my exposure to developing a real world application, Mozilla Firefox, and the various lessons that I have learnt by being a part of the global developer community. I am also certain that I could have been a much better computer engineer if I had started working with Mozilla at a much earlier stage, say 2nd year or early 3rd year of engineering and had dedicated more time to it. I still continue to learn a lot of general computer science and software development concepts (concepts not specific to Mozilla development) even now whenever I try to fix a Mozilla bug or even when I try to answer any query on the IRC, many a times even when I just observe few people conversing on the IRC.

Ok, enough of story telling. Now is the part for moral of the story. Here is what I inferred from these experiences:

1) Engineering students, specifically Computer Science engineering students, must get exposure to real world engineering (aka application development) to understand and appreciate the theoretical concepts they learn.
2) Open source software development communities provide a suitable environment for students to work with real world applications. Suitable in terms of - opportunities, cost, mentoring and certainly a few more good things also.

With these two points, it was clear to me that we badly needed open source education/exposure for students in my college. I knew that once this happened the possibilities were endless. Every time I heard/read about some of the classic Free Software implementations done at Universities abroad, I thought that our college can at least have several continuous contributors to currently existing open source projects, if not have creators of some totally new world class software projects. We could be having several different groups of students working of different types of software which operate at various levels (which translates to contributing to different open source software). Then they all could be interacting to help each other in troubleshooting problems. I thought of scenarios/discussions like this happening in the hostel corridors:

Student_1 and Student_2 are working on the Mozilla Download Manager (and here goes the conversation)

Student_1 : Hey, I want to test my new implementation for Mozilla Download Manager for HTTPS downloads. I am unable to configure my test server for HTTPS. You got any idea?
Student_2 : No dude, never done any server side stuff. Lets ask Student_3 from the Apache team.

Then Student_3 comes and sets up Apache for HTTPS within minutes (because that's day-to-day kind of stuff for him) and Student_1 continues testing his new implementation.

After some time:

Student_1 : Oh man, SSL handshake is taking too much time. I need to talk to Student_4, he knows the SSL library code base.
Student_2 : Yeah, I talked about that to Student_4. He is coming up with a patch to reduce the handshake time. It will probably be ready by tomorrow, I guess. Apparently it was a race condition causing the delays.

And so on.

Something like this is really possible. In fact many things much bigger than this are possible. But only if our students start working with and for open source communities.

So this set of thoughts made me work towards getting Open Source into my college. Now that's the background and the story. In the next part I will write about the first set of steps taken towards this, how many of them worked and how many were dead even before they started. And just FYI, the next post too will have some story telling (Obviously since this is just a record of my experiences and my (our) actions).

My first Mozilla Education Status call

Mozilla is the only open source community which I have understood a little and also to which I have contributed a little. I always wanted to make my college a sort of Mozilla hub with several contributors and many feature developments happening out of my college. It actually started with an idea of a "Complete Open Source Hub", but it got reduced to just "Mozilla Hub" (either because of my laziness or because of lack of resources). Anyways I did not take any proactive steps towards that wish of mine, until recently when our college got the "Autonomous" status. That is when I realized that bringing open source software development in the course mainstream has become a lot easier as the power to form the syllabus and conduct the tests and examination rests with my college itself and not the University.

Just when I thought of doing something tangible, Mozilla came up with their "Mozilla in Education" program. This is a brilliant idea to drive open source into the student community and also give the students opportunities to work on real world applications. I was impressed by this program the very moment I read about it. I decided to present this idea to my HOD at the college and get him to start working offering Mozilla education to students in my college. I started reading more about it and today I also attended my first Mozilla Education status meeting conference call, which happens every week. I got a wealth of information.

This week we had Pascal F presenting to us about the "Design Challenge" program organized by the Mozilla Labs. He talked to us about the way in which they organized this program. It was all very inspiring. They had nearly 30-35 people from different parts of the world (literally). In this contest the students initially submitted mock-ups of their ideas, nearly 40 of them. Amongst those, 30 fully completed mock-ups were chosen for the second level, in which the students got mentoring by some the well known names in the Mozilla community. The mentoring consists of 10 Webinar sessions conducted using WebEx, over a period of 3 weeks. This is going on currently and will end at the end of this month. These mentoring sessions aim at converting those mock-ups into working prototypes. At the end, the best prototypes are given honors.

During the presentation Pascal mentioned some interesting things. Of the students from various countries, it was the students from so called "2nd World Countries" (like Romania, India, Argentina, etc.. ) who showed a lot more interest than their US counterparts. There was tremendous enthusiasm in them where as the students from US expected -- in his own words -- "being entertained" and "spoon-fed". Though this is an alarming thing when viewed from a global perspective, I was personally very happy that Indian students, my fellow country-men, have shown such dedication. Pascal also mentioned that they were so interested that they were up in the middle of the nights for the webinars. All in all, I am even more motivated to bring open source in general and mozilla in particular to my college.

I decided to take this program as an example and present it to my HOD this Saturday and try and make him accept this and similar programs as official ones and the projects done in such programs be considered for the completion of the course goals.

Thank you Pascal, thank you Mozilla. Lets hope to have a Mozilla India Center, at least an unofficial one at my college SJCE. :-)