Get Set Go

The year 2016 was one of the most awesome and productive years for me. First of all it was a leap year, so one extra day to procrastinate yayy On a serious note, a year full of highs (touch wood) and some lows, loads of tick marks on the to-do list, friends and greater aims.

For first half of the year I was at Singapore working as a research intern with the TSUNAMi Center at National University of Singapore. I worked on development of ongoing projects in crypto-currencies and web security at NUS and our work on A Secure Sharding Protocol for Open Blockchains was published at ACM CCS 2016.

Meanwhile, alongside my internship I also worked on my photography skills, going around places in Singapore and Malaysia. It was quite a fun over the weekends to spend time on my favourite hobby, on new creations - learning about the history, art, culture and ecology of southeast asia. This is still a work in progress as I am yet to publish a ton of photographs (Singapore had just way too much to offer), so do check out all of my work on Flickr.

In August, I joined as a graduate student in Computer Science at Columbia University in the City of New York, looking forward to hone my computer science skills and make the most out of the opportunities in the city that never sleeps - New York. Although the first semester proved to be quite hectic than my estimate, it was a fun ride and rigorous learning experience, cheers to that and fingers crossed for the upcoming semesters

In my first semester at Columbia University, I also had the opportunity to work as a teaching intern under the Digital Centers Teaching Internship Program, wherein I hosted weekly Python Open Labs to introduce basic concepts of programming with Python to attendees from various disciplines within Columbia. If you are interested in knowing more about my first full scope teaching experience, please head over to my blog post Muggles Speak English. Pythonistas Speak Python.

And at last, after about 359 days of procrastination, I have finally set up my personal webpage, claiming my small piece of the web. For building this website I have used the simple ruby based static site generator Jekyll developed at GitHub. Special thanks to @daviddarnes for open sourcing the Alembic Theme used as the boiler plate code for this site.

Cheers to all the ups and downs and learnings from 2016, looking forward to an exciting and enlightening 2017