An Ode To My Project!

On 15 May '09 i was literally like "did i even finish this project"! But lo...!! We had done it! We had successfully completed our project "Disk Cloning With Badblocks"! Now if i see the work done by us, i feel so proud and at the same time i feel, why the hell did i worry for this project! Things actually seemed ok and manageable in the beginning, but later we realized we are running out of time and we better buck up and start understanding what exactly we needed to do!

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HP isn't the best company in the world but it is the best among those, my college offers for students. The pay was like really good - 4.5 pa! What more do we students need?? Many Computer Science and Information Science students were fascinated by this! Including me! It shattered the hopes of so many aspiring students when it came for recruitment. So when they came in search of project interns we sort of had not much hopes! The stipend of 3k+ was the only motivating factor!

Summarizing the events: {Can't hapazardly explain anything :)}

October 14th: After seeing the "level" of the HP recruitment, i had no hopes about this project! After a ok-ok kinda written round, 14 of us made it to the interview round! 6 of us were selected for THE HP project! Never expected it! God knows how i managed to impress the interviewer! But i remember 2 "good's" from the interviewer :) Plus i was the only girl selected from my class! Few lecturers did praise but few thought "did she really deserve this??"..... Hmm may be i did :)

January 19th: Partners and the respective topics were decided this day! I cried! I can actually write lots about this day.. but i choose not to! But what ever happens, happens for the good! :) In the pic above are the 6 of us who were taken as interns by HP. The teams from IS were "Badblocks", "Resizing" and "Error injection".

February: Literature survey should have been over by now! S~ actually thought meeting up and studying and said that could help us! But i thought reading the necessary stuff and later meeting up and executing is better. Damn i was so wrong! We were reading and searching for more information online and at the same time enhancing our Java knowledge. Initially i thought the pace was good. At this phase my friends had just then found their projects and companies and everyone were questioning us as to how much's done!! We would say Literature Survey was going on.

March: We sort of started the project, i.e. the coding part. But due to inefficient literature survey and absolutely no planning we didn't know how to start this because both were novices in this field! I know this isn't a valid reason but at one point we just didn't know how to proceed further. We used to meet up at my place and all we would end up doing is Google for information on the project. We realized now that we were far behind others and we needed to pace up. March 30th was like the most dreadful day. The Project Manager commented on the our progress in a team meeting! Such a disgrace! Anyways, that showed how well we had done our literature survey. Also, we had just then received our stipend and all the happiness this money gave was washed away by the stares of the managers! We realized the seriousness of this project now!!

April: We started going to the company and that's when we understood how to "think" and "apply" what we thought. As and when we got doubts we would consult our guide and he would either explain or send us material to help us understand it. Things progressed pretty well from now! Every day me and S~ would commute to Mahadevpura stop by bus, usually 500A. Then we would walk for like 15 minutes to reach the campus! Both were not used to work culture and the like, so both would hesitate to call or contact our Project manager Srini Sir or our Project guide Om! I remember, S~ would always sign for me at the entrance, i was so lazy to do that also! The other team, "Resizing XFS" was also with us under the same guide. We all would go have lunch together and sometimes coffee also together. I would have badam milk :) Evenings myself and S~ would return by bus. There are days when we have reached home at 9.30 and 10 and there are days where we missed classes and the fun the others were having at college. So worried we were about the completion of this project!

May: On 5th of may we were done with our 90% of the project,and then the remaining 10%, with Om's help we finished by 15th! What a Relief!! In one month we completed a 4-month project. Instead if we had understood "How to start a project" and "What we need to do" and "What they expect from us" before itself then we ourselves could have added new functionalities to our project. But, This entire project was a wonderful learning process/experience.

Post May: Now it was our turn for documentation. We both did save save few pages and links but those definitely didn't help in creating a 100 page document/record of this project. We again started the literature survey :P but this time for documenting it! Along with this presentation also had to be prepared, which we managed to do and finally we impressed the HOD and our internal guide too {hmm to a certain extent}! Not-to-forget the animations i had given for the slide show :P Infact i made it too colorful and graphical, but later realized and made it normal types! :)

P.S: 1) Big thanks to Satish!
2)Started writing this post on : 7/2/09
Submitting on : 24/2/10 :P