DEV Community: Ananya Gupta

My New Year's Resolutions

Ananya Gupta — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 14:00:03 +0000

My Adieu to 2022

The year 2022 has been incredible for me. I've witnessed significant growth in myself. From adjusting to college life and making new friends and connections to building my technical and soft skills, I have done it all. I am extremely grateful for the year 2022 and excited for what 2023 holds for me.

2023, The New Beginnings

This is the time of year when everyone is filled with Christmas spirit.
People are celebrating, spending time with their families, and preparing their lists of New Year's resolutions.

Honestly, I had never made New Year's resolutions before. I've never felt like I needed to set any New Year's resolutions. But after a year in college, my perspective has entirely shifted. I felt like I was missing out on things because I was juggling just too many duties and responsibilities. And I felt that I was inconsistent with some things too.

And thus, I decided that for the year 2023, I would set New Year's resolutions for myself to bring back the consistency. In this blog post, I’ll be sharing the New Year's resolutions I have set for myself.

1. Daily DSA

The first resolution on my list is to be consistent with practicing DSA problems. I have been inconsistent in practicing DSA, which has made me less confident in my abilities to solve DSA problems. And this year I want to work on that. I want to bring back the consistency in practicing DSA problems. So, my first New Year resolution is to solve at least one DSA problem daily.

2. Learning How to Cook

I have always been so engrossed in my books that I never had time to learn to cook. I thought I'd learn it in college. But college turned out to be more hectic than school. But this year, I have put my mind towards learning how to cook. And yes, learning how to cook is my second New Year’s resolution.

3. Technical and Content Writing

With so many things on my mind, I have somehow sidelined my passion for blogging. I have been inconsistent with blogging lately. But, thanks to the Fueler Blogging Challenge, I've regained my consistency. So, my third New Year's resolution is to maintain consistency with technical and content writing and bring my ideas and thoughts to life as blogs.

4. Learning a New Tech Stack

The year 2022 has been all about development and building projects for me. And in 2023, I want to continue it. Lately, I have been thinking about learning Computer Vision and Flutter as well as building a lot of projects. So yeah, my fourth New Year's resolution is to learn a new tech stack and build projects using it.

5. Winning a Hackathon

I have participated in several hackathons and ideathons in 2022 and even won some of them. But this year, I want to participate in a nationwide hackathon and win it. This has long been on my to-do list, and I hope to complete it by 2023. So yeah, my fifth New Year's resolution is to participate in a nationwide hackathon and win a prize there.

6. Checking Things Off My Bucket List

In the year 2022 alone, I have made a long list of things that are currently on my bucket list. I have checked off some of them. But there are few things that I wish to accomplish by 2023. I would like to check them off this year. And yes, my sixth New Year's resolution is to check things off my bucket list, like going on a family vacation.

7. Becoming a Better Version of Myself

Last but not least, I want to become a better version of myself. In 2022, I had seen a tremendous growth in myself, both in my skills and personality. And in 2023, I want to grow even more. I want to be a better version of myself than I was in 2022. Which is the seventh and last New Year's resolution I have made for myself.

I have made a long list of New Year's resolutions. But I’ll try my best to stick to them and complete them.

Thank you for sticking with me this far. I would love to read your New Year's resolutions. Please leave them in the comments.
Happy Christmas and New Year in advance.

Cover Image Credits : Image by storyset on Freepik

Web App Deployment using Spheron Protocol

Ananya Gupta — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 16:26:22 +0000

I deployed my first web app using Spheron Protocol.
It was my first experience of deploying web application and the deployment was pretty smooth. It got completed in just 15 seconds. Isn't it cool 😎.

For those who don't know what Spheron Protocol is or what it does.
Spheron Protocol is a decentralized web app deployment and hosting platform for automating modern dapps.
Using Spheron Protocol, developers can securely launch web apps, store and retrieve assets, host websites and gain HTTPS on every deployment.
Developers can deploy static websites, React, Vue, Angular, Nextjs web apps, dapps and eth apps.
It requires only a one-time fee and has no hidden fees or recurring web archival costs. To know more about the pricing Click on 'Spheron Network Pricing'.

In this blog I'll be sharing my experience of deploying web application using Spheron Protocol.

So, the first step is to head on to the official website of Spheron Protocol.

Click on the Deploy Now button to Log in/Sign Up to Spheron Protocol

You can use your GitHub account, GitLab account or Bitbucket account to Log in to Spheron Protocol.

An with just few clicks, your account is ready 🥳.

When you've successfully logged in to Spheron Protocol, you'll see your Dashboard similar to the one below 👇

To deploy your project, Click on New Project

The deployment initiates with three easy steps:
First Step: Pick a repository

Choose the repository you want to deploy using your GitHub account, GitLab account or Bitbucket account.

Second Step: Pick your protocol

I chose filecoin Protocol for my web application.

Third Step: Build Options and Deploy (The most crucial step!)

You need to fill the basic information about branch to deploy, root directory, basic build settings, advanced build settings, Node engine and environment variables. Varies with the framework used for the project.

You can refer to the official documentation to know more about the deployment, domains and decentralized protocols.

This table will help you with the basic build settings configuration.

The last step is to click on Connect Wallet.

Choose your network, token and connect your Metamask wallet. Click on Save.

And yup, you have completed all the steps necessary for deployment.
Now you'll be able to see the process of deployment and in few seconds your web application will be up and running.

This is the live link of my deployed application.
https://web-dev-resources-gjwjfab.spheron.app/
The website is pretty basic 😅. But its my first web app.
So more amazing web apps coming soon 😁.

Cover Image Credits : Image by Freepik

Unicode Characters

Ananya Gupta — Tue, 23 Nov 2021 13:41:30 +0000

Today, I saw a short video of a problem in JavaScript.
Video link-https://youtu.be/EtWgLQIlhOg
JavaScript puzzle: What will be the output of this JavaScript program:
var a;
а = 0;
a++;
alert(а);

If you think the answer is 1, WRONG!! Try to run it yourself and check!

This video gives the explanation, why the answer is not 1.

The reason is, two different Unicode characters are used.
One is “a” -Latin Small Letter A (U+0061) and the other is “а”- Cyrillic Small Letter A (U+0430).

After watching the video, I was still not able to figure out what it meant. So, I posted my query on the #javascript channel of our JODC discord server.
github.com/daemon1024 and github.com/arvindpunk solved my query.They shared their valuable knowledge on this subject and I was able to differentiate between the two.

Let me tell you a little about Unicode.

What is Unicode?
Unicode, formally known as Unicode Standard, is a universal character set to define all the characters needed for writing the majority of known languages on computers.
It is the superset of all other character sets that have been encoded.

Why was Unicode introduced?
Before the introduction of Unicode in cyber space, there were hundreds of different encoding systems used all over the world. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), ISO8859-1 (Western Europe) and KOI8-R (RFC 1489) (Russian Code) were some of them.
But no single encoding system could contain enough characters. For example, the European Union alone requires several different encodings to cover all its languages. Even for a single language like English, no single encoding was adequate for all the letters, punctuation, and technical symbols in common use.
The encoding systems were also in conflict with one another. Like, two different encoding systems used the same number for different characters while different numbers for the same character.

Benefits of Unicode encoding system:
 Unicode is capable of representing 144,697 different characters and a much wider range of character sets.
 It is a space-efficient encoding scheme for data storage.
 It resolves the problem of using different encoding systems for various characters.
 It supports mixed script computing environment.
 It is more efficient coding system than ISO or IEC.

Unicode Encoding Schemes:
Unicode defines multiple encoding systems to represent characters. These are of three types- UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32.

UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format)-8
UTF-8 is a variable width encoding that can represent every character in Unicode character set. The code unit of UTF-8 is 8 bits, called an octet. UTF-8 can use 1 to maximum 6 octets to represent code points depending on their size.
UTF-8 is a type of multibyte encoding. Following are some of the ways Unicode represents different code points with varying lengths-
• UTF-8 1 Octet (8-bits) Representation
• UTF-8 2 Octet (16-bits) Representation
• UTF-8 3 Octet (24-bits) Representation
• UTF-8 4 Octet (32-bits) Representation

UTF-16 (Unicode Transformation Format)-16
UTF-16 is the encoding type in which each character is composed of either one or two 16-bit elements. UTF-16 allows all of the basic multilingual plane (BMP) to be represented as single code units. Unicode code points beyond U+FFFF are represented by surrogate pairs.
The interesting thing is that Java and Windows (and other systems that use UTF-16) all operate at the code unit level, not the Unicode code point level.

UTF-32(Unicode Transformation Format)-32
UTF-32 is a fixed length encoding scheme that uses exactly 4 bytes to represent all Unicode code points.it directly stores the binary code of any Unicode code point in 4 bytes.

Some important definitions:
Code point- refers to a code (from a code space) that represents a single character from the character set represented by an encoding scheme.
Example, 0x42 is one code point of ASCII that represents character ‘B’.

Code Unit- refers to unit of storage (number of bits) used to represent one encoded code point.
Example, UTF-8 encoding scheme uses 8 bits’ units to represent characters, but it is a variable length scheme. For some characters it just uses 8 bits, for others it may use more number of 8 bits units.

You all can check out
https://home.unicode.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters to know more about Unicode Characters.

Also don't forget to challenge your friends with this question:)
Image Credits
www.compart.com/en/unicode
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
https://home.unicode.org/
https://convertcodes.com/utf32-encode-decode-convert-string/
Cover Image Credits
https://deliciousbrains.com/how-unicode-works/
References
Computer Science with python- Sumita Arora- Data Representation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2241348/what-is-unicode-utf-8-utf-16
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-5584/6jej8rb0j/index.html

Hacktoberfest 2021

Ananya Gupta — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 11:09:27 +0000

This year, I completed my First Hacktoberfest. It was a great learning experience as I was introduced to open source and GitHub. Through Hacktoberfest I not only learned a great lot about GitHub but also how meaningful contributions can improve ongoing projects and help strengthen the open source community.
Congratulations! to everyone who participated in Hacktoberfest. Happy Learning!