DEV Community: Abhishek Dutt

When a bug became a feature.

Abhishek Dutt — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 06:38:46 +0000

Back in the 70s, when IBM was playing masterstroke, because of its popular operating system(s), but it faced a bug, which became a very useful feature later, and is still used to date.

Meet IBM 3278, a model from the 3270 series. It was mainly built on the purpose of serving and communicating with the mainframes.It is normally connected to a control unit that connects the device to a mainframe computer. It displays data sent to it. It cannot process anything.
It has been discontinued, but the protocol is still commonly used, like in web-based interfaces to access mainframe-based applications. It was referred to as green screen terminals due to the text color being green.

While working on the IBM 3278, the engineers were faced with a huge bug.

The power indicator lights on the terminals/devices just kept on flickering when downloading data or running similar heavy processes.(Downloading something was considered to be a heavy process).
But, there is a catch!

This bug was both trouble and profit.

Trouble because

it wasn't supposed to happen like that

Profit because

it lets them know when they were running a heavy operation.

That bug is still useful to this day.

I am still confused, how a bug got converted into a feature. What do you people think about it?

Best Google-Chrome extensions, highly recommended for Devlopers

Abhishek Dutt — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 10:25:08 +0000

Browser extensions change the way one works. They alter facets of one's job by changing the user interface of the apps on which one relies on!
A developer's complete ruckus involved in selecting an extension that could boost one daily basis productivity. There are in fact a ton of extensions, which will help one deliver better websites faster.

Google Chrome, is without a doubt, the most popular browser in the world. In terms of user share, Google Chrome is well ahead of other major browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, etc.

It offers a library of extensions as vast as it does, it becomes a bit troublesome for its users to handpick the extensions for their daily needs.

In this article, I am going to highlight the meticulously crafted Best Google-Chrome extensions for developers!

Window Resizer for Developer
Check My Links
Daily Dev

I hope you like the list.

Setting up your Linux Environment for Competitive Coding(with Geany, in C++)

Abhishek Dutt — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 03:00:08 +0000

In this article, we will learn how to setup an all-in-one Competitive Programming Environment.

Operating System

As mentioned above, we are gonna be using an OS, which comes under the Linux Distro. There are many popular distro out there, but for starters, Ubuntu is recommended, Kali and Arch Linux are for advance user.
If you are a Windows lover, then stick to Windows 7 or above versions.

Text Editor

There are many text editors out there, and you are open to choose from any one of it.
Since this post mainly focuses on the Linux Environment setup, I would prefer a text editor which is maintained by the open source community:- Geany. Its not the most convenient, but perfect for competitive programming.
There are other options as well:-

VScode
Sublime(is lightweight, and minimally aesthetic
Notepad++
Atom

Lets set up Geany

Installation

First thing first, we need to install it. You are open to install it either from Ubuntu Software or from the Official Geany Website.
You can also install using the terminal, copy the commands in your terminal:
For Ubuntu/ Debian:-
sudo apt-get install geany
For Fedora:
sudo dnf install geany
For CentOS:
sudo snap install geany-gtk --edge
You can also install plugins

Configure

Once you are done with installation, you can find Geany, using the search bar.

KeyBindings

Edit->Preferences->Keybindings
Head to focus.
Now change the following:
1. Switch to Editor-> F1
2. Switch to VTE-> F2

Terminal

Head to terminal, and select the check box Follow path of the current file.

Build and Compile

First create any C++ file by typing anything in the text editor, and save it by cntrl+s, with a .cpp extension
Head to Build->Set Build Commands
Copy the following flags with the corresponding commands:-

Compile (F8): g++ -std=c++17 -Wshadow -Wall -o "%e" "%f" -O2 -Wno-unused-result
Build (F9): g++ -std=c++17 -Wshadow -Wall -o "%e" "%f" -g -fsanitize=address -fsanitize=undefined -D_GLIBCXX_DEBUG

You may get compilation error, if so, then try changing from C++17 to C++14, or remove the two sanitizers.

This is the basic set up for Competitive Programming in a Linux Environment, you can obviously set up another text editor like Sublime, with the other settings as well. I will make a post on that very soon.

Credits: The flags that I have used here, has been provided by Errichto, Link to GitHub
Thank You!
After complete setup, the environment should look like this:

First Time Participation in Open Source.

Abhishek Dutt — Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:06:20 +0000

Its about Hacktoberfest 2020

Background

Hey there, myself Abhishek Dutt, a second year CS undergrad, pursuing B.Tech from Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha.(India)
I am new to open source community. For the first time I did contributed to the open source community. I have a good hold on Data Structures and OOP language C++.

So I have officially completed this years Hacktoberfest 2020 Challenge. I have pushed 15 PRs, out of which 10 got merged.

Contributions

So as I said earlier, I am quite novice to open source, so I just added codes written in C/C++,related to DS and Algorithms.
For eg:- Many are unaware of a very famous algorithms, known as the Dutch National Flag Algorithms.
I have pushed the code for the same.
https://github.com/3NCRY9T3R/H4CKT0B3RF3ST-2020/blob/main/Programs/Dutch_National_Flag_Algo.c

I have also pushed codes for various basic DS like stack(all types), some related to Queues.

Reflections

I really enjoyed being a part of such a big fest, with over thousand of maintainers and millions of contributors. I am really looking forward to keep on contributing to the Open Source Community.