DEV Community: Krishna Sarathi Ghosh

From Fears to Achievements: My Tech Journey and the Lessons Learned Along the Way

Krishna Sarathi Ghosh — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 07:31:31 +0000

How One Click Changed My Life: A Journey of Growth, Curiosity, and Connection

About five to six years ago, when I was about 9 or 10 years of age, I came across a random YouTube video title that caught my eye, unknowingly setting me on a path that would add more thrill to the life of a curious and playful 10-year-old! As I write this on my 15th birthday, looking back at my journey reminds me how the simple act of clicking on that video sparked a passion that would help me break through not just technical barriers, but personal ones too.

The Spark: Where It All Began!

I remember one night, probably after dinner (and yes, I was likely watching cartoons 🤣), I stumbled across a YouTube video titled "Ditch Google Chrome and Build Your Own Browser in Python!" (Sadly, I can’t find it now to link here). Naturally, a bunch of questions popped into my head— “What does it mean to build a browser? Is that even possible? What’s Python?”

The next morning, I dove straight into Google, searching for EVERYTHING I could find. After hours of browsing, I thought I knew what I needed to do—except, I didn’t know anything about programming yet! 😅 I followed the video, installed JetBrains PyCharm on my potato laptop (which took forever), and when the instructor wrote the first line of code, I felt completely lost. I had no clue what was going on!

I tried Googling random words, hoping to figure it out (spoiler: it didn’t help). Eventually, I just copied the code exactly as it was. Then, my first error appeared—I tried to use the PyQt5 module without installing it first! I had no idea what the error meant, so I copied the whole message and pasted it into Google. That’s when I first discovered StackOverflow and began to understand the world of Python programming.

And continued the process of learning everything about which I had ZERO idea, by myself!

I didn’t have any specific resource or anyone to guide me! Just a lot of online tutorials and trial and error. But the more I learned, the more I realized how vast and exciting the world of programming was.

And the first project I built was what I called "My Own Jarvis"! It took voice input, did speech-to-text processing, and looked for keywords such as "open chrome", and did such tasks accordingly!

Lesson 1: Embrace the Struggle and Keep Going

The lesson I learned here? It's okay to feel lost at the beginning. Not knowing what’s happening doesn’t mean you won’t eventually get there. Through trial and error, and even frustration, I learned that the struggle is just part of the process—and once you push through, things start to click. Curiosity is a powerful tool that keeps you moving forward, even when things seem impossible.

Web Dev Enters the Chat

As I delved deeper into programming, I discovered the world of web development—and that’s when things really started to click. It all began when I started learning Python and stumbled upon frameworks like Flask and Django, and suddenly, I could see how the pieces fit together.

The idea that I could build a website, manage databases sparked a new wave of excitement in me. This was a whole new realm of possibilities. Driven by that newfound curiosity, I expanded my learning beyond the backend and dove into the front-end world. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript became my next challenge.

The more I learned, the more I realized that web development was not just about writing code; it was about creating something people could interact with, a canvas for ideas to come to life. That feeling of watching my code come to life on the web was just as thrilling as when I first wrote that "Hello, World!" program years earlier.

Lesson 2: Don’t Limit Yourself to One Path—Explore the Possibilities

Web development opened my eyes to how expansive the world of programming is. There’s no one "right" way to learn or create; the key is to follow your curiosity, try different paths, and see what excites you the most. By exploring both the backend and frontend, I learned that each aspect of development offers unique challenges and rewards, and the journey of discovery is where the true magic lies.

Overcoming Personal Fears: From Shyness to Connecting with the Community

Fast Forward to when I was around 13, I was a very, VERY shy kid, struggling to even say "Hello" to someone I met face-to-face! So one day my uncle asked me to download Twitter and participate in the community there (He's a Full Stack Laravel Dev if you're curious), and he told me about the advantages of networking and stuff. Well... I went and downloaded Twitter! Now I wrote my posts, which were receiving some good engagements (after all Twitter had a good algo back then). But when time passed, and people asked me to join meetups and spaces, I would sweat out and leave the spaces mid-way, and text them blaming my network for no reason, just because I was not ready to talk to people! Just talking to a small group felt terrifying to me!

Well, I managed to go face-to-face with this fear, and I started joining Twitter Spaces! Huge shoutout to one of my very first mutuals, Krish Gupta, who was super active on twitter at that time, to allow me to speak in his spaces. The more I did, the more I got comfortable with Public Speaking! And with time, I didn’t even notice how I lost my old fear, and I could easily communicate, without sweating my head off!

Krish had also inspired me to contribute to Open Source, which let me build more connections, while developing my skills!

Lesson 3: Overcoming Fear is Key to Growth

The biggest lesson here? The fear of social interaction and public speaking can be conquered—it's just about taking small, consistent steps. Each time I faced my fear and joined a Twitter Space or contributed to open source, I became more comfortable. It wasn't about becoming perfect overnight, but rather about acknowledging my fear and slowly pushing beyond it. Growth happens when you face discomfort, and that discomfort is temporary.

Coffee Chats and What I Learned!

Connecting and talking face-to-face with folks in tech continues to inspire me till date! As a high school student, travelling to international events has always been a distant dream, not only because of the high costs involved but also due to the visa issues. Slowly I started to look for online events and methods for building connections, and one of the most effective methods was coffee chats!

Shoutout to Ellie, with whom I had my first coffee chat! She was one of my SUPER EARLY mutuals who inspired me, helped me build my first connection, and much more! Here's a sneak peek from one of our coffee chats!

And, she helped me get my second coffee chat person - Utba as well! These two people taught me and inspired me so much in my coffee chats, that I continued to do more! Here are some more pics from my coffee chats!

And as I went on to learn more through connections, I decided to launch my first Podcast! I'm no professional, but I try my best to make it engaging and interesting! The first two episodes were with Ellie and Utba! Both of them were pretty supportive and as soon as I reached out to them, they agreed to do it in no time! (The third episode is coming out soon with another awesome personality on twitter! Make sure to keep an eye! Link for the podcast

Lesson 4: Building Relationships is Just as Important as Building Skills

Through these coffee chats, I learned that networking is not just about getting ahead in your career. It’s about building genuine relationships, learning from others, and offering value. These connections have provided me with insights and inspiration, which in turn have helped me grow as both a person and a developer. If you’re not making time for meaningful conversations, you’re missing out on a powerful tool for growth.

Reflections

If there's one thing for me to learn and remember from my journey, it is having a curiosity to learn stuff that can take people far!

And in conclusion to this article, I would like to thank all my friends who supported me throughout this journey!

Final Lesson: Stay Curious and Stay Connected

As I reflect on my journey, I realize how much my curiosity and willingness to connect with others has shaped who I am today. It's easy to get caught up in the "what's next" or "how do I become an expert," but the real secret to progress lies in never losing that spark of curiosity and always looking for ways to learn from those around you. Keep exploring, keep talking, and, most importantly, keep growing.

Thank you SO SO much to those who took time out to read this article! Have a great day!

Understanding the difference between Static Site Generation (SSG) and Server Side Rendering (SSR)

Krishna Sarathi Ghosh — Sun, 28 Jul 2024 08:19:13 +0000

Introduction

SSR and SSG are two well-known terms in the field of Web Development, often confused by beginners, and debated about by the Pundits
You may or may not have already come across these two terms while trying to build some cool websites, maybe in articles, Next.js documentation, etc. But it remains a mystery among the newbies about "what in the actual world do they mean?"
So in this article, I'm going to explain these terms in the simplest way possible and make sure you get a good understanding of what they mean to the difference between them. Let's get started!

So SSR and SSG are basically two different types of approaches to rendering a page. Sounds pretty vague? Let me explain! But before we understand SSR and SSG, we need to understand two terms that I am going to use A lot in this article - Build Time and Render Time

Important Terminology: What is Build Time and Request Time?

If you ever deploy some app using Netlify or Vercel, you may know that when you make some changes in the code of your app, the platform builds the app for some time with the new code, which is known as the Build Time. In simple words, it is basically compiling and processing the final version of a website. The build time is crucial for tasks like compiling the code, optimizing the assets and generating static files which are to be provided to the clients.

On the other hand, request time refers to the time it takes (on a request by the client) for a server to receive, process, and respond to the request made by a client (such as a web browser). This includes the time taken for the server to handle the request, execute any necessary server-side logic, retrieve data from databases or other sources, and generate a response to send back to the client.

Static Site Generation (SSG)

SSR or Static Site Generation is basically generating the pages at the build time. So the content is already rendered and served as static files to the browser when requested. This is usually pretty fast and reduces the load times as well.

Understanding What's happening under the hood of SSG

Now, let us break the process into fragments and understand what happens in each part of the process!

What happens at the Build Time of SSGs?

The build time for the SSG sites are the most important because that's where most of the stuff happens. The files we provide are used to create the pages and they are loaded in the build server as static files, ready to be provided to the client. The output of this is generally stored in CDNs, which are a network of servers located in different parts of the world. They work together to deliver web content like images, pages and other media to the users quickly and efficiently.

What happens at the Request time of SSGs?

When the data is requested by the users, the SSG static sites are received from the CDNs where the data was uploaded and the static sites are provided to the user.

When to use SSG?

SSG can be used when:

You have a fast and small site that is not very heavy
Has some content which doesn't need to be updated before showing
Cost-effectiveness is a factor, as it needs fewer server resources

Server-Side Rendering (SSR)

SSR or Server Side Rendering on the other hand refers to the generating of pages at request time. The content is dynamically rendered on each request.

Understanding What's happening under the hood of SSR

Now let's take a look at the under-the-hood operations of SSR too!

What's happening in the build time?

During SSR, build time involves the process of compiling and generating the server-side code that will be used to render the initial HTML content of a website or application. This includes tasks such as compiling server-side code, optimizing assets, and generating the necessary static files for rendering on the server.

What's happening in the request time?

For SSR, the request time is the most important, as the rendering happens at the request time. So when a client makes a request to the server for a specific web page, the server processes the request by executing server-side logic, retrieving data from databases or other sources, and generating the HTML content for the requested page. This process happens dynamically for each request.

When to use SSR?

SSR can be used when:

SEO Optimization is needed
Website is heavy
Content may need to be updated on each load
Security is a concern

Which one to choose ?

In terms of flexibility and dynamic content, SSR is better suited for websites with frequently changing content or personalized user experiences, as it can fetch data dynamically during the server-side rendering process. SSG, on the other hand, is more efficient for content-heavy websites with less dynamic content, as it pre-generates pages and can be deployed as static files to content delivery networks for fast global delivery.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the choice between SSR and SSG depends on the specific requirements of your web project. SSR is ideal for dynamic websites that require real-time data updates and interactivity, while SSG is a great choice for content-focused websites that prioritize speed and simplicity.

Hope you learnt something from this article! If you liked the article, please show some support by dropping a like, or maybe sharing it out to other geeks! Feedbacks are appreciated!! Thanks for reading!

Discover Wit.ai: Create Your Own Intelligent Bots for Free 🚀🤖

Krishna Sarathi Ghosh — Sat, 25 May 2024 14:40:41 +0000

Introduction

These days, most NLP stuff for development are either paid or have limited access. So last night I was working on a project, and I needed something like an NLP for my program. I casually started to browse the internet in search of such an NLP as a service, and I found Wit.ai by Meta. This post will provide a quick skim of what I know about it, trying to share the knowledge among my fellow developers!

What is all this stuff?

So wit.ai is a powerful Natural Language Processing (NLP) platform, which enables you to create Natural Language Experiences, like chatbots or voice assistants for your projects, business, startup, company, whatever! Most importantly, it's free and open source. It is an alternative to DialogFlow by Google.
It is a natural language interface capable of turning users' sentences into structured data.

How does Wit.ai work?

Wit.ai works with Intents and Entities:

Intents: They represent the overall meaning or message of the sentence. For example, if a user asks for the price of some product, the intent can be "priceOfProduct"
Entities: They provide additional information and context based on the user's message. They can be a word or a group of words referring to some specific information.

Developers can teach the bot by providing example sentences, and the bot learns and improves with each interaction

There are a bunch of free resources online where you can learn more about how to use Wit.ai, and I'll be dropping some links at the end of this article.

Using Wit.ai with your programs

Wit.ai provides API endpoints for several tasks, and you can use those to integrate them with your app or program.

Additional Links to Learn More 🚀:
Wit.ai Official Documentation and Tutorials
An Informative Hands On Playlist On NLP chatbots and Wit.ai
Basic Tutorial For Using Wit.ai

My Journey as a maintainer in my first Hacktoberfest!

Krishna Sarathi Ghosh — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 04:03:17 +0000

Hey, I'm Krishna, a 13 year old programmer (My GitHub). This year was my first hacktoberfest and I was both a contributor and a maintainer!

Project

My repository was PleasantWeb, which is a smart browser extension which alerts users of unsuitable content online. It was not a very highly active repo, but I had some contributors (If you're reading this, check the repo out. You can test the extension and create new issues and work on them!). It was a project I built during buildspace s4, and modified it a bit. I made it open source later. I posted on online forums and got my contributors, who made PRs and I would check them out, and merge , or request changes.

Highs and Lows

This was my first open source repo I have hosted and acted as a maintainer. So it is a huge achievement for me. I also faced problems with some new GitHub concepts, which I wasn't aware of. I learnt and explored more of Github this month!

Growth

Before Hacktoberfest, as I never hosted any open source repo, I thought of it to be some kind of rocket science. But this hacktoberfest changed my mindset. I also learnt more about newer concepts which I wasn't aware of, by reviewing others' code and trying to code myself! Thank you for reading!

My Journey as a beginner in Open Source with Hacktoberfest!

Krishna Sarathi Ghosh — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 03:44:23 +0000

So Hey there, I'm Krishna, a 13 year old Python Programmer and Web Developer (My GitHub). I recently started contributing to open source, when I found about hacktoberfest. This year was my first hacktoberfest, and it went really well!

Progress

This month, though I did not contribute to a large number of repos, I tried my best to contribute the best code/documentation I could create to the repos. I came across a quite tough bug, which really troubled me. It was a Python project. Finally, I could fix it after 2-3 days and the feeling was awesome! I also learnt a lot of new things this month, while trying to contribute to the repos!

Growth

Before Hacktoberfest 2023, I had never worked so deep into real world problems, so I believe Hacktoberfest made me a better programmer. I also learnt new concepts and topics which I didn't know earlier, while trying to contribute to these repositories!

So overall, my first hacktoberfest has been a really awesome, interesting and exciting event for me. Thanks for reading!

What are SVGs? An introduction for 5 year olds!

Krishna Sarathi Ghosh — Sat, 13 May 2023 08:31:58 +0000

Introduction

SVG - You've probably heard of it at least once, right? It stands for Super Versatile Graphics. No, just kidding! It actually stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, and it's a whole different beast compared to those pixelated JPEGs and PNGs. You see, while other image formats are like artists using tiny square paintbrushes (pixels) to create art, SVGs are like mathematicians and geometry wizards. They craft images with precision, making sure no matter how much you zoom in, they stay as crisp as a freshly laundered shirt.

Why Choose SVGs

So why should you be best friends with SVGs? Well, let me tell you:

Incredible Scalability: SVGs are like the superheroes of images. They can be as big or small as you want, and they won't lose their cool. No pixelation or image degradation here!
Responsive Design's BFF: If you're into responsive web design (who isn't?), SVGs are your sidekick. They adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes without breaking a sweat.
Fewer HTTP Requests: SVGs can be coded right into your web page, reducing the number of requests needed to fetch images. Less hassle for your server and faster page loading!

Crafting SVGs

Now, how do you cook up an SVG? Well, there are some fancy visual programs like Adobe Illustrator, Figma, and Inkscape, but beneath their shiny interfaces, SVGs are all about lines of code. Yep, you heard it right, it's like HTML's cooler cousin! Here's a sneak peek of what SVG code looks like:

<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="200" height="200">
  <circle cx="100" cy="100" r="50" fill="red" />
</svg>

Fear not, it's not as confusing as it seems. And you might be tempted to go for those high-density JPGs and PNGs, but guess what, they come with a size tag. SVGs give you the power to tweak every inch of your image without diving into binary code. It's like having a conversation with your image without 0s and 1s! Just some lovely, human-readable words.

Learning SVGs in Style

Now, if you're eager to dive deeper into the magical world of SVGs, I've got some sources for you:

Kevin Powell has a nifty series on his channel. It's like SVGs for dummies (and I mean that in the nicest way).
Here are some cool articles for your reading pleasure:

And if you're lazy like me, take a look at this video which will save a couple of minutes of your life - SVGs explained in 100 seconds. If you want the complete encyclopedia on SVGs, head over to the MDN SVG Tutorial.

Remember, SVGs are like your artistic canvas, and the web is your gallery. So go ahead, create, and make the web a more colorful and vibrant place!

Thanks for reading!