DEV Community: Sarthak kundra

Google Season of Docs - 1

Sarthak kundra — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 10:58:25 +0000

Introduction

So I officially started with Google Season of Documentation 2021 with moja global on May 4th 2021. To be honest I have no idea where this last month went 😳. There are two things that I absolutely love about open source :-

Software for the betterment of the community.
Collaborating with new folks from the community.

And moja global has provided me with the best of both worlds! The community here is still in a budding state, so we're welcoming new people everyday (Hey, why don't you join us?). Talking about the project I'm working on making a community website for moja global. This will allow not just developers but anyone from the community like researchers, scientists, etc to get a glimpse of the projects and find out resources to learn about them. "Wait Sarthak, scientists you say? Why would scientists look at your project?" Hmm, good question! I think it's time I unveil the actual work that moja global does. Quoting moja global's official website :-

The moja global community supports ambitious climate action by developing pioneering, open-source software – including the groundbreaking FLINT software – to help users accurately and affordably estimate greenhouse gas emissions and removals from forestry, agriculture and other land uses (AFOLU).

By now I think it must be pretty clear why I'm loving every minute of working for this organisation. It makes me super happy that I'm helping in the fight for a sustainable future ❤️.

So let's not waste anymore time and dive into what I did this month. Since this was my first month, it was mostly spent getting myself familiarised with the tools and planning my work.

Diving In (Week 1)

So I started my week by getting to know my team which mainly comprises of two mentors Dr. Andrew O' Reilly-Nugent Sneha Mishra, a fellow GSoD intern and a good friend of mine Harsh Bardhan Mishra and two volunteers Shubham Karande and Mohammed Warid. Of course these people don't even comprise half of the moja global community but these are the people with whom I interact on a daily/weekly basis.

After getting to know the people, the next logical step was to know the project. I spent the better part of the week trying to understand What is The Full Lands Integration Tool (FLINT)?. This obviously came hand-in-hand with me understanding the user-base of the tool and in connection helped me analyse the aspects I need to focus on while creating the community website.

Planning and Auditing (Week 2)

One of my initial major task was to setup Github actions for all the repositories and have uniform issue labels. This helps the maintainers in maintaining the projects and also makes it easier for folks to move from one project to another without trying too hard to understand what type of work an issue requires. I followed a very simple model for this. I divided any issue into the category of documentation, testing or FrontEnd / BackEnd (if applicable) among other categories. Each issue was also assigned a priority between P0 - P2 (highest to lowest).

The two other major highlights of the week were. Harsh and I compiling a list of all the Github actions that we'll be using and auditing all the repositories of moja global, analysing what all could be improved with respect to documentation, issue labels, Github actions, etc. so that new developers don't find the projects intimidating.

The other highlight was I got on a 1-on-1 call with my mentor Sneha where I shared my plan of action for the community website. She was kind enough to give her suggestions and also point out a couple of potential roadblocks I might run into and how to solve them.

Meetings and New Beginnings (Week 3)

This week was perhaps the most happening one. This week involved meeting the bright minds who are behind moja global, me and Harsh also proposed the formation of a Documentation working group.

The first meeting was an introductory one where I didn't take the spotlight. In this meeting my mentor Dr. Andrew took the time to introduce the team of moja global and also what work was handled by whom. It was quite insightful and honestly I was astonished by the fact that I am working with such highly qualified individuals.

The second meeting was well uno reverse of the first one 😂. This meeting was chaired by Harsh and me, this was with the Technical Steering Committee. It was quite an important meeting as the following things were discussed in it :-

Documentation plan for repositories (Dividing any documentation into 3 categories, suitable for researchers, new contributors and seasoned contributors)
Mind map for the community website (what sections it will have, plan of documentation, content differentiation between Read The Docs and the website, etc.)
Proposal for formation of a documentation working group.
Style guide's formation and it's progress till now.

Taking Charge and Laying Foundations (Week 4)

This was the week where I finally got my hands dirty and dove into some good old, all-time favourite React ❤️. So after a lot of analysis of different static site generators like Gatsby, Jekyll, etc. It was decided that we'll go with Docusaurus for the community website. As much as I love it you can't ignore the fact that using Docusaurus is a bit complex as compared to the other SSGs listed above but at the same time the power it provides, makes the tradeoff profitable.

So, the week started with me meeting with my mentor Sneha where we formally officiated a plan of action for the first month and also decide how will we plan our project progress. She allowed me to decide how to track progress and I always prefer the Github's project board for it. "Why?" you ask? Well because it makes everything available at one place (the code, the issues and also the milestones).

I setup the repository, the project board, etc. and pushed some boilerplate code to the repository to get the ball rolling. After that I started working on some mockups for the homepage along with Mohd. Warid as he is way better than me in the UI/UX sector 😌.

Apart from this some important meetings were also held in this week. One of them was with Kyle Salukas where we discussed a bit about what content we are planning on the community website and most importantly about how or where do we plan to host the website once it's made.

After that since the creative process was taking a bit of time I used this time to do some DevRel work for moja global. I onboarded 5 new contributors and hosted office hours with them where me and Harsh told them about the work that moja global does, got to know them and then based on their interests we tried to find areas where they could contribute. It has not even been 2 weeks and the new contributors already made 3-4 PRs 🥳. I mean what more can I ask for? 🤪

Plan for next month

The next month is gonna be hectic! All fun and games aside it's time we got down to business and get some chunk of work done. This is what I'm planning with respect to the minimum amount of work that should be done in the month of June :-

Finishing the homepage of the community website.
Finalising the documentation style guide, content strategy and getting them approved by the Technical Steering Committee.
Based on the style guide, finishing at least 1-2 projects' documentation on the website.
Have the overall skeleton up and running of the website (Sections :- Blogs, wall of fame, etc.)

With that. I'll see you next month. No no wait... React 18 alpha just got out. Make it a couple of weeks 😉.

NFTs for dummies

Sarthak kundra — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 16:25:22 +0000

You recently must've heard some news about Twitter's CEO Jack Dorsey's tweet being sold for $2.5 million or a Beeple artwork being sold for $6.6 million and so on!

Now for those who are completely oblivious to all the things that I mentioned above, let me enlighten them because hey the article is titled "NFTs for dummies" right? 🤓

A bit of history 📜

So for quite some time artists, collectors etc have been selling their work online, digitally as something known as Non Fungible Token or NFT (we'll get into the technicalities later). It basically means that a digital piece of art or a song or a sneaker or literally a GIF is being sold for millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Now you must be thinking "That's ludicrous! Why would I pay millions of dollars for an image of an artwork when I can just download it from Google images." Well to be honest I had that thought myself, so let's dive a bit deep and try to understand what's actually going on.

What are NFTs?

A non-fungible token is a unit of data on a digital ledger that can represent a unique digital item and provide proof of ownership of the NFT.

I can already imagine the comments "Ooof Sarthak if I just wanted copied definitions then why would I read your blogs". Wait, chill xD 😪 . So to put it mildly an NFT is some data (any type) on a blockchain that represents something unique. Yup it's as simple as that.

Why are people paying millions of dollars? 💵

To understand this ask yourself this question. "Why do people pay so much money for a Picasso's painting?". These are the reasons that I could think of :-

It's unique (Picasso only painted a certain number of every painting).
You have an eye for art.🧐
You buy it as an investment, hoping it's value will increase over time. 📈
Well, you are a collector and you like boasting your collection. 😎

Now ask yourself this "If a Picasso's painting was sold as an NFT and not as a physical copy, won't you have the same benefits?".

The NFT is unique, that data is one of a kind on the blockchain.
You still have an eye for that painting xD 🧐 (Big 🧠).
It might very well go up in price (stonks 📈).
You want to flex your collection. 😎

Bonus - How to create an NFT 🤑

You literally need no technical knowledge to do this. Although I would suggest to know what you're doing because it will cost real money.

Go to Opensea.io.
Click on Create.
Sign in with your preferred web3 wallet (Metamask FTW).
That's it. Then you just have to provide the data for your NFT (image, GIF, etc). Put up a name and a description.
Decide how you want to sell it (a fixed price or an auction).
That's it! Hopefully your NFT sells for astronomical prices ❤️ (if it does send me a small share please xD 🙏🏼).

I hope you had fun reading this and learnt something new. Let me know in the comments if I missed anything or something you'd like me to write about.

My Journey from web2 to web3 in the Ethereum India Fellowship 2.0

Sarthak kundra — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 06:11:47 +0000

TL;DR

Halfway into the Ethereum India Fellowship 2.0 . I started with zero knowledge of the web3 world. The organisers were kind enough to provide us with resources for each week which we had to complete by the end of the week. Major achievements in these 4 weeks are :-

Interacted with a node, synced the goerli geth network. Got introduced to web3js.
Learnt the essentials of Solidity, wrote a couple of smart contracts and respective tests for them.
Learnt Solidity in depth. Explored Balancer protocol in depth. Had a bunch of fun webinars.
Started working on a dApp which focuses on Arbitrage opportunities in decentralised exchanges.

That's it for the summary now let's dive in depth into my struggles for each week. I'll provide all the resources I found useful which you can use to begin your journey into the web3 world.

Week1 (Introduction to web3)

So the first thing that we had to do was to sync the goerli geth node. Now it sounds easy and to be honest it is. It is literally 2-3 commands. But it took 6-8 hours to sync up the node and all the fellows were just left staring at their screens 😩. It got so boring that some pretty funny memes were born out of it. Here's one to give you the gist xD

After this it was pretty straight forward. We had to do two things :-

Send a dummy transaction on the synced node 💰 (a transaction to ourselves). The whole point of this exercise was to get familiarised with web3js. The docs are pretty helpful for the work required. If you are a python developer you can achieve the same with web3py.
The next was to scrape the blockchain data. We had to scrape the hashes of the first 128 blocks of a blockchain. This was super fun, felt like solving a DSA question. This might sound tricky but again it's just basic logic with web3js functions.

That's it for week1 the major resources for this week were StackOverflow threads, web3js docs and this one video by 3Blue1Brown

Week2 (favourite week ❣️)

This week got our hands dirty! I don't know about you but I have a lot of fun exploring new tech 😁. So the whole week revolved around smart contracts 📝. Now two things are quite important for this Solidity (the programming language) and Remix (IDE).

The week started with me learning the basics of Solidity (great resource at the end of this week's paragraph). The second task of this week was to compile, test and deploy a smart contract. All of this involved heavy use of Solidity, web3js and the Remix IDE.

The next task was the most interesting one. We had to create our own ERC20 token. Which basically is my own crypto. After the hype of Doge coin and diving into the space, this was something that really intrigued me! Now I won't get into the technicalities of how I made the token (Maybe I can write a separate article for that, let me know in the comments.). So I made a token called Open Source Bounty (OSB). The idea behind this token was to put bounties on your issues in open source projects and let the person whose patch is merged get the bounty. The token could then be traded for ETH in a Uniswap pool and which can then be traded to any other stable coin or crypto. I made a meme when I was flooded with questions like "How did you make a crypto?". Let me know how you like it xD

The final task for this week was to create a smart contract which will transfer a person's crypto from their wallet to safe keeping wallet in case he/she does not call a function in N amount of time (acting as a Dead Man's switch). Like the first week this felt like a DSA problem involving the web3 architecture. It was quite fun, figuring this out!

Major resources for the week :-

CryptoZombies - To learn Solidity
Remix IDE It has a tutorial inbuilt, to make you familiarise with the new environment.
Ethereum Docs This is by far the best place you can go to learn the basics of web3 and familiarise yourself with the space.
What are Smart Contracts?

Week3 (Exploring Defi Protocols and building on Eth)

The week started with us exploring HardHat. Now what's HardHat? Hardhat is a development environment to compile, deploy, test, and debug your Ethereum software. It helps developers manage and automate the recurring tasks that are inherent to the process of building smart contracts and dApps, as well as easily introducing more functionality around this workflow. This means compiling, running, and testing smart contracts at the very core.

This was just a warmup task and took like an hour. The main aim of the week was to get us familiarised with Decentralised Finance (Defi) 📈. My goal was to learn about Decentralised Exchanges (DeX) particularly the Balancer protocol. Now obviously to learn that I needed to understand Defi first. So this week by far was the most research intensive week. A ton of articles and youtube videos at the end.

The week ended with all of the fellows giving presentations on their protocols. It was one of the most interesting and insightful session! I'll ask all of the fellows to drop their presentations in the comments if anybody is interested in getting the gist of all the topics.

Major resources for the week :-
1) Intro to Defi
2)Intro to Defi (2)
3)Liquidity Pools
4)What is Defi?
5)What is Balancer?
6)Balancer Whitepaper

Week4 (Webinars and BUILDLing)

This week was all about us getting to learn about a bunch of tools and utilities which we could use to make our first decentralised application (dApp). We had a bunch of webinars from people who have been in the industry for a long time (which in this industry means 2+ years xD)

Biconomy 💯
Oracles 💯
Building on L2 (Matic) 💯

And the rest of the time was all about us building our idea (Another article for it, maybe).

Wrapping Up

So this is my journey from web2 to web3. Has it been easy? Hell no! Do I find this space interesting? YES!! And one thing that I've learnt from my dev journey so far is that every new domain seems tough in the beginning. What's important is to have goals and award yourself even for the small achievements because the fun factor always overcomes the fear of failure, provided you stick with it long enough.

Also if you're someone from the web3 world. Drop in your thoughts or any resources you feel like I should have a look at. At the end a huge shoutout to Devfolio for having this fellowship. On a more personal note shoutout to Denver my POC from Devfolio and Harsh my mentor.

How I tanked my MLH Fellowship interview and still got in

Sarthak kundra — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 21:41:34 +0000

Introduction

Okay so this might be the most requested blog I am ever writing. So here it is! First thing's first this might get a little long but trust me it's so adventurous you'll have a lot of fun! Not wasting a lot of time let's get into it.

What is MLH Fellowship?

The MLH Fellowship is a 12-week internship alternative for aspiring software engineers. The programs pair fun, educational curriculum with practical experience that you can put on your resume right away. It's collaborative, remote, and happens under the guidance of expert mentors. To know more about it you can go to the website

What is the selection process?

The selection process consists of three rounds basically.
1) A robust written application. It is a big application which has a lot of questions the gist of which is it asks you what all types of technologies you know (android dev, ML, web dev etc), an example of your work and what all interests you?

2) Behavioral interview. Once your application is accepted the next step is to schedule a behavioral interview. The interview will be 10-15 mins long. You have nothing to prepare for this interview it's just a normal chit-chat about the projects, things you've worked on, what interests you etc.

3) Now onto the most crucial step the technical interview. Something that scares the shit out of everyone xD (including me). Once you clear the behavioral interview you'll schedule this round. Now this round is very dependent on the person applying . Why? Because in this round the interviewer will ask you to share your screen and discuss with you the code sample that you submitted in your written application. The type, difficulty and all the scary things that you're imagining depends on the code sample that you submitted. One thing that I'd say though if you actually wrote the code that you submitted and not copied it from a tutorial or something you're good to go!

This is all which you could find on the website or other blogs but now coming onto my experience of all the rounds. It's about to get wild 😂

Behavioral Interview

We'll fast forward to my written application getting approved and straight to the point where I had my behavioral interview

So on the day of my interview it was scheduled for 2:00 pm . To be honest even though I said there's nothing to worry about it I still couldn't focus on coding and was pretty much roaming around the house.
I opened the meeting link 10 mins before the time (1:50 pm). I was just staring at the screen waiting for the interviewer to join. 10 mins past, it's 2:00 pm no one's there. Since it was supposed to be a 10 mins interview I felt like valuable time was passing. Fast forward to 2-3 more mins no one joined. FAST FORWARD TO 2:15 NO ONE JOINED 😨
At this point I felt like it's over because they have so many applicants, people at MLH Fellowship won't even know that one student's interview didn't happen. I mailed the interviewer but no response on that.
I got a mail for a review on my interview which I thought was very funny. I opened it super angry to give the worst possible review but the lovely people at MLH had an option saying interviewer didn't show up I clicked on that and they allowed me to reschedule it to the same day which was awesome!
I gave my interview, the interviewer was very welcoming. He made me feel like I was talking to my college senior. He confirmed the type of fellowship I had applied for (Open source) and the term for which I applying (Fall) why I feel like joining etc. In the end he gave me 5 mins to ask some questions.

Technical Interview

To my surprise I got accepted for my behavioral interview in 18 mins that's right, one good news xD Moving on I scheduled my technical interview 2 days from the last acceptance. I was dead scared for this because let's face it you all who are reading this probably are or were too 😂
In the two days I studied the entire repo that I had submitted, google searched everything so that I could make sure that even the things I thought I knew were correct or not. Sometimes you know somethings and even make it work in your code but you don't know the exact technicalities of what is happening behind the scenes. Now on a side note one thing that the fellowship expects you to have is a good internet connection which is fair also as the entire fellowship (3 months) is remote. And honestly I have 2 good wi-fi connections in my house.
The day of the interview came ,this day I honestly just walked around the house the entire day. Time of the battle came I joined 10 mins early again and the interviewer joined too this time 😂. The interview started and the first couple of mins we both had audio issues and had to exit, rejoin, turn on/off my earphones. This destroyed my interview mindset. He asked me to start sharing my screen and told me to open my code and asked me to navigate to the start of the project. He asked me the fundamental things, the kind of things I wrote about above (you make them work, but you might not know the exact technicalities of it). He asked me about async/await env variables etc.
The problem was my net was so shitty I disconnected twice in between and with all the issues we had earlier there was no time for me to ask my questions, end the interview on a good note and also I felt like the interviewer couldn't ask all that he wanted to ask. The interview ended abruptly and I was literally screaming and throwing things around (I know sounds a bit over dramatic now but it happened xD). I felt very bad because I actually worked pretty hard and honestly if I didn't know any questions I would've been fine but to not get selected because of the wi-fi man that would suck wouldn't it? 😪
I mailed my interviewer telling him that I had no idea what had happened and I hope he could ask whatever he had planned.

Moment of Truth

I received a mail after the completion of my technical interview that I should expect a reply within 5 business day and I got this on Monday. Not lying, I checked my mail 5-8 times a day from Tuesday all the way till Friday night and I lost all hope. I was like can't do anything now, let's move on. The 5 days made me realize it wasn't my fault and let's focus on the other opportunities HacktoberFest etc.
Fast forward to Saturday night I was updating my portfolio website. I opened my mail to download something and WHAT?!?!? "Congratulations, you're going to become an MLH Fellow" I was so excited with the news that I still haven't updated my website xD 😂

Conclusion

So, this was my experience if you read it till here I hope you had a good laugh. Coming onto the real stuff if you got selected NICE! Get in touch with me let's have some fun. If you didn't, man there are A LOT of opportunities out there. What I'll suggest is look back and analyze what went wrong. If there was something wrong with your technical knowledge then work on that and while you're doing that it's called open source for a reason! It's open! You can still contribute to the repositories on which the fellows will be working on. You can contribute in HacktoberFest, codearena etc. The list goes on! So cheer up, keep learning and keep having fun hacking. May the source be with you! :)