Yash Shah - Student, Waterloo, ON

I attended Canada's largest Hackathon, Hack The North, on September 15, 2017. It was an amazing experience, and we had a lot of coffee, no sleep and a decently-functioning project by the end of it. After signing in and eating dinner the very first day, we head out to Hagey Hall for the opening ceremonies.We had many speakers come out and talk to us, such as Balaji Srinivasan, Michael Gibson, and a Canadian rather popular in the hearts of everyone there- Justin Trudeau. The Prime Minister had a great speech, and this was the place we first came up with the idea for our project, so the opening ceremonies was an overall success. Hacking started the same night at 12. Our first night was entirely dedicated to research. Is our idea viable? What APIs do we want to use? What do we want to make our backend in?  We eventually planned out and envisioned what our project would look like, after which I started designing the frontend of the login page that was to be implemented. The next 2 ...

I joined the University of Waterloo as a Computer Science and Business student on September 4th, 2017. Here is what happened since then: Day 1: Since I was part of the off-campus community and not part of any residences, my first day was just getting a feel for the campus and getting to know other students that lived off-campus. We met at DC at 1 o clock, toured the campus and had our Dons talk to us. After dinner, we went to the gym for a Warrior Welcome ceremony. This was personally the highlight of my day: we had the vice-chancellor talk to us about getting used to Waterloo, a student talk about problems he faced in University, and a very inspirational speech by a part-time professional golf player and part-time NHL referee, Garrett Rank. After the assembly we dispersed and that was it for Day 1. Day 2: The second day involved actually getting into groups with people in the same program. As a result, I was with other double degree kids, in a team called "Sinehenge....

Having used Atom as my main and only text editor, I never even bothered looking at any other ones. However, a friend of mine-who has way more experience than me in development-showed me a few tests that seemed to suggest that Vim or Sublime Text was the way to go in terms of a text editor. I cant seem to find the tests right now, but the main thing that convinced me to choose a different editor was the data that showed the large amount of memory Atom took up while doing a task. Vim is probably the coolest editor I've seen, hands down. After downloading and launching Vim, I was greeted with this retro, old school screen that I fell in love with immediately. The shortcuts are so weird too! The concept of Vim revolves around never having to touch your mouse to do anything, and that is what makes it stand out the most in my opinion. I've learned how to run code, save files and some other basic commands, but a more detailed blog about Vim will come after I get to play ar...

For a long time now, I've been wanting to learn how to compile code in Java and Python (the 2 main languages I like to code in) without the use of NetBeans/Eclipse and the Idle IDEs. A software developer friend of mine told me that many devs use text editors in the workplace, and I thought figuring out how to compile and run my code that way would be a cool thing to learn. Compiling code in Java will be for a later blog, but here is how I got python setup: 1) Installing the Atom Text Editor Atom is a free, open source text editor developed by GitHub. I was first introduced to Atom at a high school hackathon I went to, where it was praised for being fully customizable and having a large array of packages to download from (although I learned today that Vim is a better text editor in terms of memory usage). Installing Atom is very simple, and the download link can be found here .  2) Installing the Script Package  Next, I found out that installing the scri...

When I first got into coding, I dreamed about creating my own local version of Siri for my desktop; lying back on my chair and doing things with just my voice was what I always wanted. After coding with Java for over a year, I decided that it was time to learn more than just using JFrame and creating classes. "Zero" is a speech recognition bot I coded using the Sphinx4 voice recognition library in Java and the Selenium Webdriver for Chrome. Although no Siri by any means, the bot can open and close windows, create tabs, open sites etc. using just my voice. The demo for the bot and its commands as of now can be found below: 1) Setting up the voice recognition: Luckily, there is already documentation on how to get started with sphinx4. The Jar Files for this library can be downloaded  here . As you can see, each recognizer should have an Acoustic Model Path, a Dictionary Path and a Language Model Path set. After running the code, I figured out that the recogni...