Sneak Peak into HACK 2012, India Habitat Center

Hey Guys, If you have missed the chance to visit India Habitat Center on 16th and 17th June, 2012 then this is the right place to sneak peak into HACK 2012 action!

Hack 2012, an application development event with a unique motivation of contributing towards social cause , was organised by Google Developer Group, New Delhi on 16th and 17th June  at the India Habitat Center ,ND. It saw designers and developers transform their creative ideas into new generation apps for addressing real world challenges faced by the society today.

 The two day event provided a platform for budding developers and professionals to analyze their ideas based on education system, healthcare services, women security, disaster management and information access under the guidance of experts from various domains like journalism, economics and entrepreneurship. 

The participants were exposed to the practical implementation and the constraints by the esteemed panel experts and mentors so that they could channelise it effectively for the common man’s reach. The main theme of this event was to provide these developed apps to NGOs who could make it available to the people easily.

The event received huge support from sponsors like Google Inc(The platinum sponsors); Halabol (The Gold Sponsors); Sify (wifi sponsors);  DataWeave(Data Sponsors); Digit DevWorx (Community media sponsor).

Day 1-16th June:
The event kicked off with a light speech by Mr Uttam Tripathi , Program Manager , Developer Relations,Google.
 Dr. C S Arora,Senior Consultant at National Mission on Education through Information & Communication Technology (MHRD, Govt. of India) gave insight to the real world challenges, their root cause and approach to tackle them. This pumped the developers to contribute to the cause with their technical and coding skills.
Shrey Malhotra, Organiser,GDG New Delhi along with Ms Shabnam Aggarwal, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Pearson India interacted with the participants during the informal discussions. Developers spent rest of the day designing their applications, architecting the data models, designing the data flow diagrams , writing, debugging and deploying amazing codes!

Day 2-17th June:
Developers with tons of enthusiasm rushed into the India Habitat Center with their laptops, hardware and other accessories all set to accomplish their motives.
They displayed immense expertise by using latest cutting edge technologies and languages. Google App Script, Go, PHP, JAVA were used by the majority; latest cloud frameworks like DART,Google App Engine, Software Development Kits like Android SDK were used for development along with amazing utilization of Google Products and Application Programming Interface(s) offered by Google Inc. like Maps API, Search API, Android SDK, Google+ API, Google App Engine, etc.

Winners :
It was a tough job for judges to analyse and declare the winner. In the end ,the first prize was bagged by Team CodeJunkies(Vikash Agrawal,Viraj Sinha,Saurabh Sood,Nitesh Narayan Lal) who mesmerised the audience and judges with their amazing idea Y-AN-A (Yet Another NGO App) which helps individuals track nearby NGOs, make significant donations to needy, track donations and other amazing features.They also won a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. Team GujjuDroid(Nixit Patel,Dipesh Patel,Jay Patel,Pratik Patel) invested significant effort to develop  BeSecure and win HTC Xplorer as Second prize. Sennheiser Headphones, the Third prize went to Team Bazinga(Nishank Varshney,Vaibhav Sinha, Ritesh Bhatia, Aayush Ahuja) for developing  Pocket Trans.

HACK 2012-Code for a cause !

Calling all those who want to give something valuable back to the society by using their skills for a noble cause !! don't wait for the change..be the change !! Come forward and take the step now !! 

Google Developer Group, New Delhi (formerly known as GTUG New Delhi) is organizing a hackathon with the goal of bringing together developers, designers, start-ups & NGOs to apply their imagination and thoughts to the social good sector and build product ideas for social innovation.

All you need to do is bring out those creative ideas which were always popping in your mind. This is the time to showcase the real power of your idea and imagination that can have positive impact on the Society and Mankind !

Come up with your ideas if you think:

• Your idea is going to change the way information is accessed??
• Do you really think your idea can bring about change the way we learn , educate people in this world ??
• Do you feel your idea can ensure safety of women in this world??
• Do you think you can bring change in the way healthcare operates in this entire world...Is your idea really going to save a life when really needed??
• Does your idea have the power to save lives when there is a disaster?
• or any other idea which you think can be useful to mankind

Date: 16th-17th June, 2012

Venue: India Habitat Center, New Delhi

For more info dive into : HACK 2012 : Code for a cause

See you in the arena !!

Google Drive

Yet another blog post from ardent Google fan about its new product "Google Drive" !

Google has finally revealed its cloud based file storage and file sharing utility application "Google Drive" to user group.

Companies like Amazon, Dropbox have already marked their position in this business use case. Neverthless the curiosity of "what new & innovative approach" Google has incorporated in this product will keep us excited. 

Amazon has marked the presence in this phase in March,2011.Though the features provided in Amazon CloudDrive are very good and user friendly but the lack of developer support puts it in back seat when it comes to grabbing developer's attention and interest. Amazon cloud drive is tightly coupled with Amazon cloud player, a cloud based media player which can play most media formats. Amazon cloud player was not available for users in specific countries like India. Its strange why they did not gave access to cloud player to indian user group.

When it comes to dropbox, it is awesome application that I use to keep all my files that I need everywhere like @work, @home, @travelling,etc. I personally believe that the publicity and utility of any application is influenced by the availability of API for developers to explore, extend it by developing other apps that links to it.

Google knows it very well to provide developer API/SDK for each of its product :). For Google Drive also, they have provided API that will allow users to create, edit, delete and other such operations to be performed on files on their drive. The fact that Google has also eyed on mobile app for Drive has placed Google one step ahead as compared to its competitor.

Google has made an attempt to combine Google Wave and Google Docs. Features like real time editing, real time collaboration,etc which were part of Wave have

been incorporated in Google Drive.

so my equation for Google Drive :

Google Drive=File storage + FileSharing + Real time collaboration + Developer API/SDK


Eager to check my Google Drive ;)

* All views mentioned in above post are my personal. 

Google CodeJam 2012 experience

Last weekend was something different from stereotyped weekend pattern. I participated in Google CodeJam 2012. I took part last year but did not manage to get through subsequent rounds leading to finals. 

This time I was bit lazzy even after knowing the schedule of the contest. I woke up at around noon( 6 hrs past the beginning of contest-started at 4am IST) and landed on codejam page. I went through set of questions and got an idea on complexity of problems. Last time I wrote all code in C programming language. But this time I used C and Visual Basic for solving the problems. The advantage you get in using high level language is availability of data structures like list, hashtables, etc. I must say the set of questions presented this year was mix of easy and complex problems. This time they have also changed the pattern. The first question "A" carried 15pts and only required for small input.

Lets discuss about problems, their complexity and approach I used to solve them:

Problem A. Speaking in Tongues (read problem)

This problem was easy among the set. you actually need to translate the given input into other format. Googlerese is the language generated by replacing english alphabet by different alphabet . They provided the mapping in question. 

Solution: I went through problem statement and sample input in question to capture the mapping pattern. I made use of two hashtables. one hashtable used for simple english to Googlerese mapping and other used for inverse mapping. i.e Googlerese to english. I used static initialization of hastables with pair for mapping based on sample input.

Key points to be noted while solving this:
1. Make sure mapping for all alphabets is present in map or any other data structure you are using.

download my output for Speaking in Tongues -small input from here.

Problem B. Dancing With the Googlers (read problem)

This problem deals with permutation and combination. So if you are comfortable with P&C then it will be easy for you to solve. The main crux of the problem was to bring out all the possible set of triplet for each score for Googlers and find the ones with minimum value of some threshold value. This threshold value is varying for each case.


sample provided :

Here the tricky part was of surprising triplet. a triplet is said to be surprising if all 3 judges gives scores such that scores differ exactly by 2. example( 6,7,8), (2,4,4) are surprising triplet.

Solution: I used algo to bring out all triplets keeping in mind the threshold value(p). 


I initially done it this way:

say if we have  input as 3 1 5 15 13 11. where 3 is number of Googlers for which score is given, 1 is number of surprising triplet, 5 is the threshold value(p). and rest of numbers are scores for Googlers separated with spaces. so here we need to find out how many triplets will have atleast one value> threshold value(p). 

I initially write code that assumes surprising triplet value( here 1) not equal to 0 then the current score I am working on is surprising triplet, so first score 15 is surprising. But this may not give the best possible set( our aim is to maximize number of googlers with one judge's score>threshold value(p)). So you need to consider case when 15 is surprising, case when 13 is surprising and case when 11 is surprising. then pick the best result maximizing number of googlers with one judge's score>threshold value(p). 

Key points to be noted while solving this:

1. Sum of judge's response should be equal to given score for case.
2. Make sure to consider best possible set for each case.

download my output for Dancing With the Googlers -small input from here.

Problem C. Recycled Numbers (read problem)

This problem seems easy but the main aim why Google brought this question on developer's plate is to check efficiency of the code as it involved number ranges in order of 1 to 2000000.

The problem was to find set of distinct numbers (n,m) such that if one or more digits were replaced from back of n and place in front of n will result in m. 

example: (12345, 34512) is a recycled pair since you can obtain 34512 by moving 345 from the end of 12345 to the front. 

sample provided:

Solution: I enjoy writing parsers thus I picked up approach to solve this using strings. Starting from smallest value in the range I moved each single character from back of number to front of number and checked whether resulting number is in the given range.

So far we are moving only single digit at a time, the resulting number will be different if we move more that 1 character at a time. that's it! If you got this then you can easily solve this!  so if you have a 4 digit number then you need to consider cases when moving only single digit, moving 2 digits, moving 3 digits at a time.

Key points to be noted while solving this:

1. n and m must have the same number of digits in order to be a recycled pair. 

2. Neither n nor m can have leading zeros. example: number 0021 is not valid.

3. Make sure you include range check in your code to handle dataset range given in problem.

download my output for  Recycled Numbers -small input from here

download my output for  Recycled Numbers -large input from here



Problem D. Hall of Mirrors (read problem)
This problem was bit tough and unfortunately I did not get time to solve and submit this. I will try to solve this and share my experience on this.




I hope this post helps you understand the kind of questions presented in codejam.