My Unixperience at IMG

It’s easy to miss the clock in the long run when something becomes inherent, see, for example, your breath, and thus after a year of being at IMG it feels the same. It is delightful to write about my whole journey at IMG in a unix shell and thus, let’s bash my experience with instructions as its milestones.

whoami | id

It’s worthless to curse situations like a sailor, but a dull online start to your college life rarely helps intercept such feelings, possibly because it makes it difficult to identify your capabilities, and what you are interested in. And even under these circumstances, Student’s Technical Council didn’t step back, and my gratitude to them for introducing me to my interests stays invaluable just like any other freshmen (sophomore although 😛).

cat groups | grep interests

I attended almost all the intro talks for different tech groups, with my interests narrowing down after each one (pleasure I stegseeked some of them :P). I tried my hands on competitive programming initially, with the virtue of getting better at programming and logic building. Besides this, I also wanted to explore things that people interact with the most, the closest being your local PC (you might have seen its reflections until now😛)followed by the Internet(precisely websites and android applications).

ls -la tech

And thus, I began to learn and understand the basics of the web, its root elements like HTML, CSS, and Javascript. What makes these softwares (both system and application) secure and trackable also piqued my attention. Workshops and hackathons conducted by IMG and SDSLabs on Git, Javascript, OAuth also gave great insights into how these different web technologies operate. Syntax Error conducted by SDSLabs, Winter Assignment of IMG, etc. listed several techs which were hitherto hidden, and this was the time to nano them down and carve your talents into exciting projects, which even give a direct chance to be a part of IITR tech hubs as a reward. All this narrowed my choices of groups I wanted to be in, precisely IMG, SDSLabs, InfoSec and PAG.

which groups

The recruitment talks too were conducted in online mode, and it helped identify different ways of getting into different groups. I even forgot to register for the recruitment test of IMG and was lucky its deadline got extended. Emphatically, I got a call for an interview from the groups I wanted to be in (I even gave tests only for those 😜).

netcat IMG

My experience with interview felt like any real interview, with interviewers like any server listening to your requests, and responding accordingly to each of them. The first round was focused on logical and technical skills, where questions on programming, mathematical puzzles, and basic web development (the reason for the same is to test how much did you explore it as a freshman) were asked. Luckily I answered convincingly to almost all of them, and in a few hours, a got a call for the HR Round, where your dedication and reason for being at any group is seen. I was clear about my idea right after the first round, as I wanted to build something that is used by many people of IITR, learn to be punctual with the work, and be a part of a family with an amazing lab and superb seniors who are never reluctant for any help. And voila! There was the start of my journey of being at IMG.

cd IMG

For the newly recruited freshers at IMG, lectures on different web technologies are taken by the seniors to boost our interest in the same.

mkdir lectures

The journey started with a git init. A basic understanding of version control is a must for any open source contribution you sought to make or build your own. Every lecture would be followed by an exciting assignment, which is bound to be done before the deadline, and in case you face issues, other freshmen and seniors would always be there to get the ball rolling. The git-icious start was followed by lectures on HTML, CSS, and JS which helped refresh my already existing knowledge of them and also taught many new things from elementary pseudo-elements of CSS to asynchronous event loops of javascript.

#!bin/bash

And after the elements of the web, came the introduction to “The Penguin” whose footsteps are all over this blog, Linux to be precise (roundabout is fun😛). It introduced several basic commands, the scalability, and the easy development environment the system provides over different tech stacks (MERN, LAMP, etc.), as you pick a particular direction of web development. The assignment helped build a grip on basic Linux commands and moved all of us overthewire.

service mysql start

The lecture on PHP, Python, and MySQL was the most fascinating one, as it introduced the concept of Cookies, Sessions, Authorization, and Databases (Server Side or Backend Elements of Web) opening my interests in the direction of Web Security and Cryptography. We also built an authorization-based chat application solely on PHP and MySQL as part of its assignment.

All of this was followed by an exciting autumn assignment of a Project Manager Application, based on DjangoREST APIs and React Frameworks, which carved our caliber enough to manage and develop various applications of IMG.

chmod +x majors

With all the knowledge, now was the time when we could execute our knowledge to build, manage and run useful applications viz. NoticeBoard, Placements And Internships, Omniport and what not. And for me, it feels great as a contributor to the newly redesigned Content Management System. The new CMS aims at increasing the maintainability, scalability, and quality of the IITR website by providing a revamped(and more exhaustive) interface to Professors, and Admins to publish their changes to the website in an elegant manner.

docker up chapos

Well, enough of assignments and lectures. You might have come across the notion of IMG, “work hard and party harder”, and the best part of my second semester was the Farewell (although online :( )that was given to our dearest seniors. Besides this, the end of the third semester did show some light, where we got a chance to see our “Once in a blue moon Campus”, and were greeted with fantastic freshers Chapo at IMG. Well, that was not it, with so many talented seniors, it is needless to say that their awesome placements owed them a Chapo to their juniors and indeed it was a “whale of a time” at the Placement Chapo.

pidof “medium” | kill

Having a family like IMG is bliss, and it is hard to imagine the level of responsibility, punctuality, and happiness I would have had I not been a part of this family. It’s good to identify your interests and carve them into useful entities, as it takes one command to kill all processes, but several of them to build, manage and run them. Hope to see you active on hackathons and workshops, and needless to say, we are always up for a ping on discord in case of any help. Well, that’s enough of diamond picking in a hailstorm, excited to see you guys at the recruitments 😄. And lastly, do set up any Unix os(either as wsl2 , a virtual machine, or a dual boot), the impact of Unix on my experience is evident enough for its utility 😛.