View unlimited articles on Harvard Business Review and Economist.com

In this post I am going to discuss with you a chrome extension I developed to view unlimited articles on Harvard business Review and Economist.com

Harvard Business Review allow unregistered users to view 5 articles at max where as Economist allows unregistered user to view at max 3 articles for the 4th article click it asks users to pay for registration before viewing new articles.

One manual hack is to install a chrome extension like Cookie inspector or Cookie manager and delete the cookie before proceeding to view other (blocked) articles.

to avoid this manual work. I created a chrome extension which does this automatically.

So the idea is the same for both Harvard Business Review(HBR) and Economist. That is every time a user clicks on any hyper link delete the associated cookie of the respective domains.
The code can be found at github repo

Technical layout :
Architecture of chrome extension allows user to create scripts of various types. For ex: Content scripts or background scripts. Content scripts can access the DOM structure of the HTML page on which it has the permission to inject where as background scripts can access Chrome* api and can run some background job either in persistent mode or trigger based mode.

WORKING : 
For this chrome extension, I have created a content.js which gets injected in the DOM structure of Economist/HBR as defined by the permissions given in the manifest file. So every time a user clicks on any anchor tag ('<a href="....">'). A message is sent to background script (BackGround.js). So in this case background script is triggered via a message sent by content script and hence is non persistent as configured by manifest file.

When the background script receives a trigger from content script it invokes chrome api for cookies. So first it gets all the cookies associated with the concerned domain - in this case HBR and Economist. After all the cookie associated with the HBR or Economist domain is received, they are iterated one at a time and removed using chrome api.

AFTER EFFECTS :
After you add chrome extension on your chrome. Go to hbr.org.
Now select any articles to read, you will land on specific article page. The number of articles left for free view can be seen at bottom of page.

Now go back to hbr.org by clicking on anchor tag on the left side of the page

Same goes for economist.com

How to install Chrome Extension on chrome :

1.) Go to chrome://extensions/

2.) Next check the developer mode

3.) click on load unpacked extension

4.) Find the location of the chrome extension 

Now you are good to go. Just in case if you have already opened HBR or Economist make sure to reload the page.

Hello World - Chrome Extension

Here are two introduction tutorials (beginner to intermediate level) I wrote on the chrome extension.

http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/832199/Chrome-Extension-Save-URLs-of-All-Open-Tabs-in-a-N
http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/826733/Chrome-Extension-How-to-Use-Commands-and-Backgroun

I won an International Women Hackathon organised by Hackearth in March 2015.
Here is what it does :

Here is the code for this https://github.com/deepika087/HackerEarth_Hackathon_LinkedInTimeLined

Prepare for the Best

Formals, shoes and laptop bag are just to name a few things which students purchase before their their respective joining but there is a lot more you can do which might help you adjust better and prove your worth in a new environment.

I had previously written a blog post on how can you make best use of your onboarding sessions but that is handy when your team is giving new joinees required training however in this article I will cover a few topics which you as freshers can cover to enjoy that extra edge ! !

So here are a few topics which you must try to read about before joining for a smoother onboarding:

      1.)   Know at least one SCM

SCM aka Source code Management systems are the tools or repositories which teams use to coordinate code changes. If you are already a Github user than you may proceed to the next point but if the term SCMs sounds new to you then read about them. There a lot of such tools available such as Git, Perforce, CVS etc but git is the most popularly used. Here is the link to an article I wrote on SCMs.

      2.)   Prepare your toolkit

A lot of times hiring is done without even telling students the team’s name(specially in case of freshers mass recruitment) but there is a good probability that you would know that in which technology will you work on. Give maximum time to know what all tools/editors are available for that technology. For ex: if you going to work on Java try using Eclipse or IntelliJ. Make a simple program say to add two numbers and learn how to debug programs or view run time values on these editors.  Following are some other tools you may want to know about : Tomcat, VisualVM, Junit, Mockito, Jenkins etc.

      3.)   Acquire business knowledge

Say you will join finance based company as a software developer so you must try to know at least explore basic terms like Loans, EMI, interest, mortgage etc. Even though this information may or may not be used but still extra knowledge specially the one related to your field will never hurt. Or say, in case of e-commerce companies try to go through their engineering blog if there is any. You may find some key words.

      4.)   Search and search more for technical terms

Read architecture of well established companies like Facebook, Google, Linkedin. You will come across a lot of technical terms and latest technologies which these tech giants use such as database system, hardware layer, security aspect etc. Also when you come across these terms try to find out difference between them for ex: you may search for difference in basic terms like framework vs library, tier vs layer, component vs module etc.

      5.)   Know basic Linux commands

I can not emphasise more on this point but irrespective of the fact which platform you work on: windows, mac or Linux you will some or the other time end up using Linux commands or relying on shell scripts. Learn basics command such as sudo, ls, directory related commands, SSH, SCP etc. You may also install VMWare and ubuntu image and play around with basic commands.

      6.)   Development cycle strategies

There are standard strategies which each company/teams follow like some may follow waterfall, some may follow Agile development. Read about these strategies and what is the ideology behind them. Also there are softwares used to track progress of product ex Jira, Murmur, Trello to keep track of work and fisheye for code reviews. Introduce yourself to these tools.

      7.)   Basic of  Software architecture

If you have already covered all the points mentioned above then you may want to go ahead with learning Software Architecture. You may begin by knowing difference between Software Design and software architecture. Then move on to understand architecture of famous technologies like Hadoop, Mongo or Cassandra. Study about SOA and micro-services architecture.

Disclaimer: Once you are done with this basic preparation, join your team with an open mind and try to learn as much as possible. Make best use of orientation session.  These points will definitely help you to adjust yourself better amongst new people but the list is not exhaustive. These topics are just tip of an iceberg there will be a lot more for you to learn, implement and explore. All you can do is to prepare and hope for best ! !

Pride Management ? How much to ask ?

About a week ago, a group of freshers joined my team as software developers. I was asked to conduct their training on technologies like Java, tomcat,  maven and a few concepts like continuous integration and continuous development etc. Through out my life I have been very enthusiastic and proactive about helping my juniors or colleagues but this was for the first time when a group of naïve technologists, sitting in a semi circle with pens in their hands, ready to jot down every word I said were looking forward to not just casual help but but also to form a foundation to prove their worth in the team. This reminded me of my Onboarding days also know as “Honeymoon” period when I started working, super excited to make a difference and to prove my worth in the team just like these freshers. My mentor helped me checkout latest code from the repository and introduced me to a tech term - “SVN”.  I searched online what SVN meant and found a plethora of other technologies which were almost same as this SVN. Then I starting exploring the folder structure and with every java file I read, with every design pattern I recognised (Factory pattern or Builder Pattern) I felt as if I was unraveling a mystery. Now coming back to the Onboarding session I was conducting in a meeting room I decided to put Java, CI/CD pipeline concept on hold and shared some lessons with them which I learnt in my “Honeymoon period” .

Should I follow my pride and sit back or should I get up and ask for help.

This was the dilemma I faced during the Onboarding days. I thought that asking for help in very first few days of my job will portray me as a lackadaisical fem-engineer. I thought I might end up give the impression that I am not inquisitive at all and believe in running for help for every minor question. So, I made an “intelligent” decision and I chose the extreme that is to prove my worth with smart work/extra work and not ask a single question to any of my senior.

This was not as intelligent as it appealed to me when I was a fresher. Not asking questions or trying to figure out everything by yourself just portrays an fresher as a solo-worker and not a team player. It might even convey an unintended message that the fresher is uninterested in the on-going. Do some pride engineering to come up with a balanced approach which will help you bring out your best qualities.

What to ask and what not to ask

This point may act as an input to do that optimised pride engineering I just talked about. Bothering your seniors with every single question or every minor tech question may make you sound like an amateur who doesn’t respect the fact that you might be a newbie but others do have deadlines and product to deliver. So, how should you maintain that delicate balance ? The simple approach is to categories your question into technical and business related questions. For ex: Say you are asked to run/write new unit test cases (which is the standard Onboarding process followed by a lot of companies) and you get an error say “No tests found with test runner JUnit 4”. So there is no point running to your seniors for this. Search StackOverflow or other technical blogs for such minor issues you will surely find a solution. Do some hit and trial. But if you are issues related to business or domain logic, take a note of 3-5 doubts and then take it to your seniors. It will bring out a shade of your professional qualities.

Disclaimer: If you are unable to resolve a tech problems after trying 5-6 different approaches, better tell about it to your senior. But be prepared to list of various methodologies/resources you followed to resolve it.

Do Not underestimate the impression given during “Onboarding”

Human beings are often dictated by preconceived notions or ingrained ideas in their minds. The intentions or the ideas conveyed about your personality are not easy to override in your subsequent months. Often freshers find it hard to understand “corporate” culture mainly because not everyone is alike. Not all colleagues are as easy going as your college friends neither all colleagues are malefactors. So join the team with an open mind don’t expect people to be saints or wrongdoers just on basis of what you hear around. Try to bring out best colours of your qualities.

Just “Keep calm and Do your best”.

nice -20 technicalCareerProcess

Any guesses what this post will be about ?

Let me give you a hint. The nice command(runs on linux machines) has the same effect on a process's life which a good technical project or an amazing internship can do to your career.

I am sure you must have guessed it by now.
"Nice " command is used to increase the priority of process. Say if I know that a job is really lengthy and requires a lot of resources, I would probably want to decrease the priority so that higher priority jobs can run first.

In this article I am going to list a few resources/internship opportunity which you should not miss in college and these can really help you not only to make a good network with coders and programmers but also to earn a few brownie points for your resume.
1.) Google Summer of Code(GSOC)
The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organisation. Every participating organisation must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit from them. The mentors then rank the applications and decide among themselves which proposals to accept. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets, and asks the organizations to mark at most that many projects accordingly.
It is not easy to come up with an idea just like that. You will have to use it and realize that what is missing or which feature/functionality can be added to enhance the usability of the project you have shown your interest in.

2.) Season of KDE (SoK)
KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and OS X systems. It is known for its Plasma Desktop, a desktop environment provided as the default working environment on many Linux distributions
The goal of the community is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system.Season of KDE (SoK) is a program for people could not get accepted into Google Summer of Code. They will have a mentor from the KDE community to help them if any question arises or if they do not know how to continue.

3.) Anita Borg Scholarship-Only for girls sorry guys ! !
The scholarship is open to students at the Bachelors, Masters and PhD level who have at least one year of their program remaining. The scholarship value is around USD 1500–10000 and is competitively awarded based on essays and interviews. In addition, scholars and finalists usually have a retreat at a local Google office.
The program is run separately in several regions around the world, with local selection committees and retreats. Each program takes applications once per year, typically selecting one postgraduate and one undergraduate scholarship winner from among a group of 10–20 finalists.

4.) Contribute to open source
This is not an internship and neither will it pay you for the contributing to the project. However, it will give you amazing experience, provided you pick up an appropriate project. It not only proves that you are self-motivated to contribute to the open source and to take decisions by yourself but also proves that you have some exposure to real work.

So this is not an exhaustive list of all the internship opportunities or projects you can go for but this will give you good idea about other side projects which you can pursue very early in your career.

Invincible World of Data

                                                                      

Figure:[1]

“Big data expertise increased 89.9% in the last twelve months”, “Big data, Big pay”, “Data is as important to organisations as labor and capital” are a few the headlines taken from leading newspapers and websites which came across recently. No doubt there has been a rapid increase in the demand of data analysts. Because there is millions of Terabytes of data lying on clouds, local desktop, Government databases, application logs which can be processed to get  lot more significant information/insights than just suggesting ads.

Figure[2]

In this post, I will discuss some of the technologies covering from SQL to No-SQL and highlight the key features and drawbacks of various such technologies. Before touching upon the latest technologies, I would first like to go back in days when databases were not very common. Recently, I was watching a series “The Bletchley Circle” which was about 4 female friends who were code-breakers in World War 2 and then move on to live normal lives after the war. One of these girls had incredible photogenic memory. During one of the episodes she is given a chart of trains with their source, destination, arrival and departure timings of each train. She reads the sheet once, stores the data in her head and later other girls who are good at strategies or guessing who might be the culprit, use her photogenic memory to query the data and form a pattern. Analysing pattern or querying the data is not something which is the need of the hour today, it has been a need realised long back. When database systems were not very technically advance and when computers were not enough complex to support such technologies simple text or flat files were used to store the data.

Later, with the advent of RDBMS or relational database SQL came in picture. To understand No-SQL it is very important to understand the architecture of RDBMS first. So, the idea was to keep the entire data in a table which can be visualised like a matrix. Ex: if we were to store data like user’s FirstName, user’s LastName, Brand purchased etc, all the information in one matrix or a table, each row will contain repetition of data. To handle this situation the concept of foreign key was introduced which if used as an analogy in this example can be thought as, say we assign a unique ID to each user and then in a different table we store the info [BrandID, Brand] in TableA and get [firstName,LastName,BrandID] info is stored in TableB.

However, this simplistic situation is easy to implement or visualise but as the number of joins between the table increases so does the time to get the response at the front end. Sometimes, in a Private Network of a company, if server’s are kept in different countries, by the time response from DB will come, front-end  may even time out, irrespective of efficient indexing. Hence a need was felt to avoid the joins.
Another very major concern with RDBMS is its stringent definition of columns. Say while creating the DB if the administrator assumes that the firm would need 10 columns, under no situation can a developer push data with 11 attributes, unless either the DB is altered to add new column(which is a time consuming process if the data is in GBs) or the first table is copied to another DB with extra column value equal to None and then delete old DB. 

As it is said that need is mother of innovation. Therefore to overcome the constraints of SQL databases, no-SQL technologies were brought in picture.

The major difference between SQL and No-SQL technologies is that, the latter are Document data model. That is everything in these technologies is stored in key-value format. Ex: No-SQL DB like MongoDB will store data like {FirstName:”XYZ”, “LastName:”PQR”} and so on. The values part itself can be a complex block of key and value in turn.

These No-SQL technologies have added advantage like ex: MongoDB provides automatic “Sharding” that distributes data across a cluster of machines.Moreover, as discussed earlier, No-SQL databases support dynamic schemas. But that does not mean that there is nothing wrong with these technology or a tech team should opt for NoSql by default. Since these technologies are usually open source they lack maturity. These databases were primarily designed for storage and offer very little functionality beyond.[3]

No doubt that NoSql technologies have become really popular with the advent of cloud and it can help to deal with situations where the firm has to deal with unstructured data, it is nevertheless limited in certain areas. So a tech team or an individual must carefully consider the pros and cons associated with these technologies.

References Used:-
[1]http://www.sbp-romania.com/Blog/2014/03/05/sql-vs-nosql.aspx
[2]https://keefcode.wordpress.com/2013/12/04/nosql-databases-how-to-choose/
[3]http://greendatacenterconference.com/blog/the-five-key-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-nosql/ 

InternshipProject = Modify(Start_up_Idea);

Hundreds of start up are set up each day, some with an amazing idea and some with a not so amazing idea. I believe that in the world of technology every project or every success in tech world has two pillars one is the idea and the other is the excellent execution of that idea. Over a million other factors can be classified broadly in either of these two sets.

Some start ups achieve accolades by slightly changing the existing idea but it is the execution of their plan or risk taking appetite which makes them innovators. 

In this post I am going to talk about a few start up ideas which you can modify and implement in you college project itself and get an exposure of various new technologies and research work.

DISCLAIMER : I have selected these idea purely on the basis of their implementation say the functionality of their website or the idea/algorithm which they might be using at the back end. I am not saying that these ideas are too easy that you can set up your own start up and start generating revenue.

1.) WishPicker

This idea is basically a recommendation system. There a lot of research papers which can be obtained form IEEE or Google Scholars website based on recommendation systems. The papers basically add a minor change in a basic structure which one might can think of to make a recommendation. Even though the recommendation system used in sites like Amazon or flipkart are really complex(assuming) but even I worked on a recommendation based research paper for e-governance, where we not only made a recommendation to the users using the web logs but also took care what if the user didn't take our recommendation.

WishPicker is about recommending gifts for your friends and family and allows you to purchase them too, so on the whole it is an eCommerce platform in disguise. You can implement such an algorithm where you first classify each product into a category and add features like age, gender, cost, popularity etc. When a user comes to seek a recommendation of gift with parameter say A,B and C, first find all the products with A, B and C attribute. If that result is less than say 15 then go on to select product with attribute A and B, assuming priority of A>B>C. This idea can be made more attractive with an amazing UI and magazine like structure.

2.) Trip4Real

It is a startup which lies in travel and tourism domain. The idea behind this website is that usually when people travel abroad they not only want to see the famous picture but in a way they want to experience the life of a local citizen.  So the idea is that this website provides a platform to local people of the country to post any local event which they might want to organise. For ex if Bob knows how to cook a truly authentic dish or drink of Barcelona, he will post the ad on line so that all those tourists who are visiting Barcelona can attend his class at 'x' cost and specific days and time. This was an example of food category, similar ads can be posted for adventurous games or merely sightseeing.

Important point for such a website is to identify what types of ads can be posted and what is not allowed. For ex how do you stop some one from posting fake deals or deals hosted for illegal agendas. Here basic knowledge of semantic search can be applied. obviously you  need not handle all the cases but if you algorithm can handle or stop  40% of malicious content, it will be more than enough.

3.) Meterup

The idea behind this project was to let the users compare the fares of various cab services. This is another idea which most start ups follow. I call such idea comparator idea. Such start ups access the API offered by various websites and compare the cost and let the parent company/the host company to collect the cost. for ex comparehatke/buyhatke. Now coming back to the MeterUp.

The idea is to access the approx fares returned by APIs of leading cab services and and display the result. The made an app and a website for the same idea. Apart from just showing the fares they also show approx distance and access google map api to know the shortest route. The benefit of implementing such an idea is that you understand how to build an Android app and then you also learn to access various APIs.

4.) Braineet

The idea is to let people post any idea they have. From ideas like 'give historical facts on a pizza cover' to  'a new way to keep your books'. The founders thought that most of the times people invent simple methods to implement a particular idea but usually they have no one to share it with. Obviously, people can share such creativity with their friends on facebook but it does not amplify the idea. So they thought they can give a platform to people where they can come in and post their thoughts or suggest an idea. The interface is really simple and easy to use.

Once again, you can take this idea and to enhance your skills you can advance it to either domain : 1.) Make use of complied CSS libraries like Bootstrap to create responsive design or 2.) Implement artificial intelligence or data mining at the back-end to gather the data or rough statistics like how many of feedback about XYZ company are positive and how many are negative using the comments not discrete ratings of any form. 3.) Or use ElasticSearch/solr as search library to search efficiently.

@Test(expected = ComputerEngineeringErrors.class)

You might be wondering about the strange title of this post.
In this post I am going list a few mistakes which I regret doing back in college. I don't know how different my professional life would have been had I not made these mistakes but all I know is that these were "mistakes" which shouldn't have been made and should not be repeated by any one.
Before getting into lessons learnt following is the technical description of the title.

@Test is the Junit annotation to tell the Java compiler that following function is a test.
When we test a function say divide(int a, int b) {return a/b;} and we know if b is equal 0 we will get a "divide by zero", so to tell the test case that we expect an exception thrown we write expected = ErrorExpected.class

MISTAKE 1: Chased internship in a giant technical companies rather than working in a startups or a research based project.
I was so intrigued by the idea of how computer engineers work professionally that I deliberately ruined the opportunity of working in 2 startups during summer vacations via on-campus internship programs. In one of them, the interviewer had known a senior of mine, for whom I had made some

plugin to be used in his website. I didn't know that he(senior) was now working with this startup and even before my interview process, the interviewer told me that he already knew about the plugin which I had made for that website and is really looking forward for the interview and I totally ruined my interview deliberately because I knew that if I take this internship opportunity, I would not get a chance to appear for another internship interview via the college placement cell. To add on to my mistakes, I didn't even made an effort to at least pick a research based project under some professor's guidance so that I could at least do a quality project in the vacations. In the end, no more companies came for the internship process and secondly I thought it would be too dumb to do a research based project and it won't give me a professional exposure.

MISTAKE 2: Underestimated the power of delta change in resume
Through out my engineering life, I continued to skip of small project. Ex, a professor once had a project which was say, 75% done and the professor was looking for students who could test it, continue the development and give the performance number but the research or the scope of that project had already been defined and done. I thought since I had not started on this project, I should not take this task because it won't be 100%  my own research. In my fourth year of engineering I realized that to do a big project one should preferably begin with such smaller things because first of all it is not too much burden all together and secondly, one should not dream of coming up with something big in just first attempt.Most of the owners of successful startups had initially failed bad in their carrier before making it big.
Such delta changes in your resume reflect a lot of change at the end of your engineering life. Rather than waiting for a big day when everything will fall in place it is a lot better to do something small today even if it is as meager as learning a new desktop shortcut .

MISTAKE 3: Ignored some really good ideas
In college, I had a tendency to grade my ideas as "Not good" and ignore them. I don't know why I did that may be because I was afraid of executing/implementing them or may be it was because I didn't believe in my own ideas or I didn't brainstorm on it a lot. A lot of times I ignored the ideas because I felt that there was a technical blocker which I am bound to face in future and didn't know about the right resources or right people to contact. One time I had this idea that there should be a website where students can post some class notes or exam papers. Though this idea may seem to cliche now but back then we didn't have any such website, so it was actually a potential opportunity which I totally missed. A few days later some seniors launched such website using a basic "Wordpress Template" and with just basic functionality to download pdf verison of notes and exam papers. That idea could have been extended to an app on with uploading rights to based on college identity/admission number.
Lesson learnt was never ever ignore your ideas even if you feel they are too basic or not so important. Because you feel that something is missing around your college or locality, it is very much probable someone else is missing it too. All problems are opportunities is disguise and don't fill your eyes with tears if you miss one because it will double the chances of missing another. Important point on which you should work upon is figuring out that whether have you missed an opportunity or not. For ex, when I didn't work on the college website idea, I didn't even recognise it as an opportunity.

I hope that you will not make these mistakes or miss another opportunity.

Google Women Techmaker - 2014 - My experience :)

One of the aim of this blog is to encourage women in technology. So, I thought that it is best time to write my first post specially targeting this aim. What can be a more motivating than getting a chance to get training from Google and  a chance to interact with Google's employee while enjoying Google food.

Since my college days, Google has been one of my dream company and so it is for almost every software engineer. But I did get a chance to visit Google Bangalore office, get training from Speechless and join the Google's cause to help motivate women in technology.

This all began around October, 2014 when I came across a form from Google saying it is inviting applications for women/girls who are in technology and feel for the cause of motivating others. I was super delighted to see the form because I was thinking about doing something to help budding technologists and this seemed to me a perfect opportunity. So I read on, there were two essays with no word limit which the candidates were supposed to fill. One of the questions was what was your motivation  that you made you women in technology and what are your goals/objective another question was why do feel for this cause of helping the female technologists.
I submitted the application and then waited and waited. After around 15 days or so I received a mail congratulating me for getting selected in Techmakers program. They selected 10 girls from all over India.
Then a Program Manager scheduled a call with all the selected techmakers individually and we were supposed to confirm the dates. As I was supposed to fly from Delhi to Bangalore twice once around November beginning and next time around December beginning.

Skipping to the day of training. This time the aim was to introduce the techmakers to each other. Meet the PMs involved in this program. I also met the Country Head of Startup Support ecosystem at Google and other employees of Google Bangalore. There was also a team which had come to the Bangalore's office from Google Hyderabad. Another aim of this visit to give us public speaking training which would ultimately help us to motivate women in technology. The best part about the training was that no matter how much it sounds non-tech but there were a lot of technical discussions going on there.I came across other programs in which Google acts a technical support for start up ecosystem. I interacted with software developers there to know what exactly do they work on in this office.
For the training purpose. Actors/comedian from Speechless had come to India specially. That training was the best of all the trainings.The training began with a weird game in which all the candidates and PMs of Google were made to stand in a circle and we were supposed to innovate various sounds or body actions. Then the aim was to pretend that we are giving something delicate to someone else in different styles. After every one hour we would get break time. In which we used to explore every corner of Google's office. From Oatmeal to super amazing but unhealthy giant brownies. From a toffee to ice-cream, fruits we had so much to chose from. Note - lunch was altogether a different meal. In our next training session, we were divided in groups of 2 and we were asked to come in front of presentations. We didn't know what was there in the slides but we knew the story line around which we were supposed to speak. We chose Hindu mythology Ramayan. So, a random slide used to come on screen, say an exploding bulb or tree inside a house or green star and we were supposed to speak using the objects shown in slide and sticking to the story line we had picked in the beginning. Then we had an amazing lunch.
After lunch each techmaker was asked to come on stage and tell her story. THIS WAS THE BEST PART OF THIS ENTIRE PROGRAM. The stories were so different yet so encouraging and motivating. I prepared a story of around 9 min in my head but once I went on stage I skipped the unnecessary part and finished it in merely 4 min. I was given the feedback to include the details and go more in depth. Then we had dinner with Google team :) and we headed back to our hotel.

Next day real work began. Target was to shoot a a 4-5 min video. The content could be or could not be in line with our final video's script. This time aim was not to get the script right but to get us friendly with the camera. Each one of us got a chance to become director, producer, camera man, mic man, make up artist etc. It was fun to play all these roles that too with a professional camera and editing system right in front of you. In one of the practice session, a techmaker was speaking somewhere around the middle of her script another girl said CUT,STOP IT. We all were shocked and literally scared. It was like we were lost in the silence of the room with just one voice speaking. We asked her what happened and it turned out the speaker was not wearing a mike while the camera was rolling. We had an amazing time.
At the end of the day, 3 best videos were replayed. We were given a book/reading material and a super cool Women Techmaker logo stickers shown on the top of the screen. I have these stickers on both of my laptops to remind me about objective of this program every time I look at my laptops.

After I came back to Delhi, merely after a week our so, we started getting mails to prepare for the main day. We were sent literally 10 TB of videos/articles etc to help us make our final script. And each week we used to have around an hour call with Google Hyderabad PMs who met us in Bangalore. The first script which I wrote and the final one had only "is", "was", "the" common in them. The script went through so many changes. On the day of shoot, I was so tired because of flight and all that I asked all girls - present on that day to get their videos shot before me. Finally when my turn came I gave my best shot with a minor fumble in one word. They asked me to give another shot but I don't know was it the lights glaring right on my face or was it the relief that my first video was pretty good, I could never speak more than 15 sec. I either used to fumble badly or used to discover a new word while speaking the script. One time rather than saying opportunistic I said oppotunityyyIstic and then I was wondering  whether it is a word or not. Finally, after giving 3-4 such 15-25 sec shots I gave up and said I am okay with first video itself.
Then I was given a logitech camera to shoot videos and a shrug with [W] logo.
Next day I took my flight to Hyderabad, to meet a friend and then came back to Delhi.

We get mails from the PMs now and then suggesting us some good reads.

No doubts the experience was amazing, innovative, technical, funny and unforgettable. I met the one of the finest people in technology who were not only professional but also down to earth. I met with such fine other female developers and discussed with them what all problems I feel that I faced being a part of minority group in the technical industry and got their advice too.

Once again thanks Google. This time not for the pic or URLs but for one of the most amazing learning of my life.And for actually taking a step forward to motivate women in technology rather than sitting back and just publishing statements on newspaper that "companies should aim for diversity."