Tag Archives: enjoy studies

Enjoy Studies v0.1a

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Yesterday, I rolled out the first of supposed many releases of Enjoy Studies. (I really have a bad rep with projects that start and never end…)
For all those who are wondering what this is all about, Enjoy Studies is an attempt to help students who want to learn and are facing some trouble with it. This is an idea in progress and everyone can have a say in this. Our final aim is to provide an alternative to conventional education which engages and provides an awesome intellectual framework for anyone willing to learn anything.
That being a really generalized statement and idea, I will list out the detailed motives and steps on the Enjoy Studies blog

This being my personal blog, I’ll try to keep to non-tech parts of the site. The first of them is what exactly does the site do? Right now, it just provides a box for you to post any doubt/question you have. We do not restrict you to be confined in streams of conventional education, career, life in general. May be, we are named such that you kinda get a feel that they you to ask questions only related to education. :P
When we have an answer for you, we mail you back. In case of questions related to academia, it might end with only 1 reply. In case of *deeper* questions, its more like a series of mails / chats etc than a single question and answer format. When we finally do find a generic for-public answer, we save it with us so that it can be used to help. So from where I see it, its going towards being some mix of a QnA site for V1. The major differences between a standard QnA site and Enjoy Studies are,
#1 The mentor gets personally involved in many cases. (did I mention we have an open mentor/mentee concept? more on that on the Enjoy Studies blog later)
#2 In many cases, we can have a non-generic reply. So we need to more or less make a model sometime in future which actually helps figure out answers most relevant to you.
#3 In case of 1 answer questions, we keep only the best answer and try to use it as a means for self assessment and fill voids in course content (Yes creating an alternative course is in V2 release plan, but that may change entirely)
#4 Discussion boards. Similar to mentor/mentee, we are to make a discussion board for users to interact among themselves. The final outcome of those discussions are also gonna go into the QnA model.
Apart from the content itself, almost everything on Enjoy Studies is a community effort, right from planning to release. If anyone of you is a great designer or kick ass developer looking to save the world, we can find some task for you and give you some rep for it :)
Do comment on any issues you find with using/ rendering of the site, I am a terrible designer. As the title says, Ask a doubt!

Thinking VS Doing

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After getting back from Kolkata, I have been acting rather crazy crazier than before. I am almost doing a full time thinking now.
What I mean is I spend almost all my waking hour and perhaps some part of my sleeping hours too thinking and planning the future and making up scenarios and trying fit all crazy in it.
Having a nerd-ish brain (refer The Nerd Handbook for details), I wanted to perhaps think through all the possible outcomes and scenarios that the future might hold and make a well-informed and wise choice. What I failed to realize that finding the right choice for today is more like finding the position and momentum of an electron (refer Uncertainty principle). And as always it took me ages to realize this and now perhaps it’ll take some time to get over it.
There are a lot of things that I figured out and learned during this time. Also, I did come up with a daily master plan. I like to call it Multitasking simplified

  1. You can not judge the future
    No matter how hard you try, you can never judge what the outcome of something will be. You can make a best guess based on how things have been in the past and trying to put yourself in that situation and playing out roles in your mind. This may be a good idea while trying to figure things out with code its way more difficult and almost a waste of time when doing this with people and utterly ridiculous when you are doing it with people whom you really don’t know that well…
    The best you can do is know your goals.
  2. Know your goals
    Not knowing what to do next is like the worst thing that can happen to a person and that happens only in two occaisions. Not really having anything on mind or having too much at a time. While I would have loved discussing the first one, I have no personal experience in that region so I can not empathize with you if you are there. So I’ll pick the one I am facing right now. After an initial round of thinking, I figured out that my current goals are the plugin manager for DokuWiki and making the future of Enjoy Studies. I love the idea behind Stalk Ninja and am somewhere in the team (not very sure what role I am playing). So here are three major things that I have to be concerned about right now. Apart from these, there’s a client turned friend’s project which has been ultra delayed due to various reasons (one of them is me!) and he’s been very patient and supportive about all the college semester exams and now with GSoC taking most of my time. Then there’s sambhuti, WP FB Comments, VSSUT.com, moving everything to linode, fundakid, codeitout, hacktard, open-graph plugin, fb-merge and a lot of ideas that keep adding and piling everyday…
    Isn’t it insane to actually have that many goals at once?
    Does that seem like your life? If your answer is yes, you need to drop some things and group goals
  3. Drop things and group goals
    From the huge list of goals you have right now, like it or not, you’ll have to scratch some out and pick only the ones which are in best interests of your future and of the future of others involved. Divide them into groups of tasks you can cut easily, tasks you can not avoid and the gray area.
    In my case, first victims would be Codeitout, hacktard, fundakid and a bunch of other ideas. As I haven’t started with any of them, I probably should wait a little longer. may be also VSSUT.com.
    The things I can not delay at all are the DokuWiki Plugin manager (Because of a deadline, commitment to a huge community and failing the summer of code), the client site (Because he’s a great guy and has been so patient with me). I can’t leave Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies (Because they are things I love a lot).
    In the gray area come WP FB Comments(Sorry Ankit, I had to…), moving all sites to linode and sambhuti (it is pretty much stable now)
    Once you have this list, pick the things you cannot avoid and start prioritizing
  4. Start prioritizing
    When you have just a bunch of really super important stuff left, you need to assign weights to them. According to these weights, you need to devote time and effort for each goal. The best way to understand your priority would be checking in what sequence you wrote the list in the previous step.
    For example in my case DokuWiki Plugin manager is the most important thing. I can not let it pass at any cost (I have let it slack a little in the past 3 days and am feeling terrible already, I need to get to speed again on it)
    Next is the client site. This is something I am not very sure about because there are multiple variables here and according to #1 above, I can not determine which day I’ll get my next task for the project. So I keep it in the important-if-I-have-a-task category.
    Now I have Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies. One is my idea and I am somewhere between an evangelist and a team member on the other. I love them both equally and I see (read: I am bent on making) their fate intertwined in a very deep sense in future. Enjoy Studies has not yet been pushed to a full throttled launch and Stalk Ninja is already there, ready to “pivot” (the famous and often misused startup word, meaning scaling. origin: more or less pivot in popularity chart or sales chart).
    When faced with a decision like this, you have to make your best guess and go with it without blaming yourself 2 years from now.
    In my case, I pick Enjoy Studies… Partly because of a plan Pocha Bhaiya gave me for Enjoy Studies (surprisingly, Kushal Bhaiya came up with a similar plan. both unaware of each other) and mostly because Stalk Ninja has already two minds giving probably more than their 100 percent into it. IMHO, Gaurav and Pocha bhaiya are the best people you would want to hand over your new startup to if you want it to work. (This is the reason I would advise startups to float their projects on SN). I feel we have come to a point that they’ll ask me for help whenever they need me without hesitating and I would do the same. :)
  5. Practice Implementation
    Now that you have a clear weight based analysis of things, you should fix a time based deadline and stop thinking anymore about the need to re-organize this priority list. Unless of course, something really urgent comes up that you need to fit in somewhere…. After this its just plain implementing it over and over again till you find the perfect balance between the goals ;-)
  6. Thinking and Doing
    There can never be a scenario where you can do anyone of the two, they need to go together. When you overdo Thinking, remember step #1 and when doing doesnt give any results repeat step 2-5.

I am sure there must be better authors than me who have written articles like this one. But if you have reached this line, I think I did a pretty good job :P

Who is the Culprit?

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Today I went to the town with a close friend/bhaiya of mine. Lets name him Karan for the sake of simplicity and privacy(though most of the people around me will know it from the details).
I had met him when we started playing of Age Of Empires II (Conquerors Expansion). One of my friends said that he was the pro player in our college…
We got in touch and were soon discussing details of the game. All known strategies, timings etc. Soon I realized that he is a great guy and that I really appreciated a lot of things in him. One of which being that he always took sane and right decisions based on morality and rationality and didn’t fake for who he wasn’t. With time I knew him more and figured out things like he didn’t care for the middle path generally he either chose to follow a rule or to break it completely because that felt like faking to him.

So we went to the town and he was searching for some cyber cafe there. I couldn’t get the point of coming to the town to look for a cyber cafe when you have 2 back papers everyday…
I got my answer soon. We entered a cafe, it was a small room just enough to hold 3 cabins and a photocopier. Karan asked the shop owner for his microcopy!!
For a few seconds I couldn’t get the point of what was going on, because Karan would never cheat. Not in a hundred years, no. The shop owner hadn’t done the copies yet. We went to the ATM, got some money out, went to our favourite bakery, had some grilled sandwiches  and my favourite pastry. Then on my way back, I remembered the brief talk we had the day before. He wanted to do a lot of things in his life and this constant fear of getting another year back was taking its toll. with atleast 9 out of 13 papers to clear and with 2 papers everyday for 3 straight days he didn’t have much of an option. He just couldn’t leave anything to chance this time. I hadn’t seen a bit of confidence in him in the whole past year except for when he played his guitar or played AOE with us.
The system had successfully broken another man into feeling that a little corruption doesn’t hurt. Suddenly, the whole meaning of having back papers changed.

Do we have back papers so that we understand and learn the subject better or are they in place so that someone who has atleast some bit of goodness in him left starts turning into the monster he sees in everyone around him?
Who is to be blamed here? The student who broke under this pressure and otherwise hates his course and this college? The parents of the student who cant let him quit this place even when they can see that this place is literally killing their son just because its a shame to be a drop out? The teachers who are more concerned in showing students how stupid, useless and irresponsible they are rather than really making efforts to understand and resolve issues that students face and help them overcome their barriers? The system of education which focuses on teaching things that are available at the touch of a button on google rather than things that we cant find on the Internet and need to cultivate within ourselves? Or the society which doesn’t let students learn things that they really enjoy and makes them run the stupid rat race?

Enjoy Studies

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24th March, 23:09 IST

Kushal bhaiya(hindi for elder brother. Full name-Kushal Shah ) and I were doing our usual baseless bakwaas (hinglish for baseless chat). there’s something with this guy(Kushal bhaiya), you just sit with him for 30 minutes and you just cant avoid being a your creative best. Ask anyone of the stupid-seven( students who went to “study” at bhaiya’s Asha Institute of Excellence batch2005-2007 11th-12th). :)

I was buying the domain for his school website(http://www.sanvid.com).
We both have this strange overwhelming feeling of  promoting knowledge and we started planning a site for it.

I guess all of you must be aware of the situation India is facing in terms of good teachers (I don’t mean knowledgeable). We have too many students getting into colleges for our present teaching strength to handle. You might think that its the case with just lower level colleges. If you think so, ask an IITian. The problem is same everywhere… There is a huge reason behind this mess but I will get to that later.

We started talking on the basic aims of the website…

26th March, 17:25 IST

We had to go down from education for all to education for just btech electrical n possibly rest of btech coz of limited resources(we need a community of like minds for other courses)

Finally it was decided that we start a knowledge chain reaction kinda thing. We provide list of good books in each subject, references to good video courses, create discussion groups of max 4 ppl to avoid clutter. Create basic rules for a discussion group and try to find supportive teachers to help the doubts that arise from discussions…

A semi-public wiki is another option to create a good course material but I think we shall have that feature later on…

We had to drop SanviD as that was being maintained by a panel of investors and they may not approve of the idea.
We had to get a new name now (grrr)Luckily, I was on call with pooh(Poonam Prusty) and she got in the name searching as well. She suggested the name Enjoy Studies, bhaiya agreed and I got the domain :)

27th March, 14:39 IST

Kushal bhaiya suggested the nick “e-stud“  and thats how we got our nick :)

29th March, 18:35 IST

We started working on the actual specifications of the site.
Whiteboard came up as a great tool for discussions. (We need an actionscript and flash developer help for this)

Basic site layout was discussed that day

3rd April, 17:16 IST

The basic design parts were finalized. I know I am a noob designer. Whats more? I was trying to make it html5 css3 :P

4th April, 13:52 IST

Mr.Splashy Pants :P
We started finding out our pics that would suit the site. hehe it seemed funny yet important to be on the front page of our dream.
Felt like we are going to rock the world. hehe, I wasnt high guys, was just a bit senti…
Colors and gradients were added to the layout, we were making good progress yay!!
“Does this look good?”, “Should I put this image here?”,”Where should the rounded corners go?”
Questions flew and were answered :). Design was edited and re-edited and it finally reached our first beta stage…
I added the name and e-mail basic survey for the site and we were up.