Me and few of my friends (H, W, T) have been working on this pet project of ours for quite some time. Noticing the snail like pace (well, almost) in our work, we decided we would meet up at my place and code together. However, T had to rush to Bangalore immediately and W couldn’t make it. So it was finally me and H at my place.

If two computer science enthusiasts meet up at a place, with wi-fi and an unlimited internet connection, they reach a state of bliss where everything else ( food, sleep, etc. ) don’t even bother them. The only thing that would probably fill their hunger is a successful run of their code. And pretty much, this was the state yesterday!

H had come to my place around 1730 hrs on Saturday. After removing all the stuff from his armour, which included 2 laptops, 1 320 GB external HDD, 1 headphone and a few other electrical gadgets, we sat down to plan our stuff. We quickly jotted down the things we needed to do that night and the list was pretty huge. Night-out was the 1st word that occurred to both of us after having planned the stuff.

We took our seats, started coding with amarok running in the background. Wow! I din’t want to move from that place . The tasks ranged from UI modifications ( modifying CSS, argh! ) to writing a custom development environment for our project. Some of the tasks that we did yesterday night

• Set up git repository. Learn how to use it
• A development environment that would enable us to follow a standard and should also increase productivity
• Decrease page-load time
• Use image optimizers to reduce the size of the image
• Trim your javascript/CSS files
• Clean up your HTML/PHP files

That was pretty much the major tasks we covered and, I really learnt so much stuff! I would have a detailed explanation about each of the task in a separate post.

It was a totally different kind of feel working on this project. We started coding it from scratch and we had to solve every single problem that came up. We were exposed to new technologies, and we answered a lot of questions.Why this technology ? Where do we incorporate this ? How do we prevent replication of data ? Why a git repository ? and many more. Finally, we were satisfied with whatever we had done and indeed it was a very productive night-out! Its a fuzzy feeling I experienced that is difficult to put it in words.

I would urge the umpteen college buddies who had done their project together in college, but left it incomplete because of various reasons, to re-start them. You really don’t know how much you can gain out of these meetings. It’s real fun combined with great exposure and knowledge gain.

Long live technology! Computer Science is indeed fascinating