Hey, this is abhishalya.

GCI 2019 Week 1 -- Great start!

So, it has been few days since the week 1 of the GCI 2019 has ended. I was very very active during the first week. It is definitely hard to handle the school work as well as GCI at the same time. The weekends are especially hectic since we just have to do a lot considering the time we get there.

I was almost hurrying everyone to review the tasks, etc. I later realized that it is being a bit too much and I should eventually stop pushing the mentors. But, that gave me a very good start. I was able to complete ~9 tasks in the first week itself which is great I think since last year I was able to do 10 tasks in total!

The week 2 is on, and I’m going a bit slower than last week but I don’t mind it. I believe its not about winning to me. I probably won’t be able to visit US even if I won. So, I’m just trying to get my best in the competition and learn something from every minute I’m spending on the tasks. So I’m choosing the tasks which would help me learn something. Maybe that’s not an efficient strategy if you have to win, but surely you’ll learn a lot that way and that will definitely help you later.

Finally, I’m really thankful to the mentors of Julia since they tolerated my messages/questions. (I do ask a lot of questions :P)

GCI 2019 -- A slow but steady start

Google Code-in 2019 has started earlier this week and I was able to get right into completing tasks the day it started. I’m focused on contributing to Julia Programming Language this year. I’ve been interested in learning more about Machine Learning a lot and contributing to Julia would get me a very good start towards that.

Till now I have completed about three tasks with the fourth one submitted for review. All the three tasks I was able to complete introduced me slightly to the Julia syntax. I never actually sat down and learned all syntax, since I believe that is very time consuming and you might just easily forget those. Instead practicing makes much more sense and you won’t forget that easily once you’ve done some work with them.

I expect to complete the fourth task by today itself, assuming the mentors would be active later tonight. I hope I’ll keep updating this blog with much more posts. I might just have a blog post on the fourth task if it is at least partially accepted by the mentors.