My journey to Python

It starts even before one can think. So, i was in my first semester of my Bachelor's in Engineering and it was December of 2004. I was back at my home place, Jaipur for vacations. There i met my school friend Himanshu Bhojwani, who made some real cool robotics and other electronics gadgets and he showed me them. I was quite curious and asked him how did he do all that stuf. Technology and gadgets had always interested me. So, he told me about Parallel Port programming and about Visual Basic 6.0. He said that he did all this by connecting his electronics stuff to parallel port of his computer and use Visual Basic to get his stuff done. That evening while returning back home, i purchased Parallel Port Programming. My initial plan was to use C++ to do the programming part, but looking at the ease VB6.0 could make same programs in much less time, i decided to learn VB6.0. I also got a neighbor of mine, who was a Software Engineer at that time, to guide me out with VB. Well, as time went on, i forgot the Parallel port programming, and was making small applications in VB6.0. This language opened a complete new world for me. From C++ to VB 6.0.

It dates back to the Jan of 2006. I was a fourth semester student student at Bharati Vidyapeeth University, Pune and those were the days of college tech-fest, Bharatiyam. I was in the college technical team, softwares division, supervised by Hemant Sahni, who was technical head at that time. He is real good when it comes to application software development. I was initially working with the networking team, but when he found out that i had good VB skills, he asked me to help him, as he was using VB and SQL Server 2000 for this application he was designing. We were making a software to manage event scheduling, registrations, accounts and other details for the techfest. At the same time, another technical head of our University, Siddharth Upmanyu was working on a online c/c++ compiler. (Yea, the same which was hosted earlier on this blog). Somehow i was quite interested in this "online compiler" business. So, i went to him, and asked 'Sir, how have you made this cool stuff?'. And he gave me a detailed information about the underlying architecture and flow, most of which bounced off my brains. So i went ahead with another question, 'Which language you used to code all this stuff?'. 'Perl', came the reply. I had no clue there was a programming language "Perl". What kind of a name is this, i was thinking. And then i said, "Perl?". Judging my expressions, he said "its a language similar to python in some aspects". And i was even more confused. How can anyone name a language as "Python". Obviously i had no clue what Python was. But I decided not to make another fool of myself, so i said "Oh Python! Its a cool language" and hurried back home. LoL

After i came back, i did a quick Google for Perl and Python, and decided to learn one of the language. Perl looked a little complex to me, so i went on for Python, and haven't looked back since then. I used Python for almost everything i had to do programatically!! I had always been in love with Python.

After graduation, I joined Harbinger-Systems, Pune and was working on ColdFusion MX7 and SQl Server 2000. I used Python for some small programs and bot, which helped me in my day to day job. After that i am currently working with Oxylabs Networks, where I am working in a language i love, Python :-)

This is in short, my love story with Python, a tale of inspiration, aspiration and willingness.