Biography for Saurav Bhattacharya


Briefly about me

I am from India and I am 22 years old. I speak English, Hindi and Bengali(my mother tongue). I also understand a bit of French and Spanish.

About my study

I am pursuing my undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, India. Currently I am in my pre-final year of studies. As a part of my curriculum I have worked in several programming projects, which has led me to my love of coding experiences.

My interests

My interests lie in working with and getting to know how different programming languages work, and how they can be applied to varied application areas, in order to come up with softwares to solve the problems of the world (or learn more about them).

Besides that, I play the violin and I'm also a singer. I love exploring new places, meeting new people from around the world and getting to know about them and their culture.

My non-Smalltalk experiences so far

I spent my last summer in Switzerland (epfl.ch) where we worked in a social-network security problem, made the tools for the analysis and came up with valuable insights on protecting the privacy of the graph. The work involved working with Java, PostGreSQL and Bash Scripting (including AWK and C)

Before, I have worked in a distance learning (e-learning) project for students living in remote places to get access to their education from their homes (with only an internet connection and a laptop). The work involved working in strict OO design, Actionscript and Ant.

I have also worked in Python, C++, OCaml, PHP and Prolog for other academic projects, and have a working experience in all of them.

My Smalltalk experiences so far

My Smalltalk experience has been relatively new. I joined the community only a few weeks back, but jumped right in to learn more about it (and the Pharo environment), which I found very exciting.  I have made a couple of small apps, to gain insight into the underlying architecture and I intend very much to work further for Smalltalk for some concrete contribution.

Why am I interested in Smalltalk?

Three things: Self-contained GUI/IDE/VM, pure OO Design and large variety of application areas. Also, you simply just tend to love it.

Will I stay with Smalltalk after the project is finished?

I'd like to mention the warm welcome and the friendly interaction I received from the people when I first joined this community a few weeks back. This rid me of my fear to speak up. Sean, Damien, Bejamin, Stephane, Yuriy and Carla; all have been very helpful and have pointed me in the right direction. And I have just begun to learn about this beautiful language.

So, yes. I would definitely like to stay and contribute more to the Smalltalk language and the community, even after the project is finished.




Updated: 16.4.2012