Having figured out how the IBM tools worked was one of the main driving force for taking forward my project for The Great Mind Challenge 2010. True to its word, the experience was challenging indeed. We had mailed the preliminary project on the very last day of the deadline by hurrying to the Speed Post in Abids struggling in the very long line. The mailing done all right, I had even forgotten about it when the results of the top 300 teams selected for the next round were announced. I was more than shocked to find our team name among the long list of successful teams. The next step was to give a demo of the project. Little did I know that giving the final touches to make a project work successfully would be so difficult.
The project that I had sent was developed in a huge RAM eating trial version of the IBM developer environment called Rational Application Developer. As if the task of improving the project was not big enough, the horror of finding that the trial version had expired was a considerable blow to me. I spent another week running two parallel endeavors. One to somehow again download a copy of the 8GB RAD and another to make the free software Eclipse to work with IBM's WebSphere Application Server. When I was just about to give up my futile efforts, I suddenly got the whole thing working. I could sleep in peace on that day after several sleepless nights of anxiety.
Juggling between my internship and trying to improve upon the existing project, I successfully gave the User Interface a major re vamp. However the testing required more time and much to my guide's disappointment, I took a week off to focus on the project. Working almost 18 hours a day, I tried to add new features and made sure that they worked all right.
On the day of the presentation, it was raining heavily. The venue being Keshav Memorial Institute of Technology, I entered a little drenched and carrying my laptop safely in a plastic cover. (Here unfortunately you cannot go green). The demo went not as good as I had expected it to be. They asked us if we could show the entire project in Linux within 3 hours and we rushed to find a place to download the software. The University being our only resort, we went there in the rain only to find that it was a bandh and the whole campus was closed. Understanding that it was only a wild goose chase, we gave up the attempts and just went to have a sub.
As you can expect, we could not make it to the top 20 teams in India. Despite the many disappointments, this project will always remain close to my heart as I have learnt a lot from it. I put all my efforts into it and it is in every sense my child although flawed.
If you need any help with the SRS, JSP Programming, DB2 design or setting up Eclipse with WebSphere on Windows Platform, feel free to contact me.
The project that I had sent was developed in a huge RAM eating trial version of the IBM developer environment called Rational Application Developer. As if the task of improving the project was not big enough, the horror of finding that the trial version had expired was a considerable blow to me. I spent another week running two parallel endeavors. One to somehow again download a copy of the 8GB RAD and another to make the free software Eclipse to work with IBM's WebSphere Application Server. When I was just about to give up my futile efforts, I suddenly got the whole thing working. I could sleep in peace on that day after several sleepless nights of anxiety.
Juggling between my internship and trying to improve upon the existing project, I successfully gave the User Interface a major re vamp. However the testing required more time and much to my guide's disappointment, I took a week off to focus on the project. Working almost 18 hours a day, I tried to add new features and made sure that they worked all right.
On the day of the presentation, it was raining heavily. The venue being Keshav Memorial Institute of Technology, I entered a little drenched and carrying my laptop safely in a plastic cover. (Here unfortunately you cannot go green). The demo went not as good as I had expected it to be. They asked us if we could show the entire project in Linux within 3 hours and we rushed to find a place to download the software. The University being our only resort, we went there in the rain only to find that it was a bandh and the whole campus was closed. Understanding that it was only a wild goose chase, we gave up the attempts and just went to have a sub.
As you can expect, we could not make it to the top 20 teams in India. Despite the many disappointments, this project will always remain close to my heart as I have learnt a lot from it. I put all my efforts into it and it is in every sense my child although flawed.
If you need any help with the SRS, JSP Programming, DB2 design or setting up Eclipse with WebSphere on Windows Platform, feel free to contact me.
