The trouble with being a perfectionist…

Today, let’s talk about a dirty little secret of mine – Perfectionism. I’ve been observing myself for a while now, and I’ve come to realize that my perfectionist is getting out of control. So, I think it’s time to share about it. Firstly, let’s have a look at the accurate definition in Wikipedia…

Perfectionism is a personality trait characterized by a person’s striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations.

To put it simply, if you become obsessed with imperfections in your stuff (or sometimes, others’ stuff), when you wanna fix it almost immediately and once you’ve done it, you enjoy the pleasure for fixing it, then it’s a nice sign of perfectionism. At least, that’s how it started for me.

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Branching a new blog…

Yeah, it’s been a while since I blogged. I’ve been busy. My vacation is almost over. Though I’m not sure whether I’ve made some reasonable progress, all I can say is that it feels like it went so quickly!

Apart from playing games & watching TV-series, I was coding… well, most of the time. I learned some frameworks for the first few days (for making our app at a hackathon), got involved in Mozilla and patched some nice & easy bugs (Firefox, Seamonkey, Servo, etc.), worked with Python almost everyday for something, and these days I practice a new language – “Rust“.

Got into a hackathon! (for the first time!)

Last year, when I was a newbie coder (I still am, but for now, let’s just say relatively), I tried to get into a hackathon (conducted by “savethehacker“), and I screwed it up. Looking back at those days, I feel like I was quite stupid back then. I had no idea about app-development. Despite of that, I tried climbing something big, without even knowing that I’m gonna fall sometime soon. And, I did. I wasn’t selected. I got a reply after the deadline, that my app couldn’t compete with those 30 teams that got selected.

Hackathon is idea-centric!

Honestly, getting an idea and describing it to the organizers is the most difficult part. Because, that’s what’s gonna get you inside any hackathon! (and yeah, it applies to all hackathons). The organizers should feel confident about you, that your app is worthy to get part in their hackathon. This, I figured out later that year. So, idea matters! Once you get it, you’re only a few days away from winning. And, if you don’t win, it’s certain that you screwed up somewhere. Now, getting back to my story…

One fine day, during my semester exams (last month), I got an invitation mail from the same fellas, saying that they’ve come back with a much larger hackathon this time, where up to a 100 teams have the chance to get selected. I gotta do something, right? The problem is that I’m quite slow. I don’t get an idea whenever I needed one. I just think of the situation once, and it pops sometime later (sometimes, even after a few days, but it definitely pops!). So, I “not getting an idea” was an obsession for a while.

Breaking the Vigenère cipher…

Whenever I encounter a problem that interests me, I get some kinda obsession to solve it. Happens all the time! And this time, it was in a course on “Cryptography” (in Coursera). Well, it’s been an year since I pursued online courses, because I’m simply more occupied by my own works, and I also got bored of those submissions, deadlines, quizzes, etc.

One fine day, I got a mail advertising this course, which got me curious. I wanna know how it’s gonna be. After all, cryptography is the one that got me into some serious programming in Python & Javascript (about a year ago). Anyways, there was this problem, where we’re expected to decipher a “ciphertext” encrypted using a variant of the Vigenère cipher. I got interested as soon as I saw that…

Even though they expect people to solve the problem in C/C++, I (being a Pythonist) decided to get it done with Python! The Vigenère cipher is nothing but a major update to the Caesar cipher. I presume you already know about the Caesar cipher has a keyspace of “1” – just a number to say how much to shift all the characters (so, anyone with a pen & paper can crack it, as it contains only 26 possibilities), but Vigenère extended it, giving additional security.

Squashing my first bug at Mozilla!

I’m involved in Mozilla for a few days now. So, I’m just gonna talk about my experience today…

I presume you know that I’ve paused my contribution to Stack Exchange for a while, partially because (well, frankly) I got bored, and because I needed time to learn some new stuff. Later on, I was much more involved in coding, as Python & Javascript have caught my attention very well. Assignments, problems, lab works, project works, I use both of them all the time. Soon, I got bored! (again!) I wanted something new (which happens all the time!)…

How did it start?

I remembered Manish’s advertising about Mozilla sometime ago (well, if you’re also planning to get involved, then I suggest his post, which nails down the whole thing precisely, because this is just my experience with the community). When I had a chat with him, he said these exact words, “Mozilla is the most welcoming community I’ve ever seen!”. So, I joined Mozilla, by which I mean I signed up for Bugzilla & Mozillians which are pretty much enough for the start. I later realized that the former is for actually doing stuff, while the latter is for showing it off!