User:Tarun2000

Contact Information

Real Name: Tarun Pondicherry
Email: tarunpondicherry at gmail dot com
IRC: tarun2000
Lists: server-devel@lists, devel@lists, uruguay-xo-coordination [at] groups [dot] google [dot] com

Skills

Software: PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, C++, Java, PIC Assembly
Hardware: Digital Logic Design, PIC Microcontrollers
Language: A really tiny amount of French and Spanish

OLPC Work

I'm currently a summer intern working on the Educational Blogger Project with Greg Smith as my mentor. The goal is to provide a simple interface that kids can use to connect to blog tools like Blogger.com. The system will be web based an installed on the XS. Milestones are finalized and we are waiting for user feedback on the mock ups. I'll also be posting weekly progress reports.

About Me

I'm an undergraduate at Princeton University deciding between Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Physics for a major. For the most part I'm a self taught programmer and basically learned coding from reverse engineering FOSS stuff, Google and Wikipedia. I wouldn't say I'm a stereotypical programmer geek, but I am enough of one that go into withdrawal if I don't write code for a while. Right now, I'm very interested in graphical compilers and physics animations. I think anyone can learn programming and want to make it easy for people by developing a graphical language that makes programming as easy as describing the solution.

I also love to teach. On weekends during spring and fall I teach electronics courses which I designed to elementary school children at a local community program. I spend a lot of time also writing tutorials on whatever I work on to put on my website (yes, I know its in desperate need of an update and looks like a kindergartener made it).

I've worked on a few random projects over the past few years (hobby and otherwise). Following are some of my favorites:

• Hex Editor - Hex Editor is an Intel Hex File editor I wrote when I couldn't find on that did what I wanted. Its really proof of "necessity is the mother of invention". I was trying to program a chip for a high school project and got frustrated when my teacher gave me the idea to develop a new editor as well as great input and guidance.
• SMART Pot - This was my senior year project where I designed a system to wirelessly monitor the water level in house plants and alert people when they needed to be watered. I pretty much did everything from design to soldering to coding and etching the PCB. I attribute my love of assembly to this project.
• ElVis - ElVis is a scientific visualization program I worked on for two summers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. I mostly added remote monitoring of data and some new types of graphs. Most of my improvements were for simulations being done for ITER and to research the Motional Stark Effect.