User:Tarun2000

Contact Information

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

OLPC Work

I'm currently a summer intern working on the [Educational Blogger Project] with [Greg Smith | User:Gregorio] as my mentor.

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.