Miraj Shah

My name is Miraj Shah and I am pursuing a dual degree in Economics and Mechanical Engineering at BITS Pilani. I just completed my second year and I am looking for opportunities to work on things that are useful and will impact the society in a positive way. In the pursuit for the same, I came across Bitcoin and Blockchain technology for the first time during my second semester. I was so intrigued and interested by this new technology that I decided to dedicate the entire summer after my first year to try and learn more about this technology and get some hands-on experience by taking up a few courses and working on some projects along the way. I did exactly that during the summer after my first year. I learned about Bitcoin and how the cryptography and underlying technology works. Then I learned about Ethereum and how to write smart contracts on Ethereum using the Solidity programming language. Here are some Ethereum/Solidity projects I have worked on:

1. Habit Marauders: A Dapp to gamify habit tracking. Link: https://github.com/Miraj98/habit-marauders
2. Prana: A proof of concept for a decentralized social networking app made on Ethereum, using IPFS as the storage layer. Link: https://github.com/Miraj98/prana

Other than Blockchain I was really interested in making a social network for my college campus. I was really inspired by the local social network that IIT Bombay and IIT Gandhinagar had. I think having a great social network can actually allow me to touch the lives of many people in a positive way if I am able to do it right. So along with a senior, I am building a social network for BITS. It is called Assist. Assist is an interest/community based social network where people can meet new people on campus who have similar interests. We are trying to put a lot of focus on making more human interaction in the real world with the app just being a platform. Hence organising meetups, events and making it super easy to send anyone a hangout request are some of the central themes of the app. The app right now is in beta and we are hopeful that we will be able to launch it by the end of June, 2019. I am the only Frontend developer of the application. I am using the React Native framework for the same.

Thank you for taking the time to read about me. There is so much to learn and hopefully I get a chance to attend the hackathon and come a step closer to changing the world for better :)