Archana Sahoo

I am a Final Year Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate at NITK, Surathkal. I am a Competitive Programming Enthusiast. I love to learn and explore. I like interacting with enthusiastic people. I am interested in Web development. I have started exploring Machine learning and Cloud recently.
To be honest, I chose to pursue computer science after school without much thought, purely because that was on trend and considered prestigious. Little did I know that the logic, mathematics, algorithms and ideas that form the backbone of the subject would make me fall in love with it. The way that a small piece of code can make something huge happen is what fascinates me the most. It is an art which lets you express your creativity through logic. There are a few significant things that helped me realize and strengthen my interest in computer science. The first milestone in my journey so far was when I experienced an amazing sense of satisfaction on having developed a project right from scratch, it was a simple simulation of an ATM. I participated in ACM ICPC in my sophomore and junior year of college. Participating in competitive programming contests regularly made me realize the value of optimization of code and how wonderfully a code can be optimized through logic saving a lot of memory and time. In my sophomore year, I participated in Microsoft’s Code.fun.do hackathon and developed a web application which recommends recipes based on the leftover ingredients in your fridge, within 24 hours. Collaborating in team projects helped me understand the importance of sharing knowledge and how we always learn and perform more efficiently when we share. The plethora of options the field provides is what that keeps me always interested. There is always so much more to explore. The bottom line is I love to solve problems, optimize the solution, apply logic in developing software and contribute to it. I would love to achieve a strong foothold in the field that I enjoy practising. I enjoy learning from people who are masters in their field, about their take on the concepts of computer science and reading about their work. With most of the community turning to open source, it has become even easier to collaborate and extend our contribution. I implemented an algorithm which enhances the performance of TCP as an open-source contribution to ns-3. It is amazing how many people at different places can collaboratively contribute to a single project, with the help of proper documentation of their contribution. Other major projects that I have done include an IMDb scraper which scrapes multiple pages of IMDb website for ratings of movies and a web application which classifies a message into various categories based on its toxicity level using deep learning.
I interned at Credit Suisse, Pune where I worked on building a Quality Assurance Solution Platform for Business Analysts which involved development of RESTful endpoints. In my leisure time, I like reading novels and dancing. I see myself as a person who would love to be a part of the solution, contribute to the community, be significantly good at coding so that she can extend her knowledge to others and someone who constantly pushes others to realize their potential.