Dhruv Bhatnagar

Who am I?
I am a CS undergrad pursuing my bachelor's at GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi. My interests span across javascript engineering, GIS and data visualization.

I am currently working in the data visualization team at SocialCops where I will be developing an application for business analytics by collaborating with the data team for geospatial data insights.

What am I good at?
My technical skill set includes:

Strong Javascript & ES 5/6/7 practical knowledge
Core NodeJS + Express & SocketIO
Unit testing - Jest, Mocha
REST Architecture
Cloud functions, Cloud Firestore, Serverless Technologies
React ecosystem (Flux, Redux)
Vue ecosystem (Vuex, Nuxt, Vuetify, etc.)
Python 3 - Automation and data scraping
MongoDB & MySQL

What drives me?
A person who is on a constant quest for knowledge, and what better way to gain it. Focused on developing solutions to interesting and diverse technical and intellectual problems, I love the process of mental sparring. I crave for work that lets me devise new approaches, new ideas and push the limits of my creativity, from every angle and from every side & that's the reason I choose software engineering.

What’s the most complex project I have worked on?
Allayer:
A blockchain-based platform to help NGOs work in a synchronous manner during and after a disaster ensuring proper supply and preventing double-spending to the victims. The product includes three applications:

1. Decentralized web application for NGOs - It provides intelligent location-based visualization to the NGOs in real-time that helps them prioritize areas where urgent help is required. It also visualizes the overall progress, status, synchronization among various NGOs & their helping pieces of equipment like ration, etc.
2. Mobile app for the field volunteers - People who are supplying rations to the disaster site need to keep a track of everything and also locate the victims. Our app helps them navigate to ration storage site, then go to the disaster site at a high granularity with the help of our intelligent suggestions and verify the victim.
3. Mobile app for victims - People who can access their mobiles can request for help, ration and medical supplies all in one go. This is an additional feature and doesn't affect the functioning of the app.

Challenges faced:

1. Hard to think from the perspective of a victim and develop an app that truly helps in such a scenario.
2. Also challenging for NGOs to build trust over a web application in a sensitive situation.
3. Generally, network issue arises at a disaster site. To overcome that and finding alternatives was difficult in a real-world situation.

What did I learn?
The problem itself is very complex. We learned to build an approach to understand the problem with best of its proximity and disaster events include a lot of variabilities, building a general solution, which suites all the use cases and serves all type of users, was the greatest learning.

Technologies learned:
Solidity - Most popular smart contract language which is easy to get started. I and all my teammates were noobs in blockchain development but still we'all started learning solidity. (in the hackathon premises :p)
Truffle - Most popular smart contract development, testing, and deployment framework. We required the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), which made our life easier.
Ganache - Used to deploy contracts and develop the application.