Harshit Maurya

Since my time in middle school, I had been fascinated by the technology around me and was always motivated to uncover the innards of a particular system. First introduced to languages like Logo and BASIC in my curriculum, I developed a taste for programming. Actual programming began when I was introduced to Java, where I got to learn the concepts of Object-Oriented Programming and optimization techniques.

In my first year at IIT Roorkee, I tried my hands on exploring the various fields of Computer Science to figure out where my passion lies.

My passion for programming and building something new is what drove me towards the field of development. Currently, I am in my senior year at IIT Roorkee and have been a part of various campus oriented projects that aim to ease the lives of students.

I have been a developer at SDSLabs, which is a small group of students that fosters the growth of software development on our campus. Being a part of this club, I have worked on many software and Web development projects. Since the group is constantly working on projects for the campus students, I got the opportunity to work on large scale projects and monitor everything from the bug fixes to final deployment stages. Working with tools like git and slack has already enabled me to work efficiently in teams and given insights into aspects of both project lead and project development.

I worked on Study Portal, an SDSLabs project-oriented for the campus. It is a website where students can upload and download course-related files. I used Elasticsearch to index searchable data in Study Portal website and brought down search query time from the scale of 3s to less than 50ms. In another phase of development, revamped the platform using the Django-React stack and mentored juniors in the process.

I have also taken part in many hackathons held in our campus, some of which are SDSLabs Campus Hackathon and Microsoft Code.fun.do. I've been a gold medalist at the Inter IIT Tech Meet 2019, for proposing and building a solution to bridge the gap between the common citizen and bureaucracy.

In addition to development, I am particularly driven to the field of security and have participated in various competitions listed on CTFtime.

Apart from this, I also love the concept of open source and wanted to contribute to the same. I have been trying to contribute in the small ways I could, by having all my projects on GitHub so that others can benefit from the same and trying to fix minor bugs that I can.

My Google Summer of Code project was quite interesting and close to me since I could work in the domain I particularly liked, digital music. I had to completely think through the way a DJ might use the application and add features to provide an easier and more interesting DJing experience.

I like to take up new challenges and work in sprints to finish them to create something new.

I have experience in a wide range of tech stack like C++, Qt, Java, PHP, Python, Node.js, HTML5/CSS3, MySQL, JavaScript, React. Thus I would find it convenient to build projects in the hackathon.

Coming to the non-technical part, I am a team player and can speak fluently in English and Hindi. New ideas excite me and fuel my drive to build new products.