Rahul Saxena

Hello Devfolio,

I am Rahul Saxena, a final year Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate at IIIT Bhubaneswar and I am writing this to express my interest in the Ethereum India Fellowship 2.0 . I came to know about the opening from my friends and fellow developers and needless to say, I couldn't really let a chance to be a part of such an inspiring event slip by.

I have always been a curious tinkerer, and owing to that fact, I have explored a variety of domains in my college life.
I started off with cyber-security wherein I learnt about Networking, Network security, open-sourced security tools such as Metasploit, NMap, WireShark, BurpSuite and other related stuff. Thereon, I co-founded the Information Security Society of my college along with a few seniors and as part of it's activities, we trained our junior students, students from different colleges/school and even government offices in the basics of cyber-security. With this undertaking, I experienced effective communication, team-work and most importantly becoming language/framework agnostic, because to identify security flaws, you have to understand whatever language the target machine runs on and work according to that.

After that, I had brief yet rewarding stint in competitive programming and gained actual hard programming skills and the ability to solve algorithmic puzzles. I was consistently ranked in the top tier of my college coding competitions.

Next, I moved onto Data Science and due to this foray, I was exposed to the R Language and also Python. I learnt everything about Data Engineering, Data Manipulation, Machine Learning Algorithms, Data Visualisation, Dashboard creation(R Shiny), back-end development and other related parts to be able to deliver end-to-end data science products. To test my understanding and for practical experience I created two highly impactful and useful web apps/ dashboards using R Shiny for the benefit of my college students.
My experiences with the R Language pushed me into open source and I therefore worked as the core developer of a CRAN listed core package of the R Language as a part of Google Summer of Code 2020. I wrote some very low-level R code in order to successfully exceed my mentor's expectations and triumph my GSoC 2020 convincingly.
In my final year, I've picked up cross-platform mobile application development using Flutter and made quite a few applications as personal projects. I've built a fully functional chat application completely wired with a backend database and secure authentication.
Also, I've actively been developing projects in the MERN stack to brush my full-stack web development skills. I'm also proactive in learning the basics of devops to be a sufficient and fully functional developer :D

As for professional experience, I have had a successful summer research internship at Indian Institute of Technology, Patna in the field of Networking of Electric Vehicles in my 2nd year of graduation and in my 3rd year I was selected as a Google Summer of Code 2020 student developer for the R Project for Statistical Computing, where I successfully completed the task that I set for myself and went beyond the scope of the project into devops for a more holistic experience.

The decision to apply for Ethereum India Fellowship 2.0 stems from my own beliefs and experiences. Also, with the ongoing pandemic, I firmly believe that the adoption rate for tools backed by blockchain, will only rise. Thus I want to be a part of a company that is all set to cater to the needs of countless professionals very soon, enabling me to operate at a scale that might only be a distant dream for many developers.