[Techie Tuesdays] Meet Sagar Pandey, Python whiz, Open Source lover, and is only a student

This Tuesday, we bring you a techie who loves python, builds web apps at Hackathons and is a Mozilla contributor… and is still in college. Sagar Pandey, a final year engineering student at Assam university, is majoring in IT. In his early days in Gorakhpur, a tier two town in eastern UP, Sagar didn't show much interest in computers apart what was taught at school and was instead fascinated with video games and pokemon.

Early Days

Sagar’s father passed away in 2007 and his mother worksfor a government organization. Although Sagar studied Java in high school he didn't show much interest in programming at that point. After school, he took a break for a year and then followed his brother into engineering college.

"I applied to Assam University in spot round of AIEEE. So there was no turning back from that round. I filled all three branches(IT, Agriculture and EC) of engineering in the university and it was by pure luck I would say that I got allotted IT. Then I took it from there since I had a brother pursuing B.Tech in Computer Science that time. It was later that year that I met my friends who were in colleges like IIIT Hyderabad and IITs, they told stories about the programming culture at their college. I wanted to have the same but I knew almost nothing"

Introduction to OpenSource

Thing took a turn for Sagar when he saw photos of a Mozilla Meetup in Bangalore on Facebook. He contacted one of the Mozilla representatives and expressed his desire to work with them. They helped him to start a Mozilla chapter in his college. He started taking workshops for web development in his college and started doing bugfixes for various projects.

It was during a Yahoo hackathon last year he built his first web app. It was an application to track trains. Users can enter their PNR number and the app would query and display Information like current status of the train, upcoming station, weather in the coming city etc. The app won the award for best Technical Hack.

Building products for the Blind

Sagar also worked on another project where he developed a library to summarize Wikipedia articles into a few lines for quick reference taking the most important points. At a hackathon by Sequoia Capital last month, Sagar built an app called Knowledgize for the visually impaired. A user could enter a query vocally and can search for that term on Wikipedia. The app would search for the result and summarize the article and then would read the output to the user.

Sagar along with his team also won the TechSparks Hackathon conducted by YourStory. He built an app called RTPI (Right To Provide Information), which enables users across the globe to track the progress of grass root level development of government projects online with the help of crowd sourced images. RTPI uses the data from the World Bank and builds up a timeline for geo tagged images.

Sagar is now looking forward to building something in the social space and Open Source. He believes that "Open source is the biggest motivation for students to develop codes for the betterment of mankind. Also the kind of environment provided for learning and the help available on the platform is amazing and will ensure better growth of the philosophy and awareness in general public.