Developer Showcase

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Kamlesh Nagware, CTO Blockchain at Snapper Future Tech.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on and how you got into blockchain

I am currently working as the CTO Blockchain at Snapper Future Tech (SFT). SFT is a global blockchain development company offering blockchain solutions development and training services and creating versatile tracing and authentication products and platforms powered by  blockchain. We create various products to empower enterprises, academia and government to achieve efficiency never experienced before. An innovative technology product company, SFT is connecting global ecosystems through its suite of Trust as a Service (TAAS) products and platforms powered by blockchain. 

My blockchain journey started when I was part of IBM India and, at the same time, the Hyperledger project was started by Linux Foundation. I can say proudly that I was one of the mentors in the IBM accelerator program for blockchain start-ups and mentored 10+ start-ups during early enterprise adoption. I started with Hyperledger Fabric 0.6 and have been consistently part of the Fabric community from 0.6 to 1.0 active status to first LTS release 1.4.x and now another LTS 2.2.x. 

I have been closely associated with Hyperledger from its founding days. It’s been a very good experience to co-lead the Hyperledger India chapter and build the Hyperledger community in India.

What Hyperledger frameworks or tools are you using in your projects? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

I have been part of the Hyperledger Fabric journey from 0.6 to 1.0 active status to first LTS release 1.4.x and now another LTS 2.2.x. It is always interesting to be part of the early journey of any open source project. Other than Hyperledger Fabric, I’ve used Hyperledger tools like Explorer for blockchain dashboard and Calliper for benchmarking Fabric networks. 

Hyperledger has umbrella projects, great suits of projects, tools to solve different kinds of business problems. Hyperledger Indy and Aries are for solving identity management problems. In Hyperledger, other than Fabric, the most used and talked about projects are Indy and Aries. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated interest in the identity and credential solution using Indy and Aries. Immunity passports is an example of such use cases.

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

I think there should be more focus on cross-Hyperledger project collaboration for interoperability between different Hyperledger projects. Hyperledger Aries is a very good project for building credential solutions, but it only supports the Indy blockchain protocol. It will be fantastic to see Aries supporting other Hyperledger projects like Fabric.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain? 

Blockchain has become key technology for digital transformation strategies, but it’s not necessary to apply blockchain in every business case. Don’t try to use blockchain where it’s not required. Always follow a decision matrix for selecting use cases and the blockchain protocol that is best suited for any particular use case. 

For reference, please check out this decision tree by the World Economic Forum. The decision tree is composed of a number of questions that assist in defining whether a blockchain is the correct approach for a particular business or not.

If you want to start learning blockchain, this is the right time. As a developer, start with any one blockchain protocol first and build an application. Start with the Getting Started Guide (like this one for Hyperledger Fabric), understand the protocol’s components, get a clear understanding of its smart contract, consensus mechanism, SDK/API for smart contract and client application development. You can also start with any sandbox environment like minifabric or IBM Blockchain code extension, which makes blockchain application development easy. 

There are huge opportunities for open source contributions. Master one protocol and start contributing to its open source community.

As Hyperledger’s projects continue to mature, what do you see as the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result?

In the coming years, the most interesting use cases would be in sustainable supply chain, e-governance, healthcare, digital identity, CBDC (Central bank digital currency), waste management and renewable energy. 

These are five use cases where I see more adoption and blockchain implementation in coming years:

• Sustainable supply chain
• E-Governance – citizen services, transparent government
• Digital Identity – self-sovereign identity & verifiable credentials
• Agriculture – traceability throughout the agri value chain
• Renewable energy – carbon emission tracking, energy trading

What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

With “blockchain,” the first thing that comes to mind is trust and transparency, so blockchain can solve any kind of problems where those are needed. One specific problem that I hope blockchain could solve is in bringing trust and transparency to the agri product chain in India so that farmers get fair pricing for their yields/crops.

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

Blockchain technology is evolving so I hope to see many blockchain protocols and different consensus mechanisms. 

1.    I believe that everyone wants to see interoperability in blockchains. By interoperability, I don’t just mean blockchains talking to each other at the protocol layer but at the smart contract level. Interoperability of governance frameworks is also very important for mass adoption.

 2.    I hope to see performance and transaction throughput improvements so that blockchains will be able to process transactions like card processing or UPI companies are able to do. 

3.    I hope to see well-defined and adopted blockchain global standards. 

4.    And I hope to see trusted computing meet blockchain. This could happen with Hyperledger Avalon off-chain trust protocol adoption and integration with other Hyperledger DLTs.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

One of the best pieces of advice I received from Sameer Pise, Program Manager at Mphasis, is that “It is just code and written by human beings only so, if he/she can write it, then obviously you can fix it. So don’t give up until you’ve fixed it.” Another valuable piece of advice I heard from Naresh Jain, COO/Co-founder of Snapper Future Tech, is that technically everything is possible. Don’t say “NO” without trying it.

What technology could you not live without?

Agriculture? Electricity? Computer? Internet? All are connected, and we can’t live without each of them.

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Anand Banik, Principal Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on and how you got into blockchain.

When I joined Walmart Global Tech’s Supply Chain Tech team, one of the challenging tasks was how to do data reconciliation in multi-party transactions. Conventional technology stacks like API or Messaging frameworks were designed for transactions that involved data-transmission with minimum validations. For the most part, they were point-to-point and required complex architecture for use cases that involved multi-party transactions. Blockchain, with its distributed architecture, immutability and smart contracts, was an ideal candidate for multi-party transactions – especially in supply-chain use cases like food safety, where my journey with blockchain and specifically with Hyperledger began.

What Hyperledger frameworks or tools are you using in your projects? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

Most of the work I have done is on Hyperledger Fabric, but I have also dipped my toes in Sawtooth. I find Explorer to be a great tool for monitoring and Caliper for performance testing. Also, the Blockchain Automation Framework seems to be an awesome tool for deploying the network and maintaining its state in a cloud agnostic way. I am keeping a keen eye on Aries for the work being done on decentralized credentials.

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

As the adoption of blockchain increases across various industries, data and technology standardization would play a key role in their success. I believe one of the focus areas for Hyperledger should be making interoperability part of its core principles.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain? 

The best way to get started on blockchain is to start reading the “Getting Started Guide” to a framework (e.g., this one for Hyperledger Fabric) and then try to run and tweak any sample application you can get your hands on. It’s also important to understand the design principles of blockchain to effectively implement blockchain solutions to solve business problems.

As Hyperledger’s projects continue to mature, what do you see as the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result?

In my opinion, one of the most complicated use cases that could benefit from blockchain technology is global trade. Personally, I am also rooting for an implementation of blockchain to maintain travel records like visas and passports.

What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

To use transparency and visibility to establish trust.

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

In the next five years, I hope to see adoption of blockchain technology in the areas of trade finance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare and learning credentials.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

Experience is gained through failures, not success.

What technology could you not live without?

Electricity

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Mohit Kumar Sethi, Enterprise Blockchain Engineer at KrypC Technologies.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on and how you got into blockchain

At KrypC, I work on the development of KrypCore, which is our core offering. KrypCore allows organizations to accelerate their blockchain journey using Hyperledger Fabric. It abstracts complexities of deployment, governance and chaincode management and lets users focus on the business logic. We have used KrypCore to design and deploy a variety of use cases in production ranging from supply chain, provenance, trading and micro finance. 

I have also had the opportunity to work in the field of smart cards, cryptography and payments. The application focused on secure messaging, digital signatures and immutability. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency were natural areas of interest as they related to cryptographic security and payments. We did a deep technical study of Bitcoin and realized how it has stitched existing cryptographic concepts and P2P networks to form an immutable decentralized token network. The challenge we tackled was how to the advantage of immutability and autonomous contracts to the enterprise business and hide the complexity of the protocol. 

What Hyperledger frameworks or tools are you using in your projects? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

We use Hyperledger Fabric as the primary DLT. We use the combination of Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Fabric SDK Go as part of our internal SDK to develop all Fabric-based projects. 

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

From a Hyperledger Fabric point of view, I think: Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) & Privacy Enhancements. Hyperledger Fabric has evolved a long way since version 1.0. PDC (Private Data Collection) provided solutions to many of the privacy and compliance needs. However, further strengthening of privacy can be achieved using ZKP or some related privacy preserving  techniques. 

The introduction of implicit PDC policies have simplified adoption and management of PDCs in large member networks. The current features, capabilities and design approach for PDC are well suited for most use cases. However, there are scenarios where privacy demands are not just limited to the visibility of the data but demands privacy on actions. For example:

• The ability to hide the fact that selective members operated on some private key & value. The collection ids are visible in the read/write sets. This enables other members to be aware of the fact that some private information is processed between owners of collection members present in read/write sets.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain? 

There are numerous online materials available on blockchain. It is good to start with reading the basics like how blocks are related to each other and the concept of digital signature. The next step would be to go deep on Bitcoin and Ethereum white papers. Hyperledger Fabric provides very good documentation and examples. The documentation covers both developers and technologists. 

Apart from knowledge of the technology, it is equally important to understand the suitability of the technology to solve a problem. Lets remember blockchain is not a replacement for traditional databases. Use cases should be evaluated for applicability of blockchain. There are multiple blockchain protocols each suiting different applications. For example: Hyperledger Fabric provides tremendous capabilities of enterprise networks where permission and governance are managed by the private consortium. However, if we need publicly auditable immutable trust records or exchangeable tokens, Ethereum is preferable. Complex networks can use a combination of protocols in public and private domains to suit multiple needs like scale, privacy, tokenized assets and immutability. 

What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Fake currency

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

Adoption in the field of voting, e-governance. Blockchains would provide the required secure sharing and discovery platform for IoT networks.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

Try to keep the functions/methods small and reusable. 

What technology could you not live without?

Docker/Containerization! It is not going to be easy to manage local developments or deployments.

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Sally MacFarlane, ConsenSys Protocols Engineer at ConsenSys.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on and how you got into blockchain

I’m working on privacy and permissioning features in Hyperledger Besu. I got into blockchain in 2018 when a friend told me about an exciting opportunity working on tech I had only just heard of.

What Hyperledger frameworks or tools are you using in your projects? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

Besu uses Hyperledger Caliper to run performance testing for public and private transactions. We have been able to leverage Hyperledger infrastructure to expand our Besu community for both developers and users. Recently my team has been working on interop with GoQuorum for privacy and permissioning features. 

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

There’s a lot of momentum in the blockchain space, and it would be great to use that to attract more people to the community. Also Diversity, Equity and Inclusion! To build software that will be useful to a wide range of people, we need a wide range of people building the software. What can we do to stand with the rest of the world at this time and improve DEI at Hyperledger projects?

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain? 

Read a lot. Understand the space. There are lots of open source projects looking for contributors, which is a good place to start.

What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Election fraud

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

I hope blockchain becomes usable for regular people. Current software is hard to use even for us engineers! Seamless integration and consistency between products would be good to see.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

“I don’t know” is an acceptable answer.

What technology could you not live without?

High speed internet

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Si Chen, president of Open Source Strategies, Inc.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on and how you got into blockchain

We’re building an “operating system” that links together data, transactions, and user engagement and can be used for climate action at any scale, from supra-national cap and trade programs to community-scale energy or nature-based projects. 

I got into blockchain because I saw that while there was a lot of new innovation for tackling climate change, it was difficult to get our existing centralized institutions to adopt them. Blockchain lets us build collaboration even when there are no central authorities available.

What Hyperledger frameworks or tools are you using in your projects? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

We’ve worked with Fabric and Besu and are looking at Cactus and a Hyperledger Labs project called TrustID.

Overall the experience with Hyperledger has been great! It’s a large community that has helped us learn a lot about this emerging field, and there’s a lot of developer support available.

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

Bringing different projects together to address a few complete application-scale use cases so that we can see there is a Hyperledger solution to building full-fledged applications.

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain? 

Skip the hype. Blockchain is not just bitcoin trading. It’s a lot more mature than you realize. It’ll probably transform on your field, so get ahead of the game by really learning how it works.

As Hyperledger’s projects continue to mature, what do you see as the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result?

Ownership of Data. 

Today your financial ratings are owned by your banks, your health records are owned by your doctor, your online credibility is owned by social networks, and your climate records are owned by, well, nobody. Important data is spread out across many different “silos,” and it becomes impossible to piece them all back again.

Imagine a future where users own their data by storing them immutably on blockchains–financial, health, social, climate, etc.–and grant access to them to providers in return for services. This could solve a lot of interesting problems: Providing credit to the unbanked. Better health care and public health management. Useful collective action. A solution to climate change.

What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

Collaboration. Climate change is just one (huge) problem that results from lack of collaboration due to a lack of coordinating authorities. Blockchain is the technology for building collaboration networks and could solve a lot of big problems.

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

I’d like to see Hyperledger being a key part of the blockchain ecosystem that brings together people all over the world to collaborate together.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

Make it Easy for Your Users.

What technology could you not live without?

Agriculture? Electricity? Computers? The Internet? This is a very humbling question and makes me realize how much we depend on each other.

Back to our Developer Showcase Series to learn what developers in the real world are doing with Hyperledger technologies. Next up is Arun S M, Senior Software Engineer at Walmart.

Give a bit of background on what you’re working on and how you got into blockchain?

Walmart is a pioneer in technology adoption. This case study offers a comprehensive look at Walmart’s journey in blockchain technology adoption. You might have read about multiple other pilot programs Walmart has either initiated or participated in as well. At Walmart Global Tech, we join hands in powering the next generation retail disruption. Listen to what Archana Sristy, Sr Director, Blockchain Platforms, had to say in the keynote panel at Hyperledger Global Forum 2020. 

While many say their journey into the blockchain started with either Bitcoin or Ethereum, mine started with the Hyperledger projects. I started my journey into this technology at my previous employer Intel. I remember when everybody was excited to see Hyperledger Fabric leaning towards its 0.6 version release. On the other hand, Hyperledger Sawtooth was prepping up to support EVM smart contracts. My first quest on the technology was to provide an option of byzantine fault tolerance to the Hyperledger Fabric project with the help of a trusted execution engine. I found myself digging through source code written in a language I was not familiar with back then. Project source code and logs from the test run served as documentation. It was quite a joyful experience to see a working POC completed in a short period of time.

What Hyperledger frameworks or tools are you using in your projects? Any new developments to share? Can you sum up your experience with Hyperledger?

The range of projects in Hyperledger’s greenhouse is sufficient to provide a starting point for any blockchain-based idea. I say that not speaking only for my employer. At Hyperledger I wear multiple hats:

First, and my favorite of all, being a developer! 

Though my journey started with the Hyperledger Fabric and I predominantly use it in my projects, I have spent a considerable amount of time on other Hyperledger technologies. I found myself enjoying the problem statements within Hyperledger Sawtooth and, eventually, became one of its maintainers. I started by fixing bugs in the sawtooth-core and working on consensus engines and then on a Hyperledger Labs project implementing a new protocol for the Proof of Elapsed Time. (Feel free to reach out in case you would like to revive it.) I took on adding missing features on the sabre engine, participating in the 2.0 release planning meetings and supporting Hyperledger Transact’s goal. 

Very recently, I started to find myself interested in the potential benefits of lab projects such as Blockchain Automation Framework. Likewise, Hyperledger Aries has never ceased to impress me. And don’t be surprised if you see me in Hyperledger Ursa meetings. 

Second hat, being a Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee member!

Walmart uses blockchain at scale like nowhere else, and yet we are pioneers in adopting new features. This gives me a great, dual point of view as I have worked extensively on the core protocol layer as well as on realizing potential use cases. On the TSC, this allows me to speak up for what an end user organization would like to prioritize when it comes to the advancement of blockchain technology.

Out in the community, I enjoy speaking at Hyperledger Global Forum and other conferences. From the time I started to help the community based in India, it has been my pleasure to meet several tech enthusiasts. It is amazing to see how people are willing to join and contribute back once they understand the technology. Oftentimes, lack of awareness is often what makes people think contributing to Hyperledger projects is out of their reach. Being a TSC representative has helped me be a bridge and bring in new perspectives. 

Third hat, leading the Hyperledger India Chapter and other speaking engagements! 

The idea of Hyperledger India Chapter was conceptualized by Amol Kulkarni in early 2018. The chapter was inaugurated in January, 2019. The chapter’s goal was to build a bridge between the global community and India. In the initial days, we spent time answering technical questions, running project specific developer forums and organizing national meetup events.

Since taking the baton from earlier chapter leads in 2020, I’ve had the pleasure of proposing and running multiple other modes of engagements. Our hackathons, a multi-week blockchain story sharing series and a technical deep-dive fest have all contributed to increased participation by the community in India. It’s been satisfying hearing the positive impact these engagements have created. It is evident in the feedback we receive from the community in India but also in the rest of the Asia Pacific, Europe, Africa, and, sometimes, the Americas regions. The latest approach has been to identify more community leaders, delegate responsibility and encourage smaller circle engagements to gradually build the community participation. Hyperledger staff members (so as not to miss out any names, let’s say everybody) have supported all the initiatives proposed by the Hyperledger India Chapter. There never was a no for anything. 

Having mentioned these, let me know if you have an idea. I am ready for the next hat 😉

What do you think is most important for Hyperledger to focus on in the next year?

Hyperledger is doing great with community participation and diversity. Technical diversity is what I can focus on here. These are the points I would pick up in no particular order:

1. Encouraging projects up the protocol stack that are aimed towards easier and faster adoption to production. These could include ready-to-use tools and libraries such as deployment tools or core protocol management libraries/tools.    
2. Prototyping possible interoperability patterns to integrate multiple blockchain protocols.
3. Paving the way towards plug-and-play style, reusable modules development across protocols.
   

What advice would you offer other technologists or developers interested in getting started working on blockchain? 

If you are thinking about using blockchain technology and/or if you’re new to blockchain technology and this happens to be your first read about the technology, then you’re in good hands. Do not always overfit your problem statement. It could be just digitization of data that you want to solve your problem. Use of blockchain for the sole purpose of integrity protection amongst the trusted nodes can be debated. I am happy to help you in your blockchain journey! I’ve shared some background and advice for getting started below. 

Blockchain is a technology. As you know, any technology defines a well known process of achieving an outcome for a given problem statement. Blockchain technology is aimed towards removing intermediaries (many a times unnecessary) in transactions and establishing a high level of trust on the data exchanged between the involved participants.

Blockchain technology achieves this by the use of distributed, decentralized, digital ledger technology. You all might be aware of distributed databases. Now let’s add decentralization to it. As an example, what if multiple instances of the database (having the same copy of data) are maintained by different parties. Each of those involved parties don’t trust each other generally without a trusted agent making sure everything is rightly copied. Now, what if we remove the unnecessary third party agent and let the distrusting parties trust each other using a mechanism? The digital ledger is that mechanism.

Let’s break the myths and understand commonly used terms:

1. Blockchain (often used as the name of the technology as well): Imagine it to be a linked list that is cryptographically protected so that you cannot change the position of the list nodes or the contents stored in it. This makes it an immutable ledger of data. 
2. Smart Contract: If you have worked on database applications, you know about CRUD operations. How would you control how CRUD operations are performed and by whom in a distributed system? This is taken care of by the smart contracts.    
3. Consensus: Just by controlling who and how can one perform CRUD operations may not be sufficient for making sure every participant in the network has the same copy of the data. This is not a totally new concept. Consensus in simple terms is getting agreement. You can follow multiple approaches to get different participants to agree to a common data point. RAFT, PBFT, PoET, etc. are examples.

To get started on developing or supporting blockchain applications, your first step is to decide what you want to do. It is quite uncommon that you need to understand how Fabric/Sawtooth is implemented if your goal is to develop an application. Similarly, if you would like to be an expert DevOps/administrator of the network, then you would learn how to maintain the application with the available options. Hyperledger projects have abstracted low-level handling from you. There are CLI or SDK options for you to interact with the running ledger.

 The following steps should make you an expert on a given project:

1.  Familiarize yourself with one of the protocols.    
2.  Understand how a framework is architected and the flow of data in it.
3. Read through the documents and note down all possible configuration options. How well your production deployment will work will come down to how well you understand available options.    
4. Write sample code to use the provided SDKs for smart contract and client application development.

As Hyperledger’s projects continue to mature, what do you see as the most interesting technologies, apps, or use cases coming out as a result?

Here are my top five picks, considering the needs of the hour:

1. Tracking COVID-19 vaccinations: Creating blockchain-backed ledger verifiable credentials to provide greater confidence on the issued credential and open up international collaboration that gets things back to normal while maintaining individuals’ privacy. Similarly, enabling safer vaccine track and trace by making sure every process is followed as expected in the supply chain for effective progress. Blockchain can also play a vital role in future health emergencies in a range of ways such as increasing trust in the research data in the early stages and improving collaborating with parties in far places.
2. Leveling the field in education: I am a strong supporter of education for all. Use of blockchain in eradicating the indifferences and providing quality education to the needy would be an excellent use case if somebody can come up with one.
3. Federating learning: Use of blockchain in federated learning to achieve trust is something to be explored further. 
4. Enabling the concept of global citizen: A person graduating in university from a far away place should be able to prove the knowledge and degree to get a job elsewhere. 
5. Enabling eGovernance: Blockchain has a role to play in a range of areas, including the electoral process, security lending, property buying, government reach out programs, digital credential issuance, reducing corruption and legal processes.

What’s the one issue or problem you hope blockchain can solve?

After this set of intense answers, I will answer slightly comically (who knows it could be reality in future). I wish blockchain could become backbone technology to end the misinformation on the internet, eventually becoming the single source of truth for a peaceful humanity!

Where do you hope to see Hyperledger and/or blockchain in five years?

Blockchain technologies are evolving at supersonic speed. Even as we speak now there could be someone thinking of a new feature or capability. 

• I hope to see interoperability becoming not just an advantage but a necessary parameter for adoption. Another analogy is that, in the near future, it would be great to have the option to switch between multiple blockchain frameworks like we switch the databases today. With standards governing how to transfer the data across blockchains and still maintain integrity.
• I hope to see design patterns being defined for blockchain technology, eventually helping scale the network or overcome the limitations of today. 
• I hope to see blockchain networks talking to each other, not just from the protocol perspective but at the domain level. This will open up a range of new use cases.
• I hope to see techniques that would optimize the storage and compute requirements for running a blockchain network.

What is the best piece of developer advice you’ve ever received?

It’s hard to pick on one thing! The best piece of advice that I received as a freshman from my mentor Mark Chung back then is “do not give up because the code is complex; stare at the code until it breaks up and surrenders to you. Code will tell you more truths the more you stare at it.” Another recent from one of my ex-boss Ansuya Negi is “do not be upset because your project didn’t go beyond the POC. The learnings you got through the process is more important than the outcome.”

What technology could you not live without?

To be honest, I would prefer a life not surrounded by technology and would rather go out into nature’s serenity. But, to logically answer this question, I think the evolution of the computer system has accelerated and uplifted the human standard of living in many ways making it is difficult to live without a computer.