Parmita's Blog

Just came back from the amazing event hosted by Nutanix, a data center infrastructure and cloud computing software company.   It was extremely engaging as we started off with a design workshop and competition (My team and I won 2nd place!) We also had an extremely informative speaker panel of women who work at Nutanix which opened my eyes to how varied jobs in the tech industry truly are. Not everyone is a software engineer or coder--people do all sorts of jobs in all segments of a tech company, and it was interesting to see how all the differing roles meshed and interworked to create a whole company. I was also lucky enough to get to talk to the CEO Dheeraj Pandey of Nutanix, and he gave some excellent advice about staying motivated and always looking forward. Overall, it was an amazing experience, and I’m so glad I had the opportunity to attend.

Today I had the awesome experience of getting a tour of the Video Game Dev company, Zynga! It was really fun and engaging. First, we got to play a bunch of arcade and video games (of course!), but after that, I got to see an amazing presentation by Kasey McKenna, a senior software engineer at Zynga. She explained her problem-solving process for a part of the Zynga game, Farmville: Tropic Escape. The task was to animate a boat making a delivery, making sure that it hit certain key points on the way there. With simple code, the boat made sharp, jerky motions, awkwardly arriving at its destination. However, after working through the problem, Kasey applied calculus and parametric curves to simulate the natural smooth curving of the boat’s path.   It was super interesting to see the calculus I learn in school applied in real-life in someone’s actual job! And here's what the finished result looks like: Overall, it was a lot of fun and definitely an e...

I'm super proud to say that since September of last year, I've been working with a team of 4 other girls in the Technovation Challenge --a global competition where teams of girls work together to create an app that helps work towards one of the UN Global Goals .  Our team, team superCode, created Amity, and app working towards the goal of Peace.  From our submission, which you can view here : "Amity serves to bridge the physical and cultural distance between people across the world. Read other users’ stories by clicking a country on the globe, and share your own experiences, from personal anecdotes, to photos and videos, to recipes. Like and bookmark your favorite posts to easily view them later. In creating a platform for people everywhere to view different cultures, Amity hopes to promote a feeling of friendship, or amity, among people of all cultures." Out of thousands of worldwide competitors-- we made it to semi-finals!!!! Though we didn't ...

I'm a pretty visual learner, so over the course of my AP Statistics class, I've made a couple of drawings that really helped me solidify certain concepts in my head. I'm pretty proud of them, and hope others will find them useful as well!