Know Your CEan - praveenscience

YaY! CrazyEngineers came up with an Awesome and Awesome interview with one of our CE – Stars. He is CEan - praveenscience, a Crazy Computer Science Engineer joined recently just in the last month and has contributed about 850+ valuable posts to CE. And his Post count per day is 20+. Praveen, The CEO & Managing Director, PraveenTech Research Labs is passionate about Computers, Internet, and Web Development. We are Very Glad to present his words here…


Pallavi: Hi Praveen, you are a Crazy Computer Science engineer, tell us more about yourself.
Praveen : Hi, I am Praveen, from Chennai. I love Computers and Internet. Web Development is my passion and I started being technical from my 6th standard.

Pallavi : How did you get introduced to CrazyEngineers (CE)?
Praveen : I got introduced by Praveena. I have heard of CE before, but did not think of joining. She asked me to try it out once and I got addicted!

Pallavi: Why did you take up this particular engineering trade? What do you like the most about it?
Praveen: From my young age, I loved computers. I love any technology, to be specific. This is what attracted me towards computers. During those days, computers were the only ones to be technically awesome.

Pallavi : What is the biggest achievement in your life so far?
Praveen : “My next achievement is the biggest achievement”, but to be frank, being in a corporate place at an organization and enjoying their leniency in having PraveenTech Research Labs in parallel, with the same technology is what I can say as the biggest achievement so far. Another one which I would like to quote is, I got placed in my college itself after completing my final exams. 😀

Pallavi : Who are your idols or inspirations and Why?
Praveen : To be frank, there is none! I take a small amount from each one of the biggies. And the real inspiration for me came from the movies I watch. By the way, I am a techie cartoon freak, especially, Dexter’s Laboratory. This is what made me to be what I am now. Reason? Simple. I love technical stuff.

Pallavi : You are well versed in most of the programming languages specifically in scripting languages. Which language do you like most and Why?
Praveen : This is really a tricky question for me. As you all know, technology changes with time, and the time is measured in nanoseconds, not even milliseconds. Right now it’s PHP and MySQL. The reason is simplicity and open source. If I say I love some Microsoft product, then I have to pay for getting the support. Even if payment is not a problem, I have to wait till the support people check it out and correct them. In case of open source, there is no payment stuff and another thing is the 1000 eye concept. In case of a proprietary technology like Microsoft, the internal stuff is accessed only by a few Microsoft Employees. But in case of an open source application, you can find many people working in the same field and at least one person in the world would have faced and solved a similar experience.
I would like to say something about the history of this. When I started my experiments in my 6th standard, I really loved Microsoft Visual Basic. Everyone likes the first thing, which they did to start something big. In that way, I have a special love towards VB6. During those days in 2000s, I loved it very much and I thought that’s the best one. The moment, the competition of OSes came, Linux and Mac are competing Windows like anything. I had to make sure that my stuff runs in all the platforms. So I had to find a way out, which made me drive to the web world and I started with ASP. That was the easiest web development language for beginners as it resembles the same coding as VB. Due to licensing restrictions, it is not available for free. Then PHP was made really simple and it rocked the open source world. So I switched to PHP and MySQL!

Pallavi : Why your interest lies in web development when there are lots of areas in computer?
Praveen : One line answer: Web Development is Platform and Resource Independent. If it’s Microsoft Office, you need Microsoft Windows. If it’s Apple Final Cut Pro, you need Apple Mac OS X. But, a simple website can run even in your washing machine or refrigerator with proper configuration. I am not kidding as I have done an application, which is powered by Java (I hate it) and it sends a request when the stocks in my fridge gets over or when my washing machine finishes its job.

Pallavi : What inspired you to start PraveenTech Research Labs?
Praveen : I had said you before, I started with VB6. It was taught to me by my neighbour. He is a scientist and he has no knowledge in technical stuff, but he made an encyclopaedia kind of software and showed it to me. I was keeping on pestering him to teach me how to do it. Finally he gave me a book named Teach Yourself Visual Basic in Record Time by Steve Brown. I started trying out and creating simple apps. My final work was Praveen’s Interesting Facts, which is an encyclopaedia kind of software having handpicked articles taken from The World Book Encyclopaedia. I thought of releasing this to my friends and I wanted to show case this to all. So I needed something like a company. A company presents a software package. This was the first internal requirement for me to start something like PraveenTech Research Labs.
Lolz, seriously I laugh even today, when I think that, a 12 year old kid wanting to be the owner of a software company. I used to think of many names from those existed before. “Praveen Software”, “Praveen Logics”, crap, even “Praveen Stores”. Did not know what made me to think so. I felt something lacking in the name itself. How can it be just Praveen? It should not be so as it is capitalistic. I thought of adding some more things. A few were like “PraveenSoft”, “PraveenComp”, etc. until I finally chose this, “PraveenTech”. Some other thing too lacked. “PraveenTech” What??? I needed a second name for it. Finally, after seeing the most mentored Microsoft, I came to a conclusion “PraveenTech Corporation”. Ha! Finally I got a name for my Company! In the recent ages, after knowing about our Indian Economy, I cannot have an unregistered firm with Corporation, without having bank balance more than 1 lakh. So I changed it to “PraveenTech Research Labs”


Pallavi : It is very hard to do a Single Project in our final year. But, great to know that you have done 6 projects in your final year! Tell us about it.
Praveen : “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”. My final year projects were focussed on Web Development only.During my final year, my HOD asked me to work on Speech Recognition. Being a web guy, I asked him why not make it platform independent or powerful, bringing it to the next level in the web, as there are no tools in web for assisting the visually impaired. This led to my first project of Web Based Speech Recognition.
Being an engineering student under Anna University is not an easy task. If the syllabus is the numbers 35, 36 and 37, Anna University frames 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, and 40. After completing the engineering and joining the industry, the expectation would be only 36, with a version, very much later than we studied in our engineering. This is how the deviations will be. So I wanted to take the education in India to a next level. In US and similar places, students need not come and sit in the class physically to study. Instead, they can be present in the class virtually. The idea of Virtual Classrooms was born this way.
I attended a conference in Software Technology Park of India, during my pre-final year. There I met a group of people from Essentia, a leading platform provider for open source communities and customer experience. I learnt much from them as a team of four of us from the same college working on a project, PHPWatchDog. That is the birth of the next project, “PHP WatchDog”, which is written in PHP and uses MySQL, works under Linux like systems, watching processes for their health.
I am really close with my faculties than with my friends and classmates. My college placement officer asked me for a help to get the list of students, who are eligible for the placements, during the placement season. He asked me to work on a software package, which should run across network and should have user privileges and should handle updates of data by many. I thought for a while and asked if it would be okay if I present it in a web based form. He agreed and Web Based Data Mining Tool to generate reports based on the criteria given was born.
Since I am doing many projects, it was really hard for me to keep track of all. So I needed something to manage all these stuff. I thought of delegating this work to another web based software package, which is none other than a Project Management. Modules like collaborator, issue tracker, scheduler, portfolio, resource, and document manager are available in this.
Finally, one of my friends, my lecturer asked me to work with his firm. I thought of giving out a try and it turned to be a project to provide a collaborative platform for the academicians, who wants to pursue their doctorate and so on, being able to communicate with the experts. It connects a researcher and a pursuer, a peer of researchers, and industrialists to pick the researchers to employ them in the production projects. I thought of making this as a project of my labs and submitted this as my final year project of my engineering. The project, Web-based Platform to Connect Academicians was born.

Pallavi : You are a Junior Scientist, Businessman and one of the most active CEans who contributed more to CE. How do you manage everything?
Praveen : Time Management is the key factor, which I learnt in a very hard and costly way. So, each day I used to allocate time for most of the things. During my work, I give top priority to my own work, the next to my company work, and to other chit chatting works. When the day starts, my schedule for the day will be ready.

Pallavi: Seems you are too Hardworking man, working a lot with your PC, How would you spend a day without your computer?
Praveen: How will a normal person, who loves to enjoy the world feel, when both his hands and legs are chopped down? That’s the way I would feel at first. But during my vacation, out of town, mostly at remote villages, I spend my time with kids, playing with them, watching TV shows, and trying to help people, teach something or do some work. A village needs more help in these kinds of awareness activities and I love to participate in them. This is how I spend a day without my computer. It is really a hard task, which I don’t want to get.

Pallavi : You joined CE So Recently and became So Popular with your Good Work within a Short Time. How do you feel yourself?
Praveen : I feel really happy, double the happiness of the person, whom I help. If my work has made a community happy, then count the happiness. I feel being top of the world.

Pallavi: What changes you found in yourself before and after joining CE?
Praveen: Usually I used to waste time in the office, doing some useless work. But after joining CE, I am able to help a community of engineers. I feel happy doing this.

Pallavi: If you were given a chance to take a role in CE, what would you like to have and what would you do for CE?
Praveen: I would love to be a spam remover, as I have a good experience in fighting spam and identifying the spammers on the internet.