An undergraduate from IIT Bombay in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Darshan Kapashi was a strong contender in the final list of winners during the Code Warriors contest held in April. 

Darshan Kapashi

We caught up with him and here’s what he had to say -

On Code Warriors:

• Which app got you recognition in Code Warriors? What was your motivation in developing it?

My app @connect4 got selected as one of the top 7 apps. It was basically an app which allowed two people to play the classic game where the goal is to make a line of four of your tokens either horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

My main motivation was that I wanted to make some “social” app which allowed users to interact in some way with each other. And designing such an interactive game to be played over SMS seemed like a good idea. It started out as a Hack Night project which I completed over the next week.

• What was your experience in the Code Warriors app contest?

I never expected that my app will get into the finals! I built it for the unique challenge that it presented and the contest happened to occur during this time, so I took part!

• What were your learnings from it?

I learnt how to:

• Make engaging interactive text based user friendly interfaces.
• Design good schemas and workflows.
• Design modular, reusable, scalable code.
• Track exactly what the user is doing with my app and where they are facing problems.

• What advice will you give other budding developers in order to be prepared for such app contest?

I think that the most important thing is the idea and the design used to implement the idea. Coding it then is the relatively easy part. A good design and insight into the problem at hand goes a long way in making a successful app.

On other apps in the platform:

• Which other apps do you have on txtWeb currently? Which one is the most popular among users?

I have a lot of other apps on txtWeb! @trivia, @rps,  @checkgmail, @movienames, @iitb, @sports. @trivia seems to be the most popular one. It has 7k registered users and is doing quite well.

• What was your motivation in developing these apps on txtWeb?

                    I had different reasons for building each of these!

• I started out with @movienames to learn how to parse web pages.
• I then built @rps to develop an app that allows interaction among users.
• I then created @trivia which was a single / multiplayer trivia game and allowed invites and challenges and lots of such features.
• @checkgmail was just so that I could check my emails over SMS
• And @iitb.sports was developed so that the students at my university (IIT Bombay) can get the latest information about any sports activity, easily.

Your experience with txtWeb:

• Considering that txtWeb is platform agnostic, which technology do you use to develop apps on txtWeb? 

             I generally use PHP and MySQL to develop apps since most of the free hosting sites support it. I have also developed a couple of apps in Java.

• As a developer, why would you recommend txtWeb platform to other developers?

              Not everyone has a smartphone but I guess more than 700 million people have a phone in India! And considering that a lot of them don’t have internet access, everyone does have SMS! IMPACT!

Other Platforms:

• Which are the other platforms you have developed apps on?

I have developed apps on the Google App Engine, but mostly for txtWeb. I haven’t really developed for other “platforms” but worked on many different projects..

• How has your experience been on txtWeb vis-a-vis other platforms?

It allows me to have a much wider reach, in the sense that a LOT of people can access my app and for free (at least for now), which is one of the major reasons why I “like” txtWeb!

• Which online resources, websites, forums do you often visit and recommend to other developers?

Google. The second best answer to everything!

The best answer being 42!

• Who is your role model? What are your personal aspirations?

I try to incorporate the good traits, qualities, habits and practices of all the people around me. Some of the people I take inspiration from are my parents, my first year mentor at IIT - Pratyush Rathore, the txtWeb team, my batchmates, school friends, seniors, and as I mentioned everyone around me!

Profile:

• Educational –

3^rd year undergraduate student at IIT Bombay

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

• Professional –

Internship at Intuit India – Summer 2011

Internship at Facebook – Summer 2012

• Hobbies –

Lawn Tennis

Travelling

New to txtWeb?

txtWeb provides FREE sms based mobile apps for ALL mobile phones and telecom service providers. ‘Imagine Internet on SMS’ with txtWeb. Every day users make more than 500,000 requests from across India to use txtWeb apps for information and services. txtWeb is FREE. NO extra / hidden charges applicable. There is No download required. Simply SMS relevant keywords to 9243342000. Finally there is no need for an internet data plan or GPS on your phone.

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