I’ve been making computer science video tutorials ever since I’ve fallen in love with the field of CS. In the summer of 2011, I decided to put up a landing page advertising an idea I had in mind that I dubbed “The Khan Academy of Computer Science”. You can see the video I posted at the time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRTVHVVp7K0

The response was phenomenal. I got over 10k hits in a few days, and over 3k subscribers waiting to hear more about the project (which I called Hacker CS). I thus went ahead and built a basic web app to house the project (and learned Django along the way). The result was hackercs.com. I’ve been adding features ever since, and I’m hoping it helps more and more people learn/review their cs knowledge.

When you realize the sad, beautiful fact about our inability to absorb even a fraction of the ever increasing corpus of wisdom in our world, and when you hear google’s Eric Schmidt talking about the incredible rate at which data is produced, you’re left wondering how will you ever learn the gist of everything around you.

With the Wisbit web app, you need wonder no more. This application lets you browse the best passages (or wisbits, for wisdom-tidbits) of several books in the order they are deemed important by the crowds. You can have fun “mashing” wisbits to score the passages against one another and learn something new along the way, or jump right into reading wisbits based on their ranking.

I’m currently working on a web app project to create a Natural-Language-based File Manager that is dubbed the Blackhole. It would consist of a UI allowing a user to create text files and drag and drop them onto a “blackhole” which would store them along with associated identifying information. The user would then be able to recall those files using Natural Language and with no concern whatsoever for file locations, directories, or even filenames. All they have to do is type out in natural language what they recall of the file, or even cues such as the time of creation/modification, and the web app would pull out the appropriate file (or offer suggestions), allowing the user to quickly continue editing the file from where they left off. Read more…

I realized that the quotes that I’ve been collecting from my readings can be put to good use on the site. I had two choices: either post them all (in their original text files) and put the burden on the reader to extract them and read them one by one, or design a framework that would feed these quotes to the reader on a regular basis, one quote at a time.

I opted for the latter, came up with the catchy word wisbit (=wisdom + tidbit), and wrote a simple framework for it (not optimized, but does the job).

The video below explains all you need to know about the workings of the wisbits framework.