[Techie Tuesdays] Championing parsers and interpreters - Bhimsen Kulkarni

Some people start very early in life while some are late bloomers. Today’s Techie Tuesday started pretty late when he was in college, but caught up very quickly. Interested in history and meteorology, Bhimsen has a very interesting story.

Born and brought up in Gulbarga, Bhimsen believed computers were used to play games and the only encounter he had with computers was playing Aladin. He says he wasn't interested in computers at all and was too much into history and meteorology. Borrowing history books from a neighbor who was doing PhD in history he conquered it all from the Roman Empire to Mughal Empire.

It was around the same time he saw the movie, ‘The Day after Tomorrow’, and meteorology caught his fancy. “I used to spend my entire summer vacation looking at the clouds and predicting the weather.” And to take it further he built a rain gauge and an anemometer to check weather conditions.

It wasn't until his PUC when he learnt C and helped a doctor develop a software for psychometric testing of patients that he realized he had a natural affinity to software programming. Despite this, Bhimsen wasn't convinced that software engineering was his cup of tea. Mentored by his computer science teacher at school he finally took admission in computer science at PESIT.

College was a new world for Bhimsen, who came from a small city, but his desire to excel pulled him through. Learning from various online blogs Bhimsen designed a parser in python for HTML DOM manipulation. The parser has been downloaded over 4,000 times so far. The parser helps in web scraping like the BeautifulSoup library. As HTML5 was evolving, Bhimsen started experimenting with Canvas and designed a paint app. But he didn't have money to pay for the server to host it online so he had to take it down after the one-month trial period of his web host was over.

When it came to learning about the compiler, Bhimsen started building his own language called YAIL (Yet Another Interpreted Language) named after YACC. As he gained confidence by building his own interpreter, sky was the limit for Bhimsen.

When he is not working for Cleartrip or building vim styled text editors, you will find Bhimsen honing his skills on TopCoder or HackerRank. Looking at the future, his dream is to become one of the best programmers in the world.

Catch up with Bhimsen here.