I am Ananya Srivastava, a junior at Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women studying Computer Science Engineering and Articial Intelligence (AI). In school, I had a love of Mathematics and Physics which turned into a degree of Computer Science. I am quite interested in the development of AI and the questions it poses for socio-political ethics. Recently, I got into open source development and my life has been changed since (check out my previous blog post).

In my spare time, you will find me spooking myself out with the latest Stephen King paperback and a cup of coffee. Here's my Goodreads, I would love to connect with more book lovers! I also adore long walks and I have a well-loved journal on my bedside table.

My Core Values

As I was going through the prompt of my first Outreachy Internship blog, I learnt about this neat concept of core values.

"Core values are a set of beliefs, ideals or practices that inform how you conduct your life, both personally and professionally."

My core values are:

Curiosity

“It's not a silly question if you can't answer it.”

As opposed to the colloquialism, curiosity did not in fact, kill the cat.

Like many other kids who do relatively well in school, I used to believe that rationality and problem-solving were skills that one was born with. You either excel in academics, or you don't. Lately, I have learnt that your mind, like any muscle in your body, can be trained over time to get better at doing hard things.

The biggest hurdle that most people face while approaching a problem is their mindset. If we start approaching cognitively taxing tasks from a sense of curiosity, rather than fear and uncertainty, we have already done the hardest bit.

When given a problem to solve, I am never hesitant to get my hands dirty, to poke around as much as I can.

Here is a relevant example to showcase how I applied this core value while approaching my Project with **scikit-image** (Enhancing Image Warping with Thin-Plate Splines): The Project seemed incredibly intimidating to me in the beginning because I was supposed to build a brand-new API that was going to be integrated into scikit-image. After panicking for a while, I decided to begin with the smallest part I could understand, a piece-wise defined polynomial function called spline. I find YouTube to be a treasure trove of some of the best (free!!) resources to learn hard-to-grasp concepts (or anything, really). Lo and behold, I found this absolutely fantastic hour-long movie, "The Continuity of Splines" that made this concept not only less daunting, but actually fun to learn about.

Growth

"The journey you take to reach your destination is sometimes greater than the destination itself."

For me, growth is a three-step process: dare to fail, learn from failure, repeat. I believe that someone who has never failed, has never grown. The first step to growing is accepting that failure is always a possibility when one is taking risks and exploring uncharted territories. Every failure that you face is a chance to learn and an opportunity to view the problem through another lens. In my experience,growth comes when you learn to move past your setbacks and shift your focus towards openness and curiosity.

Community

“I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.”

Although individualism is quite prevalent in today's day and age, I firmly believe that an individual's growth does not occur in isolation. As someone who has largely benefitted from the teachings of others, who has had kind peers and mentors guide her through understanding enummerable challenging topics, I can eagerly vouch for the fact that being community-driven is one of the most important values a developer/innovator can possess.

I am grateful for the people/resources that have constantly helped me in gaining new skills, hence, I am always open to giving back to my community whenever I can. It has been an absolute joy to have found this blog to be one such way to interact with and to help people in my own small way.