User:Soumyasch

Hi, I am Soum, and I appreciate that you have taken the pain of reading this :). This page was kept neglected for a long time, and I apologize for that, but really, I don't see anything special about myself that others ought to know. Still, I will try. I was born around the mid-1980s in Balurghat, where I spent the first seventeen years of my life (barring vacations, of course :P). Then I shifted to Gandhinagar to complete my graduation, where I am still rotting trying to conjure three papers for journal publications. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, I share my birthday with footballer Vágner Love.

[edit] My expertise

My expertise lies in the field of Computer science. Having said that, I think most of you will formulate an image of me as a geek, poking and prodding into a vast ocean of code all his day. Well, you are not too far from reality. :) I can code with an expert level of proficiency in C, C++, C#, Cw, Erlang, Haskell, JavaScript, F#, Lisp, Prolog, Visual Basic .NET, Verilog, and (I hate it) Java. I am just a little better than a noob when it comes to Nemerle and Ruby. My designing skills (both with markup languages like HTML/CSS and XAML as well as with designing software like Photoshop or Inkscape) are pathetic at worst to limited at best. So, I am more of a library developer. I guess this is already made redundant: I am quite proficient with .NET Framework. I love to debug code and I have to thank my friends in ensuring that I become an expert in fixing unreadable code :). And yeah, code obfuscation is not to be left out either. If you ask me to choose a favorite, it would undoubtedly be a functional programming language. And for an imperative language to get a high rating for me, it must have extensive support for reflective programming to start with.

I focus mainly on system level programming, but networking and data structuring and storage technologies are also pretty interesting to me. Operating systems and compilers are my main fields of interest. I have a thing for concurrent programming and parallel computing. My research is mainly along the fields of language and compiler support for concurrency and verifiable correctness. Grid computing and high speed multimedia networking are also something I like to develop for (not applications that use these, but software infrastructure that powers these). I spend a fair bit of time hunting down vulnerabilities in software, both with and without source code. I guess I can safely call myself an amateur vulnerability researcher (I hate it when someone calls me a hacker! :x)

I need quick access to this image. So am just sticking it here. Please overlook this :-P

I also am quite comfortable with the theoretical aspects of computer science, and yeah, by that I mean Mathematics. No not continous function processes like Calculus (I hate it as if it were some plague), but discrete mathematics, mathematical logic and computing models such as lambda calculus, pi calculus and join calculus. And to quite an extent cryptography.

I bet you must be imagining me drowning in a sea of 0s and 1s by now, but I assure you thats far from reality (how could I be editing in Wikipedia then?) I am very lazy when it comes to working. I consider hanging out with friends a religion, and follow it like a devout :P (though I hate night clubs and would rather spend the night on a bike safari!). I like music playing in the background (no rock please!), regardless of what I am doing. Though, my attempts of playing any instrument has been disastrous till date (when I play a guitar the only sound that comes out is of strings snapping in succession!). I watch a lot of tele series as well (no, not the saas bahu soaps that dominate Indian airwaves) including House (my favorite), Lost (I sure ask one question at the end of each episode: "What the fuck did just happen?"), [Anything beyond this point is woefully out of date, read only for historical interest. --soum ^talk]Heroes (Niki should have fought Sylar, not Peter), 24 (I swear I am not watching any more seasons of this) and Grey's Anatomy. I also used to watch The Black Donnellys and Drive but what can I do when people haven't learnt to appreciate any good series! Currently, I am watching The 4400 as most others are off air, and am hooked onto it. When I am not doing any of these, you will find me behind my camera or mobile phone, whichever I have handy. And of course, I like to write, actually, type :).

[edit] Wiki career

I joined Wikipedia on January, 2006. Since then I have had almost 18,000 edits, including a half-year wikibreak. I started off disastrously, though now have pretty solid ground under my feet now. So, if anyone wants my advise, do not be detterred by a jittery start to your wiki career, you will soon outgrow it. I work mainly on computing and programming language related articles, with some work on musician biographies as well. I don't really care about U.S. or British spelling, the only thing I pay attention to is keeping them consistent. And if in the midst of writing, if I remember that I am an Indian, I spray a generous dose of Indic words (like show offing, instead of showing off). I don't really care about whether they stay or changed, so if you spot any such words in my edits and want to change them, be my guest.

I am also an administrator here, which means I help clean up the mess over-eager editors make. If you need any help dealing any violations you might come across, just ask (or if you want the text of any deleted article, I will be happy to provide that also). I know this makes me look like some descendant of Hitler, but believe me, I try to be as lenient and accomodating as humanly possible. I try to juggle my editorial and janitorial contributions as effectively as I can, but sometimes I may lean to one or the other. But do not think I am neglecting the other. Its only temporary and before long, it will swing the other way.