Photo: CAN

Federation of Computer Association Nepal, Software & BPO Committee organized Happy Coding Program for Nepalese IT Industry. Happy Coding is an event organized to motivate and encourage the programmers towards the development and growth of ICT in Nepal. The event had two categories National Website and App Competition and three winners were declared from the two categories. Yashin Shekh won the title among 16 others in the category of Mobile Application. Shekh has developed five applications till date and four are available on Play Store. DWIT News took some time with the winner of Happy Coding Program, Yashin Shekh '18 for a short interview. Let's know about the motivation, experience, and challenges he faced in the course of developing the app. What was your motivation to participate in this competition? I simply wanted to show my skills and connect with the other passionate developers from all over Nepal. [caption id="attachment_16492" align="aligncenter" width="238"] A screenshot of Android app Speak English[/caption] A brief description of the application you had built for this competition. The application which I  built for this competition is 'Speak English.' It is a machine learning based application which records the sound of the user and tells the user if the spoken English is correct or not. It also converts the text to speech to teach the user how to pronounce the given text or words. How did you proceed to develop this app? I had already worked on other mobile applications which helped me a lot to make this application possible. First I worked on the machine learning algorithm using Python on the server then I focused on my mobile app. What challenges did you face? It was pretty tough to develop this application. I was not even sure if it will work. I think the biggest challenge was not to have any doubt in myself. Every day I worked hard to make this application possible and every day I had to convince myself that I will make this happen. The biggest challenge for me was to follow my intuition and heart no matter what other people said or criticized. How did you feel when you won the competition? It is a quite tough question which can't be expressed in words. When I heard my name as a winner I forget all the sleepless night and efforts I had made to build this application. I was honored as the winner of the competition and the feeling of happiness surrounded me all over. But along with happiness, there was a hidden pain. I wished if my mother was there to watch me receiving the award. It is a moment of contentment for DWIT. DWIT News would like to congratulate Yashin Shekh for being honored as the winner of the competition. The application can be downloaded here.

Edited by - Sushil Awale