Day 2 - One Step at a Time 🚀

Every day isn’t about giant leaps—sometimes, it’s about small wins that add up. Today, I continued working towards my 100 Days of Getting Better, balancing coding, projects, and learning.

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The sudden change in plan is that since most engineers are night owls, and so am I, I will discuss things I did a day earlier. It wasn’t very clear earlier about when to write, but looking at the timings of college and events, this would be appropriate. It would also help me to review my tasks of the day. Another big change is NO AI. Meaning I would only be using AI for understanding and studying when necessary. Isn’t it true that most students today are relying on AI for so many things. Maybe if I have an idea, I might check up stats with AI or check out for edge cases after I write code or design a course or roadmap for me. But writing my code, absolutely from scratch, “no“. The blog is absolutely in my voice, and so be it. I won’t use AI here, either. Shoutout to any student reading this: it is fun and quick at first, but once we make a habit of it, we stop learning, and I don’t think that will make a good engineer of me.

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Things I did yesterday:

Making Habits

class Solution {
    public boolean isPalindrome(int x) {
        if(x<0){
            return false;             //negative values are avoided
        }
        int a=x;
        int rev=0;            //always initialize
        while(a!=0){

            int temp=a%10;          //take remainter -> temp
            rev=rev*10 + temp;        //reversed number in here
            a=a/10;                  
        }
        if(x==rev)                  //check if original and reversed match 
            return true;            //is a palindrome
        else
            return false;           //not a palindrome
    }
}

• Started Leetcode again with my new email. Completed one problem only as I was working on an idea. I’d love to share the code here as well.

Competitions

• So, I participated in Hack-O-Hire. It is a hackathon opportunity for students studying in the Second and Third years of their degrees. We are required to provide a solution for a real-world problem. There were 4 problem statements for which we had to submit a document about our approach. I am not sure if it is okay to share it, so let’s just avoid it and be safe. Today is the last day to submit the document, and I’d be working on it today as well.

• I also participated in Chatbot Rumble, a competition of building an AI Chatbot, but before that, we needed to clear the MCQ round where we missed it just by 2 points. It was disheartening, but it’s right. “Why cry for the chance lost when you have more than enough ahead?” That’s what I think, and I absolutely think we do have many more opportunities further and I’m not leaving any either.

Learnings

• About Japanese, after a long pause in my Minna no Nihongo journey and after breaking my 210-day streak on Duolingo (That was devastating!), I’m back on track. I completed a small lesson on Duolingo and also some material from Minna No Nihongo(a workbook for practicing language vocabulary and grammar)

• You can check out the following channel for N5-level Japanese:
  https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1l62G4pGqfQjcIS1VdspVuCm1Zi1wBPE&si=4RYYJIOoYAqKvlAk

• We have a submission date approaching for DocSecure (an application to protect our documents when we send them for printing to Xerox shops). I will be working on bringing in AI features into it for ease tonight.

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Writing these small things about my day gives me a sense of accomplishment and keeps me going for further tasks.
“How do you manage projects and studying? Would love to hear your thoughts!“
Please feel free to communicate with me. Thank you!

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📢 Let’s Connect!

Feel free to reach out—let’s grow together! 💡

📩 Email: wanjalemansi23@gmail.com
🔗 LinkedIn: Mansi Wanjale

Always Learning, Always Growing! ✨