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Tomorrow is the day. Hrishi, Raju, Sunil Ji, et. al. will be here. Here at Jagdalpur. For the kick-off of the CS17 Software Development programme.

Honestly, I am a bit nervous as it is a huge responsibility. But also excited for what the future holds.

Entrance & Interviews

After the entrance test paper was handed over to the Chetna team, they did a great job in outreach! Especially Rekha ji. She left no stone unturned to get a bigger pool of students to take the test. Visiting schools, arranging tests in remote locations, taking tests at the office, and more. Her job became harder as schools closed after the exams ended.

Learning for later: this process has to start at least 2-3 months sooner starting the next batch (🤞🏼)

We kept receiving and checking answer sheets in batches. The result was maintained in a simple Google sheet (of course there was an itch in me to create a DocType in Frappe). Thanks to Vishwajeet and Aditya (winners of Aamcho Hackathon 1.0 and recently started interning with us) for helping with marking.

Interviews

After we had evaluated a good chunk and there were no more answer sheets coming in actively, we got on an all-hands call and decided on the next key steps:

• 40 out of 70 to be the cut-off
• In-person interviews on 23rd April, 2026 at BSM Campus, parents to be called along with the prospective students, and counselled by Rekha ji and team separately
• Arrange lunch for all and be ready to announce the result on same day
• Target a start date of 11th May, 2026

We stayed on timeline. Gulshan from Foundation joined me for the interviews. While Rekha ji coordinated the arrival of students, Gulshan and I interviewed the kids one by one. Gulshan was surprised by the calibre of girls of Bastar!

We ended up selecting 6 and having 3 on waitlist (later we selected 2 of those). This totals to 8. We are still a bit far from our target of 17 students, but more on that later.

Preparing Myself

For the past month or so, I have started to learn about systems at a low-level. For a very long time I have been an application layer programmer without much clarity about how things work under the hood: how does an OS work, threads vs process, how does a CPU work? This has bugged me for long. I finally decided to do something about it.

I picked up the book: “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” to learn about operating systems, but the prerequisites of the book was knowledge of how systems work and recommended the book “Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective”, which was luckily lying around in our book shelf. I started with that. All the missing pieces started to fall in place!

It started at the very bottom, overview of the Computer Architecture: registers, the BUS, data representation, memory hierarchy, components of operating system, etc. I am still on Chapter 3, but the level of clarity I have gained here is awesome. Then I stumbled upon this video series by Ben Eater:

I basically binged these 44 videos! I can confidently say now I understand how computers work.

Laptops

This needs its own section because it was tougher than I had anticipated it to be 😂

I had finalised a model (Acer, 14”) weeks back and the budget was also based on that (INR 55K). This was the laptop used by Gajendra, one of our team mates, and I had really liked it.

The Chetna team was to procure it via a wholesale dealer. But they had no luck: the dealer took too long to respond, and then when he got back he didn’t have the model (or even a close one).

At first the Chetna team was reluctant to buy online, because of some past experiences, but then we decided to go for it. Then came the next blocker, the prices for the model had gone up significantly (more than 10K), making it out of our decided budget. The search began again. We found another one, which was very similar and the same brand, but we could only order 3 at a time. Since Induji was having billing issues, we took responsibility of ordering those.

As soon as we ordered six, it went out of stock, and came back with a 3k price increase 🙈

Those six arrived in the meantime and Rahul took charge of testing and preparing them for CS17. We have installed Linux (Ubuntu) on all of them:

I managed to order one more at that price via Flipkart, after which they increased the price to 61K. After waiting for a few days, we ordered the rest at 58K(!) from Amazon.

The Venue

There were serious hiccups here: miscommunications, expectations not matched, etc. I won’t go into much depth here, but let’s just say things were not smooth. It was sorted later.

Time Table

Still WIP:

The Small Things

Along the way it has become clear to me that even in a programme at this small-ish scale, there are hundreds of things that need to be in place: boards, ID cards, furniture, nutritious food plan, stationery, ensuring safety, classroom, and much more.