I worked for the Data Engineering team at Yahoo! India for around a year and a half. I was involved in the development of fast and scalable algorithms to process Yahoo!'s traffic data. Here, I met a few really smart people who motivated me to delve deep into core computer science concepts. In a way, my inspiration to study further came from my interaction with these people and the beautiful (and complex) systems that were in place there.
Straight out of school, I joined ThoughtWorks India, as a part of its first batch of school recruits. I was the fourth employee in this incredibly exciting place, where I was lucky enough to learn software development as its supposed to be done. I was initiated into the world of test-first programming, refactoring and a gamut of other cool software development methodologies that came under the cult of Xtreme Programming. I was the moderator of the Design Patterns Study Group, and learnt basic OO design with a lot of hands on development. A great place to work for all die-hard OO programmers, J2EE/.NET developers, and any kind of Enterprise Application Specialists.
As a part of my B-Tech. project, I was involved in a character recognition effort at NIAS. Here, we employed back propagation neural networks to recognize characters from ancient Indian scripts like Brahmi. My contributions were in the phase of character feature extraction. I designed and implemented a bunch of graph and matrix algorithms that extracted (mathematical) features out of characters. These features were later used to train the neural networks.