1. 'Atomic Habits' by James Clear (for fixing sleep & study loops) 2. 'Deep Work' by Cal Newport (vital for CS & engineering focus) 3. 'The Psychology of Money' by Morgan Housel (money basics) 4. 'Norwegian Wood' by Haruki Murakami (nostalgia & youth) 5. 'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi (perspective on purpose). What book changed how you think during college?

Never charge hourly when starting out — clients will question why a bug took 3 hours to fix. Charge per project milestone: - Milestone 1: Wireframes & visual designs in Figma (30% upfront) - Milestone 2: Functional staging deployment (40%) - Milestone 3: Production domain launch & handover (30%). Never deploy to their live domain until the final payment is cleared in your account.

Include this sentence in your initial proposal contract: 'Project includes up to 2 rounds of design revisions. Additional revision rounds or changes to approved wireframes will be billed at ₹1,500/hour.' The moment revisions have a price tag, clients suddenly become remarkably clear about what they actually want.

For our Cloud Computing semester project, someone uploaded a starter repo that was secretly the final completed assignment from the 2024 batch. Over 40 students forked it without clearing the commit logs. During external evaluation, the external examiner opened git log and saw 'Fixed docker compose - Rohan Patel, Dec 2024' on 38 different laptops. The entire lab froze in utter silence. The professor just sighed, took off his spectacles, and said: 'At least change the commit author name, you are in 7th semester'. Everyone got a B+.

Everyone knows about the multinational consulting firm that blacklisted our campus for 2 years. What actually happened: A senior was giving the online technical interview for his roommate using a second monitor and an external Bluetooth microphone. Midway through the coding challenge, the webcam mirror reflection on the hostel window clearly showed the second guy sitting on the bed frantically typing code into ChatGPT. The interviewer asked: 'Could the gentleman on the bed please explain why he chose Quicksort over Mergesort?'. The silence was so loud you could hear the ceiling fan squeaking.

When I entered college, I had no clue what computer science even meant. By the end of 2nd year, I had accumulated 8 backlogs across Engineering Maths, Digital Logic, and Data Structures. I felt paralyzed with shame. I stopped going home for Diwali because I couldn't face the questions. In my 5th semester, a senior sat me down and told me: 'A backlog is just an administrative exam debt. It does not define your intellect. Clear one subject per month and build your GitHub portfolio.' I cleared all 8 backlogs over the next 3 semesters by doing 6 AM study sessions before classes. Last month, I cleared the technical bar at a leading fintech startup in Bangalore. To anyone staring at an N-grade right now: this is merely a chapter, not your whole story.

During the 2020-2022 lockdown semesters, whenever a professor called my roll number for random viva questions, I would blow gently into the microphone while crinkling a potato chip bag and saying 'Sir... krshhh... network... krshhh... audio cut ho raha hai'. I cleared 4 semesters with an 8.9 CGPA and never answered a single viva question live.

Classic computer architecture experiment: Iterate over 100,000 integers and conditionally sum elements > 128. If the array is unsorted, the CPU's branch predictor misses 50% of the time, stalling the instruction pipeline. If the array is sorted, branch prediction accuracy is ~99%, and execution runs 6x faster. Understanding hardware mechanics makes you a dramatically better programmer.

Question: 'Estimate the number of cups of tea consumed daily on your university campus.' 1. State clarifying assumptions (campus student population = 6,000; hosteler vs day scholar split = 80/20). 2. Segment by user personas (non-tea drinkers = 30%, light drinkers = 1 cup/day, heavy exam grinders = 3 cups/day). 3. Add faculty and canteen footfall. 4. Sanity check with canteen vendor batch sizes. Interviewers care about structured logic, not the exact number.