Mrinal Dhar

My parents decided to name me Mrinal and my family name is Dhar.
I'm in my fourth year as a Computer Science undergrad at IIIT-Hyderabad.

I'm a Web Developer/Designer, though my interests range from UX/UI design to Network security to Operating Systems development.

I'm passionate about creating real world applications with intuitive interfaces that people have a pleasant experience using.

Once I complete my Bachelors education, I will be studying for an M.S. in Computational Linguistics at IIIT-Hyderabad.

What I'm up to, these days...

Web Administrator at Language Technologies Research Center (LTRC), IIIT-Hyderabad.
Maintain all websites under the control of this department. I have also re-designed some of them (IASNLP).

Teaching Assistant (T.A.) at IIIT-Hyderabad.
for IT Workshop-1 course

In-charge of design at Ping! (college magazine).
Responsible for ideation and development of website's user interface and coordinating all design decisions.

Administrator at Open Source Developers Group (OSDG), IIIT Hyderabad
Promote FOSS at college level, encourage students to contribute to open source.

Working on several personal projects.
A (very) basic OS kernel, an AI digital assistant, an iOS game among others. Because, you know, they're fun.

I love...

creating user interfaces from scratch

Steve Jobs Keynotes

my family

iOS

Pixar

Philosophy

Linux

Apple

Chandler Bing

Google Search

Stack Overflow

The Newsroom

HIMYM

Suits

House M.D.

Javascript

The Beatles

day dreaming

Iron Man

Chicken

iPhone

Wikipedia

reading

XKCD

Cyanide and Happiness

being a smartass

Design

Design is more than how something looks. It's how it works.

It's easy to create a minimalistic user interface, or one that's heavily loaded with features. The trick is in striking the right balance between the two so the user doesnt feel either handicapped or over-burdened.

"Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I try to follow this quote from Albert Einstein in all the work I do. It fits perfectly with the design ideology described above.

It's important to note all the possible actions that can be made in an application at a particular time, and then focus on those which the user is most likely to care about and actually perform.

Re-design

I'm human. I make mistakes. We all do.

Even the best product design today will eventually break down or become obsolete. It's not about making systems bulletproof, it's about how quickly they can recover from bullets and then dodge similar ones in the future.

It's important to learn from your mistakes and develop a system that is better than the one it's replacing. Code that fixes a bug probably adds two more.

In some ways, the process of re-design is actually tougher than design itself.
There is just one strategy to it: Design, Re-design, repeat.

Inspired by Steve Jobs & his insanely great life.