[We had the opportunity to interview Amit Shekhar, developer of the Android Debug Database, Co-founder at Mindorks and co-founder of HackerSpace. Amit is based in New Dehli in India.]
Can you present yourself and your contributions to open source?
I am a co-founder at Mindorks. Mindorks is the largest Android Community in the world. Here, I help students, developers in learning Mobile Development, Blockchain and AI. Helped more than 1,00,000 developers. I am also a co-founder & CEO at GetMeAnApp and HackerSpace. GetMeAnApp helps startups and enterprises in building mobile applications, blockchain apps and also in solving tech related queries. HackerSpace helps working individuals or small business owners in getting the office where they can work collaboratively in a shared area at an affordable price.
I am a self-taught programmer. I had graduated as a Civil Engineering from IIT in the year 2014. Then, I started working for a startup as a software engineer. While working, I used to note down the problem which was the tech-related problems I used to face and then later thought of creating the open-source projects for their solutions to help everyone. I have mostly contributed to Android Open-Source. I also started blogging about my open-source to show how it can help everyone. This has helped me in providing visibility to my open-source projects. This is how I started open-source.
You are very active in the Android and AI spaces. What areas in open source AI and Android seems the most promising to you from an enterprise point of view?
I think in AI, there is no solution which can run machine learning on Android very efficiently like low battery usage, small model size. I think we can work on an open-source project to create this. Although these model and processing can be done on the server sometimes it is required to be on our mobile phone. Nowadays, Mobile phone is at our fingertip. The bet is now on “Machine Learning on mobile devices in a very efficient way”. It can be built only with the great collaboration of both AI and Android.
What are your top 3 best open source Android software and enterprise related?
- First of all Android Debug Database we developped of course! ;). It is a powerful library for debugging databases and shared preferences in Android applications currently being used by top companies.
- Fast Android Networking – A Complete Fast Android Networking Library used by more than 2500 apps on google play store.
- PRDownloader – A file downloader library for Android with pause and resume support.
Are companies in India using a lot open source software?
Yes, of course. Most of the startups are heavily relying on open-source technology to move fast. Open-source software is bugs-free and proven software which is ready to use. I must from enterprise to startups, everyone is using open source software.
How do you see the open source ecosystem in India?
First of all, I’m biaised since my company Mindorks is encouraging the open-source culture in India 🙂 . I must say the open-source culture is building in India. It is not perfect. We are working are hard to build it. I am seeing day by day developers are showing their interest in open-source.
Any great open source projects born in India you know and like?
Here I’m biased but this is true that Android-Debug-Database which we created at Mindorks is quite famous everywhere. More than 5000 stars on GitHub is an achievement. I have received a great response from all around the world that this library has helped a lot of developers.
How can open-source help developers?If you have started as a developer: Start reading open-source code which will help you in knowing about the best practices, better architecture. Mainly you will learn how to write a better software.
If you are already working on open-source: You are basically collaborating with the great developers and enhancing your skills.
We thank Amit, and will follow the conversation in a few quarters to see how the Indian ecosystem is developing.