The Digest

This is the third blog I'm putting out, and even though the name "The Digest" might seem like it came out of nowhere, trust me — it's more relevant than it looks. Both meanings apply here, and that's exactly why it works.

This one is about CipherHash, a project my friend Avinash K. and I built as an assignment for a minor subject in college. It's a hashing project, and the blog is called The Digest. If you didn't catch that, the output of a hash function is literally called a digest. So yeah, it was always going to be called this.

This was a genuinely good experience — working on a project with a friend, sharing insights, throwing ideas at each other, sometimes landing on the solution we needed, and sometimes landing on problems we didn't ask for. That part was new for me. I've almost always preferred to work alone, so having someone to bounce things off of, contradict, and build with was a fresh kind of dynamic.

The project came together in a shorter time than expected, even though we started late, which might be the most student thing I've ever written. The majority of the coding work was done by Avinash K., since I'm still making my way through front-end programming. I handled inputs, logic, and a good amount of the thinking behind it. Even so, I understood the structure and the flow throughout. The colour combinations and palettes were chosen by Avinash, which also made this my first project with any real front-end involvement and it was a good one.

We made our project as a Progressive Web Application (PWA), which was inspired by our English teacher in the first semester, Mr. W. S. Andrew Veda, when he created a PWA for English Quests and took a different approach to teaching English as a subject.

In the end, this was more than just an assignment. It gave me a better understanding of different types of hashing, and quietly showed me that working with someone else can change the way I approach things — sometimes for the better, sometimes into territory I wasn't expecting, but always forward.