April 2009 - Appraisal

This was making rounds as email forward. Just could not laughing for a loooooong time..

You and Your BOSS

And I became the nomad...!!!

Bachelors -- A very bad title for the people with a career line like that of mine. It is that state when they are doomed to all sorts of miseries and the only best part being the freedom - for every aspect of life and the feel good factor being the last stage in life where we stay with friends. But seriously apart from this its all crap, totally. And just for the record, by my career line, I am referring to a typical average student, scoring some ok level marks, getting a job in some software company in BENGALOORU and starting this doomed life first by starting to look for a place to stay. Its all good in the beginning when we go out for treats and parties often and don't really lead a REGULAR life. But once things cool down, once we are no longer FRESHERS, thats when the trouble starts. We no longer have friends calling us for parties on the occasion of they joining their first job. And sometime later even the first salary treats get over. Then we are just the NORMAL SOFTWARE ENGINEER. And don't even get me started on what that means. In short, as mentioned before, it is this doomed life.

I personally escaped this for nearly an year now. Luckily my doddappa (Uncle) was working in Bangalore and I got a chance to stay with him. But again, this was supposed to be a temporary arrangement. I was supposed to stay with a few of my closest friends from college in a rented house in Indiranagar. But that location was not good for me as there was no direct transportation to my office from there. I had to travel in two city buses, though the distance was just 7kms. Also I got so used to the easy life at my uncle's place that I was not really willing to move out and start staying on my own. Well man it was really heaven when I compared myself with so many other colleagues of mine who were the "Bachelors". But this obviously had to change. I just could not continue to stay there forever. At one point or the other I had to move out and face this partial-hell.

There were a few triggers for this either in the form of Doddappa's transfer or they moving to a different house at the north end of the city (FYI, my office is in southern bangalore) and some more. Somehow those just passed by and I stayed there for 1 ful year. I recently joined Akamai, and these people are moving further south and the new office is even farther and I might require close to 2 hours for one way commute which is certainly insane. Totally insane. So I had to move out to a place nearer to my new office.

There were different plans and different ideas, and as usual, only one worked out. I decided to stay with my college friend Abhijeet aka Kolya. As he was in a hurry to find a house (and I am lazy), we could not roam around a lot and check out lots of houses and find an awesome deal. We had to settle for one of the inital houses. Its pretty good, but I have this feeling that the rent we are paying is pretty high. Anyways I was sort of under limitations. The rent is not the point here, the point is that I finally moved out and plunged into this "DOOMED LIFE". Though the shifting, that too just the first phase, happened just today I am already feeling like a NOMAD. At the end of the day, when I see the
office getting empty, I get a thought of going home. But then again, there is a sort of reluctance. I don't know why but I become averse of going home. For me its still a friend's place, not yet my home. I try to reason out and find a valid reason to go home and find none. As of now my new home is like some 'yet another place'. Earlier, I had this push or force that I am going home, where there are people waiting for me to come and we will have food together. And probably later watch TV or just chat or have gyaan transfer later. All this can happen even at the new place also. Relatives replaced by friend(s). But that is yet to sink in. It will take some time, probably a little more in my case.

Whatever it may be, as of now, I am a NOMAD --- I have become the nomad.

Aren't you proud to be a programmer?!

Read this: Lucky to be a Programmer : Gustavo Duarte

This blog was circulated in my organization and it is really awesome. This is something every programmer/software engineer must read and really be proud about the work they do. Of course everyone must be proud about the work they do, if they are really doing what they love. Now that's a totally different argument about following one's passion and doing something else for money. May be someday I will have a write up about that. As of now, the blog post linked here in itself is pretty long and I do not want readers to be tired by the time they finish my "introduction" ;-).

Go ahead and read that one.

Regards,
Brahmana.

Need of Exposure To Open Source Community

Ever since I have been associated with Mozilla community I have been interacting with a lot of people involved in the development of the Mozilla products, mainly Firefox web browser. I have learnt so many things from the community and have interacted with several extremely modest people who despite being extremely knowledgable and busy too, often helped me with my stupid questions. And in several occasions I see people younger than me who are so bright and have contributed much more than what I have done. All these situations just keep reminding me that no matter how much of Computer Science I know, how much of coding and design I have done there is still so much to learn and there are a lot of people who are simply better than me. The second part especially motivates me and always keeps ringing in my head in case I start thinking big of myself. Not that I am boasting about myself, but it’s true that I was a pretty good programmer back in the college. I was one guy who did a few things others did not do or others did not consider doing, though there were several who were way ahead of me in knowledge and intelligence and had much more capacity than me. Basically I am trying to say that I was somewhat good amongst the guys in the college. And this had given me a feeling of satisfaction (to some extent) that I have indeed learnt something and achieved something. I knew that a lot of real good punters lurked around in the open source community through my frequent visits to IRC. That to some extent kept me glued to earth and prevented me from being complacent. But I always carried around a thought that I am some good.

That was clearly a crappy thought. And it became more and more clear when I was formally involved with an open source community and interacted with the folks there more and more. I, like any beginner in the community (Mozilla community), had several things to learn during the initial stages and always had a lot of questions. Probably in my case it was a little more than any other beginner. Luckily I had several people in the community helping me out and always ready to answer my questions. Whenever I came across a new nickname in any channel I am observing I would just try and find out more about the person. That way I got to know about different people pretty well. I came across people who have been there right from the time Mozilla originated or even before when it was still NetScape. But none of them carried any air of pride and were very modest all the time. The credentials of the person answering my question used to be so high that I often feared asking anything thinking that I would just get some scolding for putting in a silly question. But such a thing never happened. Be it a regular developer or QA guy, employed or a volunteer, young or old, they all helped me. It’s not just the modesty, but their technical knowledge also is worth speaking. They were so precise, they considered situations that never occurred to me, they thought of performance, usability and several such things simultaneously and every word of theirs carried weight, every bit of it was informative. Sometimes things went way above my head and I had to ask them to explain the same things again and again and in simpler words. They did that almost every time. If I was not ready to understand what they were talking about someone would point me to a nice document which would clearly explain me the basics, after reading which I could understand the discussion easily.

All these things always told me one thing: World is really big and it has some really big people, so be modest and be ever receptive. This means that there are a lot of heights yet to be scaled by anyone and hence one should never stop learning because there is always something new to learn. It is in this OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY that I realized what computer science and programming is. It is because of the PEOPLE IN THIS COMMUNITY I realized that there is so much to learn. If not for this community I would probably have been a complacent guy who would have shut his doors for new knowledge and considered himself a "GOOD PROGRAMMER". Thank you OSS.

That is why I would say that exposure to the open source community and affiliation with one of those is mandatory for any computer science student who aims at being a successful and worthy programmer. It is here people will get a look of the ocean named programming and the several software applications that are churned out continuously. I hope this becomes the order of the day very soon and every computer science student will learn programming real world applications right when he/she is in college. This would also lead several success stories coming from our Indian academic institutions and we will be leaders, intellectually, once again.

Jai Shree Yalaguresh Prasanna.
Hari Om.

WaterWays - An amazing way of transfer

Water ways - The most cost effective transport system:

This is the outcome ofyet another discussion with Doddappa(Uncle). We were actually about varied careers and how one can be successful and not be yet another engineer or a doctor. Though we came up with a lot of options like being a scientist after doing a masters in pure science or may be be take up journalism and many more, but the one that stood out as an extremely lucrative one was Merchant Navy. Then my sister asked the typical youngster question: "What do these people at Merchat Navy do??!!". That was what my uncle was precisely waiting for, an opportunity, and he started the gyaan transfer.

Though most of what he said was known to me, there was one thing which struck me like anything. He said that a large part of mass-goods transfer i.e actual large scale business hapened through water-ways because it was the cheapest mode. Though I knew this bit of fact the reason for this interested me more than anything. It is very simple. For roadways we ave to "maintain roads", for railways we have to "maintain rails", for airways though we do not have to "maintain air" its really a costly affair to maintain airports, the air traffic control and hence makes air-transport an ultimately costly choice for transfer of all regular mass usage goods. But with waterways there is no such thing at all. Ships move on waters and seas and oceans take care of that. Traffic control is a lot easier than airways. From what I know fuel is also much cheaper compared to the extremely high quality air-fuel. (So much of comparision with airways is because the others cannot be used for transport across the globe)

So all that we need to worry about is ports/harbours. i have heard about natural harbours and hence I guess even those costs are partly taken care by Mother nature already. This and so many other things make water ways the obvious choice for shipping large amounts of goods. may be other modes of transport will make transportation charges itself more than the actual cost of the goods being transported.

Now there might be some environmental considerations that need to be taken care of. Because recently when some American or French ship was coming to Gujarat port for scrapping there was a lot of opposition as it was hazardous and leading to pollution big time. But still cost stands a big deal. I hope our good scientist fellows will soon find a less hazardous and pollution-free shipping ways. :-)

So businessman and would be businessman, watch out for your shipyard. And also learn how to swim, just in case, you know. ;-)
Hail Water-ways, Hail mother Nature... (Thank god I can swim :P )

Theory X and Theory Y

This is yet another discussion that I had with my Doddappa(uncle). The title seems to be a very interesting and something exciting. Even I felt the same when my uncle first mentioned it. But it eventually turned out that it was a very much common and known thing. Then why the hell am I writing about this here?? Well the answer is, I did not know that such a common thing could be documented so well and that it would be on of the most important management theories.

There is a nice Wikipedia article about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_X_and_theory_Y and hence I will not be writing anything about this here.

In short Theory X is the pessimistic view and Y is the optimistic view about the people you are managing. But in reality people at any place are really a mix of this and are generally somewhere in between these two extremes. So the manager needs to shrewed enough to identify and categorize people and manage them accordingly. Because X-type of management will piss-off the Y-type of people and may result in resource loss. The reason is that self motivated and creative people want freedom and do not like to be persistently nagged. On the other hand Y-type of management for X-type of people will result in zero or close to zero output and the manager's neck is on the blade. The reason simply being that lazy people who are at work just for money and exploit all facilities will just do that and refrain from working. So managers and people aspiring to be managers, though this is a very common and old and also a sort of outdated philosophy my guess is that it still is an important one.

Basic Planning Gyaan

I recently completed my graduation in Computer Science and Engineering and started my career at National Instruments R&D as a Software Engineer. There are a lot of things that I learnt here in first few days. Of course I cannot put all of that here. But I can indeed put some most generic things, things mostly known to all or at least a lot of people. This post has something like that. The freshers here (one of whom was me) had a meeting with our manager for a particular thing. We discussed a lot of things out which I found few interesting and have put them here. These are mainly management related stuff like how a professional should lead his/her professional life. Pretty simple but very important things. These things are very essential for any organization to be successful.

Don't push things , rather take things on. Take Responsibilities .
-- This is the good old thing which told us not to put the blame on someone else when we do not succeed. Its just put in a different way. Whenever we have task facing us we should always go for it rather than shun it away waiting for someone else to take it. We should realize that the more we work the more we grow. Its always a +ve things to take up responsibility than to drop them or avoid them.

Always Under Commit , Over Deliver .
-- The previous point tells us to take up work. But what it does not speak about is that whatever is taken up must be completed in time. When accepting a job, when committing for something we should make sure we got enough room for this new thing and it is not going to affect our previous schedules and commitments. And also when finalizing deadline we should think of unforeseen situations and obstacles and plan accordingly. Have some buffer time reserved. Hence we should always under commit and try and work hard to over deliver. This point might seem contradicting to the previous one but both are to be balanced well to go up the ladder.

Don't randomly oscillate on days . Divide your day properly.
-- This is the discipline part. Every day has to be productive. At the end of each day when you ask yourself about that day's outcome you must have a valid answer. And this can happen only when we properly plan the day. Planning plays a crucial role even in a day's work. So instead of spending the day trying to do a lot things, we better plan the day. Tools like post-it reminers, or an online dairy or a calendar or some other form of To-Do list will come a long way in making the day fruitful. So the first thing you got to do when you move in daily is to list down the tasks you plan to do that day. Something like 5 to 10 minutes should be sufficient for this. Be sure to note these things so as to verify later. Start work as per plan. Note down any new thing that you come across in the middle of the day. Then close to the end of the day, say around an hour before you leave verify whether you accomplished all the listed tasks. If some critical things were left out then complete them before you leave. Or may be you can postpone the less important ones to a further date.
What is more important to a plan to work is that it should be followed. So once you have a plan for the day follow it. And follow it as closely as possible. Do not oscillate between multiple things at a time. For example - if you are focussing on something very seriously, just don't start browsing. That will put you out of the frame(of course unless you have some real good control over thoughts and mind).

Plan everything well for the time you spend out of the office as well.
-- Our personal life affects our professional life almost in every aspect and the converse is also true. If we can't get things done on time in office we end up staying late and that annoys people at home. They start cribbing, telling us why we are late daily and all that stuff. That obviously makes us angry and we lose the mental balance. And when we are in office with such a mind we do things in a much worse way and the cycle goes on. So we better plan things for our personal life also. Just to make sure that we are successful everywhere.

These are a sort of Golden Rules for anyone who aspires to be successful. At least that is what I feel. I of course have started following these and it has helped me a lot.

Learn to say NO , Learn to be harsh

Doddappa & General Dyer

This is one of the several discussions or talks that I had with my Doddappa (Uncle). It was during and after supper (during mine and after his.. though we started together). He just started with the JalianWala Bagh incident which happened before Indian Independence. Just to recall, a large number of Sikhs had gathered in this place JalianWala Bagh for a religious meeting (from what I know). At that time General Dyer had issued a notice that no public meetings could be held, as it was a sign of freedom struggle and the British always wanted to avoid a full fledged opposition to their rule. When General Dyer became aware of this religious meeting he came with a troop of gunmen and positioned them behind the Sikhs covering the only the entrance to the enclosed JalianWala Bagh ground where they had assembled. He gave a warning telling the people there to clear before his countdown ends. The Sikhs did not budge and the General ordered the troops to open fire on the people. He killed almost all of the Sikhs present there. Some say the number was hundreds and some say it was thousands. Whatever it is, I am pretty sure it was big number.

There was a lot of opposition and revolt after this incidence in a lot of places in India. Also there was a great big opposition in England also, about the action of General Dyer. So the British, fair in governance as they few call them, formed a committee to investigate the matter. The committee had Indian(s) too.

It started with the General Dyer being questioned. When he was asked for a reason to take in a troop of gunmen inside that enclosed area, he said "The entrance was too small for my tanker/automated firearm weapon to move in. Thats why I had to finish the job with few gunmen". This might enrage the Indians, but there is a lesson to be learnt here.

Never in the interrogation did he confess that he did a mistake. Never was he sorry that he killed so many people. Not even through out his life. Any time he was asked about that incident he said "I was just protecting the queen. I was following my orders. I just did my duty". Never did he regret that action of his and he always considered that he had discharged his duty properly.

Each one of us will face a similar scenario in our careers. We will come across situations when we are supposed to make harsh statements or we receive such harsh comments. In either cases, it that was the need of the hour then we should never regret about the situation. Sometime a senior of ours may scold us or make certain negative remarks. If those are justified then all that he has done is his job. He would have failed in his duties if he had not done that. This justification is again a very difficult thing. Not all would be ready to accept any such thing told. The very first reaction would be think that its wrong. But a proper thinking with a cool mind will sort out the things.

On the other hand there might be a situation when we are supposed to speak like that or make certain hard decisions. If that is in the best interest of all then we should never hesitate to do it. The person at the receiving end may consider us to be rude, but we know we are not. All that we have done is dischared our duties. This is the harder part. And this is what we have to learn from the above mentioned incident in the life of General Dyer.

IBM Internship: Part I: The Interview

This is the second post regarding my internship at IBM. Since the prologue did not contain any information about my interview here is a bit about it. It was my first corporate interview and I guess I did fairly well. Before the interview I went out with a buddy to get print outs of my resume. He was one of the volunteers coordinating the selection procedure. He revealed to me that the IBM folks were selecting just about 3 or 4 students. This was certainly not welcoming information and it brought some concerns.

I did not top the written test and hence I was later in the list. So I watched people go in and come out at an interval close to 20 minutes. Pals like SI shared questions and even suggested answers. A couple of those finished their interview came out jumping, literally, and were totally sure that they were in. This raised certain doubts in my mind. I started imagining scenes where I and a few others would be just sent back without even being interviewed. Luckily IBMers were pretty patient and nothing like that happened. And then came my turn. I went into that same interview hall, which our senior Harish Bhai had shown as a place where he got his job.

A person named Suresh interviewed me. He started with typical questions which SI had told us earlier outside. The first one was the television and the remote control question, where in I was asked to design a system which will enable interaction between the two devices, just the object oriented (OO) software (no hardware details). My design was a little ok I guess. Then he went on to as me about some other design questions closely related to OO. Then it was my college and CSI senior Gautham Pai, who in a way is one of my gurus, who interviewed me. He looked at my CV and started asking me about the paper that I and my friend Ashwin had presented. We divulged into several discussions regarding authentication and authorization and how they differ and all that. It was all good and smooth. Then finally I was asked about the UNIX style access control system.

With this came an end to my first interview and nearly a 45 minutes wait to the next candidate. It was a good experience for me as my performance was satisfactory to me. This was confirmed when the list of selected students was announced and my name was the first. The first thing I did was, obviously, to run to the phone booth and inform my parents. Well I had officially started earning and 12K per month was a good enough deal to be happy. :-) After that I called Doddappa and a few others to inform them about the beginning of this success.

After this followed verbatim recitation of my interview and casual talks and finally the PARTY. More about the party and other happenings in another post. After all, Success Story has just started. ;-)

IBM Internship -- The Prolouge

Internship @IBM - The first productive period of my Engg student life.

THE PROLOUGE

The title clearly states that till this internship I have not done anything productive. On the academic front it was bound to happen considering the way college was being run, the competence of the people who imparted knowledge and the way exams were conducted. Had I been dependent just on these things then probably all that I would have been is a book-worm. But thank god, there is this world of open-source software which saved me. Thanks to a few seniors, a few peers and partly also my ego, a fire to learn things beyond the books was kindled and I started "wasting" my time on things not present in our textbooks. But it was all learning, a one-way traffic. It was never reflected back in any achievement. Though I and my friend Ashwin Biyani came up with a paper, we both know what research (re-search) we did for that paper.

I do not know what held me from doing anything. It was my laziness or probably lack guidance. But neither of these are reasons worth mentioning. All that matters is the outcome and what can be present in "white and black" and there was no such thing in my case. We did have certain failed attempts though. After our 4th sem we stayed back in holidays and learnt HTML. Of course the plan was to further continue it and come up with a project which of course did not succeed. Then probably in 5th sem, we tried joining GNOME, Bangalore with projects like Mono or Evolution. Again that too failed. We did try to knock the doors of Novell but backed out later, just because of laziness and lack of josh and passion.

It was so until the middle of 6th sem. I was at our university hockey tournament at Tumkur (I guess it was Tumkur). At the end of first half of first day we had won our first match against PESIT and were to play our second match later that day. It was a little late in the evening and we were getting thoughts that we will not be playing our second match that day as the first round was still going on. Around this time I got know (I do not remember how, I did not have a cellphone with me back then) that the very next day IBM-ISL was visiting our college for offering internships. I was a little disappointed considering that I will have to travel and reach hostel that night and the very next morning I would be attending the test and hopefully the interview also. I hurried without informing all of my teammates. Kushal, the team captain, was pretty reluctant and tried retaining me for the rest of the tournament. He said "VTU Cup maga". I said "Nanna career Maga" and he said no more. (I now realize that I was absolutely correct about what I said. This internship did shape my career as a s/w engineer.)

When I reached hostel I could feel the heat of the next day's test by seeing all my able friends gummed tight to OO - related books, mainly C++ ones. (It was revealed by a senior interning at IBM that selectors would concentrate on OO concepts) There were few BOOs and WOOs when people saw me back, as I guess they were expecting me to miss this internship opportunity. I was a bit tired because of the game and the journey. But I had to hold the books and I did. I started with Herbert Schildt's C++ and I started to realize that there is so much in C++ that I do not know. But this attempt for last moment preparation was in vain as I was very sleepy. I do not remember much about that night, but I am sure I would have had a few discussions with friends, both technical and non-technical. I would have narrated the hockey match and finally when we realized we were wasting time, few punters would have gone back to books and I would have gone to sleep.(of course with some hope - which I always like to carry)