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.

Learning from others project --- One big opportunity at VTU

VTU students are very aware of the way final year projects are done. I having completed my bachelors, am fully aware of the practices for the 8th sem project. But it appears that the same thing happens with our post-graduate students also. And this realization was made possible by none other than loafer Sethji . It was his brother's (elder of course) M.Tech final sem project. Sethji arranged (bought, actually) for a network based project. The project was about "Frame Relay Networks". The people who sold the project are not some scientists. So there document also had a lot of similarity with Wikipedia (no wonder). The code wasn't really that complex as it was Java (managed programming). Its not these technicals because of which I am writing here. Its the learning that the project gave me in course of me trying to stuff the concepts through the heads of setu, so he could eventually pass on the knowledge to his brother.

Not that Setu is a bad or slow learner, but the process took more time than I initially expected. Initial explanations by him made me think that things are pretty simple. Some of my initial assumptions about a few things being hard-coded did turn out to be true. But I never understood why anything like this was required. After some 3 hours of googling, reading and other eye/brain straining exercises I finally got some things stuffed into my head first, which were subsequently passed on to setu. As of now I assume that he has got hold of the concept, but I am not entirely sure what he will explain to his brother as he already seems to be pissed off with working on his brother's project (which is totally fair considering that fact that he himself worked for 3 days on his own final sem project).

Whatever the story or the background or the future might be, I must be thankful to Setu's brother for having made Setu get a project without which probably I would never have know what a "Frame Relay" is. Now about the technicals of the concept/project I have another post on another blog with a set of links to articles/documents from where I read about it and a bit of my own documentation for the laymen (aka me).

Now whats interesting about such practices is the opportunity that it provides for opportunists. In this case I happen to learn about this technology when I was no where near it from any angle. There will be many such opportunities, its just a matter of cashing them. This dialog from a Hindi movie makes perfect sense here: "Har minute ek bakra paida hota, aur two usko halaal kane ke liye" which essentially means for every dumb guy out there there will two others ready to exploit.

If there are guys waiting for someone to help them, there will be someone ready to make him a cash cow. So quickly decide what you want to be.

Nostalgia and the movie next day

Date: 29^th December 2007

Since few days, because of some unknown reason, I constantly wished to be back in my 3^rd year of engineering with all my friends at hostel, specifically the L4x series of rooms along with the 3 CSI seniors. That was probably the best part of my engineering life. The amount of learning and amount of fun was highest during this time. I guess, if given again, I would enjoy that part of my life at any moment and any number of times. Now as part of the co-incidence series of posts, this one will also present another instance of co-incidence.

Yesterday when I was going to office, I saw a boy with a bag running to catch a bus. He reminded me of Harish Bhai and an incident when me and him had raced casually after lunch. I once again wished to be in one of those CSI meetings under the chairmanship of the Harish Bhai. After this when I reach office and logon to Gmail, I see Harish Bhai online after so many days and I talked to him for a few minutes.

Today being weekend I got up late, only to find two Kannada movie CDs on the table in front of my bed. My Doddamma (Aunt) got it from a neighbor here. As I was absolutely jobless (in one sense) I decided to watch one of the movies as it was a long time since I watched any of the new-age Kannada movies. Of the two I picked up one and seeing that Sudeep (A well known Kannada actor with a commanding voice) is the protagonist I started watching it. The movie was really good and I enjoyed it like anything. Now the co-incidence part is that the movie was about the protagonist recollecting the past – his school days, college days and initial days of his work, at a time when he was deciding on the list of people whom he wanted to invite for his wedding. He wanted to see all these three spheres of his life together once again for one last time. Every scene was beautifully portrayed (of course except for the songs) and each instance in those scenes reminded me of some instance that had happened in my life. I too have three sets of friends, in fact four including the colleagues at office. I could correlate several parts of my life with quite a few scenes of the movie. The only outstanding difference was that the protagonist has “FOUR” girls in his life where as there are typically none in mine. But nevertheless I have much bigger group of friends and above all a lot of them are still in contact with me and we talk frequently enough.

I suggest any person who has lived a hostel life to watch this movie. By the way, the movie is “My Autograph”. A really good movie (would have been much better without songs). I wish science was advanced enough for me to afford a minimal time machine, without any accessories, at least.

FOSS.IN/2007 – The most exquisite FOSS event

In an earlier post I mentioned how much Mozillians have influenced me and that will surely give an idea as to how much eager I would be to meet any of those people. Well it finally happened this year during the FOSS.IN/2007 as IISc in Bangalore. I was looking forward for this event even before Mozilla was a part of this. I had missed it in the last couple of years and this year I was very keen on attending it as I was in Bangalore itself and the venue was so close to my residence. I sometimes even thought of bunking office for all the five days and have some real good time with all the open source freaks from different parts of the world. As crazy the idea seems to be I was able to attend the event only for one full day and a part of another. That apart, my interest in the event doubled or increased by several times when I found out that Mozilla was one of the projects for Project Days and few of the folks that I had talked to over IRC were coming down to speak at this event. I was very much excited and followed the event very closely. I completed my online registration the day it was announced, I subscribed to the RSS feed of the FOSS.IN/2007 main page, looked at the schedule when it was posted, read about speakers and what they will be speaking when that was put up. Basically I made sure I did not miss out on any detail. Another thing that caught my attention was the Google summer of code BoF (Birds of Feather) that was proposed and also accepted. This was another chance to meet fellow countrymen involved in the development of FOSS. Altogether this was something really big and was close to one of my all time dream of being amidst full time geeks and computer science pundits.

I was getting ready for the event and unfortunately cold and soar throat struck me a couple of days before the event. Nevertheless I asked for a sick leave on the first day of the event and thanks to my manager who granted it immediately. I quickly got ready by noon after some extra resting in the morning and took my uncle’s laptop and moved to IISc to meet the OSS freaks from different parts of the country and the world.

As I was late I missed out on talks related to extension development and a couple of other dev stuff in the Mozilla project days schedule. When I went there it was close to lunch time and almost everyone was moving to the dining area. As I was not completely healthy I had restrain myself from enjoying the FOSS delicacies. I just roamed around the event area looking at the various corporate stalls that were put up there. A couple of days before the event I had met a friend’s brother, who was going to launch a product of his company in this event. I went and met him and looked at the various products that were out there for exhibit. This got over pretty quickly and I had to find something for me to spend time.

Fortunately the event area was Wi-Fi enabled. I utilized the lunch break to update my Mozilla repository on my uncle’s laptop and also to submit a patch which was waiting in my inbox. The wireless connectivity was really good and the speed was well worth mentioning. By the time my repo was up-to-date the afternoon session had started. Then I moved to Satish Dhawan auditorium where the Mozilla talks were being held and spent the rest of the day with the Mozillians. More about the time spent with Mozilla folks in a later post. But I must really thank Team FOSS.IN which made it possible for me to meet the Mozilla people and have some good time with them.

On the whole the FOSS.IN/2007 experience was awesome and memorable. It was very well organized and at the end of the day I saw Atul Chitnis (One of the main men behind the success of the event) hanging around with the volunteers. The sleeveless jackets that the volunteers were given always made me feel that I too should have been a volunteer. ;-)

Jai Shree Yalaguresh Prasanna

Hari Om.

My First Hangout with Mozillians

As I am involved in the development of the Mozilla Firefox web browser I have always thought of meeting the actual full time Mozilla developers and spending some time with them. As most of them are in US, in a normal scenario this would have happened sometime when I was in US. But luckily for me this happened in India, right here in Bangalore where I stay. It was today, the 4^th of December 2007, during the FOSS.IN/2007 event at IISc.

On account of being sick during the event I was not able to attend all the talks. I missed out on all the morning talks as it was already lunch time when I went there. So I started with the afternoon session where Axel talked about localization, Chris Hoffman talked about Testing and Krishnakanth talked about accessibility. Though these were not the talks that I was looking forward to listen to, I just spent my time in the auditorium waiting for an opportunity to speak to Myk, who was the only developer guy amongst those who had come. All the talks got over at around 6:00pm and it was announced that interested people can talk to the Mozillians. Though Myk was already caught by a couple of Akamai guys, I went to him and introduced myself with the “Resumable Downloads” tag. Though he did not remember me he remembered the feature and that made it easy for me to talk to him. Moreover I was wearing my GSoC shirt, which luckily my father had got it from home just a day before. That carried some recognition too.

Then me, Myk, the Akamai guys and another person interested in XUL and Thunderbird talked at length about various things involved in Mozilla development. The Akamai guys asked me if I am interested in joining them when they realized that I knew Mozilla stuff, after they heard me speaking about debugging release builds of Firefox using remote symbol server. Then we exchanged contact info and they asked me to send them some info on that debugging thing. There were a couple more incidents like this where in I met different people from different companies, small and big, who were doing some work related to Mozilla.

Then we carried the banners and posters to the store room and that was when I got introduced to the other 3 Mozillians present there: Mary, Chris and Axel and also to other Indian developers, a couple of NIT-Jaipur students and a RV college lecturer. After we deposited the banners and stuff in the store room, I asked Mary about their plans for the rest of the day and she said, “We are going out for dinner to some place nice and you are coming with us.” I was like “Me???!!!” She said, “Yes you. Lets go, the cars are here.” I was so surprised and did not know what to say. Luckily the RV college lecturer and the NITJ students were also coming and that made things a little more comfortable. I and the lecturer agreed to go on his bike and the rest of them came in cars. We went to an Italian restaurant named “Sunnys”.

We spent nearly 3 hours there eating and talking. A few of them had some nice Italian wine and other drinks. I sat next to Myk, with Axel and Mary in front of me. We again talked about the various things happening at Mozilla. The OS conflicts, views of different people and who is working on what. It was during this discussion that Myk told me about Timeless’ secret project at Nokia, where he was involved in development of a Mozilla based browser for Nokia N810 tablet. I also got to know about several other such things. Mary told us about her driver running over a dog and several other things that they find so very surprising about India. For instance, traffic was one of them. They even took pictures and video recordings of the traffic to show it to people back in US.

Overall it was a nice time and I learnt that the employed folks are also as fun loving and easy going as us. I got to know a lot about the internals of the Mozilla and some of the current affairs. It was basically a start for me to get more known in the community so that people would identify me with my contributions when I talk in IRC. I guess this motto was achieved to some extent. At least of the 4 I am sure Myk remembers me. After that me and the NITJ students went home and it was the end of a memorable day. Hope I get more of such days.

Jai Shree Yalaguresh Prasanna

Hari Om.

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. ;-)