And for me, that is THE problem I am having!!! Writing a post here… With a perennial writers-block in my head, writing ONE blog post is becoming a herculean task for me.  Over the last few days I’ve been introspecting on why I’m unable to write…

• Its probably because I’m interested in doling out high-quality content only. Duh!
• Its because I’m stigmatized against writing something for the love of writing but instead concentrate more on the outcry of what anyone would say when they see the content…
• Its because I’m scared to admit that I might not know sh*t about what I write here…

And you know what??? F*&k that!!! Here goes, one “junky” post to get my gears rolling…

Do stay back and comment… and keep visiting here… Will / do hope to have more content soon…

Chao…

This landmark achievement in my life definitely deserved a blog post… So here goes a list of experiences / learnings that I hold close to my heart and have mattered to me the most.  I’ve just jotted them down with out any structure / format blaming intensive lack of energy to sit and “compose” a blog post about my historic and memorable achievement:

The initial days in TechM as a fresher have been the most amazing days of my life till date. PERIOD.  Training, Practice, Tests, Training, Practice, Tests… In mellu speak, simbly oosssoome!!!

And when I look back at what I’ve done in the last 4 years, there are moments that give me a lot of pride and there are some where I’m going: “Dude!!! WTF!!! You god-freaking-seriously did that???” :-O .  But as I’m ME, I’m just gonna blame everything on fate and let the WTF moments pass and leave them for laughing at myself waaaay ahead in the future.

There is one important learning that I’ve kept steadfast and very close to my heart for all these 4 years… Something very simple, yet amazingly effective. And that is to NEVER SAY NO TO INFORMATION.  Of any kind…  A lot of people who know the cruisemaniac would agree to this…  I’m not talking about rule validation and sanity testing here… I’m just talking core-dump!

That was something I learnt from my first ever PM at TechMahindra.  Keep searching, keep learning, and it will all come back and help you one day.  I’m still waiting for that “One day” though!

Coming to the next learning, I’ve learnt to fight where its necessary and be subduinng where necessary.  People skills play a huuuge part in corporate life.  Being frank may first offend people… but it sure helps in the long run.  If i can commit to a deadline, i commit whole-heartedly.  If I cannot, I make sure my seniors know that I cannot!

Which brings me to the next very important gospel…  EMail is for record keeping! Not only for fooling around with silly forwards!  I’ve learnt not to take work from my managers unless the specs of what I have to do are written in an Email and sent to me!  Lets face it… IT takes its toll on everyone… All of us want the short way out… But remember, the short-cut always fucks you up! ALWAYS!

Next up, Always experiment… I’ve always wanted to figure out things on my own…  Make mistakes and fuck things up… thats how you learn! Atleast, thats how I learn…  I’m sure this mentality has brought me a full circle in Symbian.  Starting off from Apps, I went down to the Subsystems and Frameworks, dirtied my hands on multimedia engineering, user interfaces, Platform support and Integration, and currently handle Build and Release Process management, whoa!!! That felt good when I typed it in!   The crux, its there for the taking… Go Ask… Show interest, show commitment, it has happend for ME! It can happen for you!

Shifting jobs is not a bad thing!  You get another chance to make a different set of mistakes in the name of work! That has helped me tell my managers upfront what I’ve done and what my goals are… It gives people a window to fit you in and experiment…

And of course… the last but not the least part: Its a totally unrewarding rat-race… you win some, you lose some… keep your spirits up and keep running.  Rat or not, it doesnt really matter!  You’re in it for the money and the perks… Figure out your path, and walk it!
<<<Something more must come here>>>

<<<apparently it wont>>>

Chao…

2008 started with a dark note this time around for me with Mom being admitted to hospital for a Bypass surgery.  The surgery was succesful, mom started recovering her health and January went by quite fast… and then hell broke loose!!!

On the afternoon of February 2nd, mom left us all!!! A shock that none of us was prepared to take! So there went February 2008, down the frigging drain!!!

March and April went by pretty dullish… Nothing interesting in life… Except to mention that I was no longer associated with Nisarga from that point on…  I dint see the same commitment levels coming out of me…  I dint see any point in anything else in life at that moment.

Life did a steady climb from May onwards, when I was asked to travel to Turin, Italy for 3 months.  Lovely trip, amazing places, awesome beaches, serene hills and fields… That was the best 3-month-period of this year.  Met some lovely people in life! Had some of the best Tiramisu and pizza in my life.

Back to India in August, Sasken started dipping down the scales… Motorola was dying… things in my life were however moving good… Got to work on the Media player for Motorola’s Symbian series of phones.  The sad truth however is that not one of the devices I worked on lived long enough to hit the market!

And then on the 1st of October, Teleca happened.  They were opening their operations in India and wanted Symbian developers! Took an interview, got whooopped!! and was offerred a job there… Lovely salary… and most important of all, the power and responsibility to create the India team!!! Joined Teleca on the 10th of November and things have been great since then!!! I am finally going to be able to realise my dream of working on a Nokia phone!!! Double w00t for me

So yeah, Things rolling good after a very very bumpy and rough ride!!! As 2008 draws to a close, heres a list of highlights in life in the year:

1. Saw a live football match for the first time in life!!! Juventus vs. Inter Vs. Milan @ the swanky new stadium in Turin.
2. Learnt italian!!! Personal best for me! Proves that I’m still wired tight and right!
3. Got promoted at work. Yippeeeeeeeeee!!!! I is Senior Engineer now B-)
4. Shifted to Jayanagar from CV Raman nagar.  I now have a crowd at home… Its back to living with a group
5. Bought a 500 gig hard-disk and managed to fill it up to its brim!  Im now busy trimming it down!
6. Got myself an eee-PC – I picked up the eee-PC from jace at BCB7 for an undisclosed sum .  Good company… Ultra lightweight stuff!!! Totally awesome thingy thats running a fullblown Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) distro right now…
7. Got myself an iPod nano – Finally into the apple family… I would never pick up anything more than this from the apple family!!!  49 grams of uber-ultra-light-weight goodness!!!
8. Did a bike trip to Ooty with scorpion032 a.k.a. Laxman Prasad and swaroopch a.k.a. well… Swaroop. C. H.
9. Travelled to Nandi hills on bike again!!! With my roomies…
10. Got a new job… Got more responsibility and got to meet some uber l33t peeps @ work!!!
11. Managed to do a looooooot of reading!!! and a lot of listening to music!!!

Pretty positive outlook I have eh??? Well life rocks… thats the rule… and we live on to die another day…

There goes the post for the past year!!! Lots of new things learnt… lots of pain felt… lots of love lost… and lots more of love gained…

I guess this is what is called a roller coaster ride…

Chao… and Wish you all a very very happy and prosperous new year!!! Have truck-loads of fun…  If life’s giving you the kicks, take it, and enjoy it all…

Special thanks to preshit for making things happen pretty quickly And yeah, the cruisemaniac continues to roll…

One small quirk that I had to go through was to login to phpmyadmin to upload the database backup that I had of the blog at the older location.  I would love to have this feature built into wordpress… This would be a total dream thingy to have

And before I sign off and retire for the night / early-morning / whatever at 2.30 AM, a quick update on life: Things have been going good!!! I’m loving it!!! Every moment of this rollercoaster ride that I’m riding… And oh, I will come out with some good news pretty soon…

’til then… Chao…

I was probably not very comfortable in the group-dynamics part of life… or so.. I thought… So, I then did get a room + terrace combo all for myself… and it was nice… alone, in total peace with myself, solitude, and all those sordid, sober words!!!

But over a period of time, ( 1.5 years actually, of having done nothing in my life other than the regular job of pumping out water from my room everytime the overhead storage tank overflowed and my room got flooded ), I decided that it was better I moved out of that forsaken place!!

And now, I’m back to living between a lot of noise .  I have now shifted from C. V. Raman Nagar to Jayanagar, and moved into @daaku‘s place where we are now 5 people.  That would mean a lot of noise wouldnt it???

Its gonna take time for me to get accustomed to so much of people around me… but yeah, life’s good!!! noisy and fun!!! And the best part, I get hot roti’s and sabji EVERYDAY for dinner!!! Which effectively means that I eat everyday!!!

The only trouble that I see is travelling on Inner ring road into Koramangala and onto Bannerghatta road.  Quite a painful ride… but hey, when u have Linkin Park giving you company, “It doesn’t even matter!”

Life is good!!! Life moves on…

P.S.: I felt compelled to write this post because I need to give the roomies credit for putting up with me

When I had time to take a coffee break, I had this sudden flash of thougths that ran across my mind and hence this post…

Till May 16th of this year, till I landed in Turin, Italy, I had nothing on my track record to prove that I was a useful, as the corporation calls it, “resource“.  Since then, Life has come around so fast and so full that as I gave more thougt into the whole sequence of events, it did seem not only gratifying… It also felt extremely complete… the whole scenario connected!

I actually got a pay raise! and transitioned as a Senior Engineer in the organization! Special credits to my Manager for making this happen!!!

I got into a high-priority team at work! Apart that being a huge incident in itself, I also realised that I’ve not lost a lot of symbian in the last 2 years of not coding on symbian! I’m not the sharpest… but I’m still sharp… Probably the late night coding sessions with @daaku paid off finally!

That apart, the team I work with has so much of electricity (OK, I am not accepting any lame jokes on this pun) in it that work becomes a breeze… I’ve started falling in love with code once again… Irrespective of how painful it is to take a crashlog, figure out one bug among about a million or so lines of code that my team uses, fix it, ensure that it doesnt get repeated on other components that might use the code, et. al. et. al.

As I was writing the previous paragraph, I was reminded of Chetan Bhagat’s One Night at a Call Center.  In the book, when God speaks to the people stranded in the Qualis at the bottom of the pit, he mentions to the main narrative Syham that a Bad Manager is the root cause of all evil .  And God also tells Shyam and Vroom about getting a bonus in the process of setting things right!

That just happend with me! The very same damn thing happened with me !!!!!!  I’m sure more than half the industry is ruined by people like Subash Bakshi!  My first year and a half at work was totally ruined by horrible managers!!!

Well, turning back, it was overall a bumpy ride… some really big potholes hidden under water, getting caught unawares many times, and at the end of the day, coming out of it all…

Life has come a full circle for me and I must thank you all for putting up with me for whatever I’m worth!

P. S.: I love twitter!!!!

Lots of things in the last 2 months… the most nerve wrecking thing being the loss of my mom… Something that none of us have been able to come out of…  It so happens that when someone shares a relationship with you thats deeper than being a friend, and suddenly, that person gets sucked out… the void is too hard to handle… neways life moves on… and so do have us…

The next topic of the post: the ever lovely and awesome BCB a.k.a. BarCampBangalore is back!!!  BCB-6 summer edition is happening on april 19th and 20th… The venue is IIM-Bangalore… Be there!!! I’ll be running around fixing up wifi for you peeps… Tats for sure…

The next most important topic of the post: Moto-dead… I’ve spoken about this for a very long time… And mentioned in my blog a couple of times too… This was bound to happen… Motorola Handsets Division being royally kicked out of the Motorola stable… atleast that’s how I choose to see it…

You cant be a blood-sucking leech in this age… you have to contribute or else you cease to exist.  I’d go by Motorola’s top brass’ move to do this… but it could have completely been averted.  They didn’t have to screw up. And screw up with so much perfection that nothing can correct it ever again…

Motorola is perhaps the only company thats been practising the jack of all trades in the mobile segment for quite a while. And guess what! It BACKFIRED!!! What else would you expect??? I may not be Trump but I can see through the lining to say that in today’s age where competing takes balls of steel, you had better not be playing around on the highway!!! You’d definitely get run over!!! Many a time..

And I’d say this with a lot of sadness that a Mobile giant simply went ahead and committed suicide!!! RIP Moto!!! The Razr was an awesome show… nothing else after that… Not one single mobile after that was even worth picking up and holding in my hands…

Coming to the next important topic, my conversation has actually changed places… Keeping in touch with poeple on twitter has become the in thing and the easiest thing in life now… A conversation, although asynchronous, is definitely conversation worth it when the whole discussion is available anywhere and althemore better when the participatory limits dont exist!

Twitter just takes chit-chat to the next level… The erstwhile Yahoo chat rooms concept with a bling from technology… converse from anywhere… anyhow…  Follow me on twitter to know more…

And there ends my hiatus…  Chao…

The Situation:

We had to give our client an interim delivery on the project we were working on. A phase that involved testing third party code to ensure it was “without defects” so that we would be able to integrate it into our mainstream systems in the coming phases. And guess what… I was completely wrong about the “without defects” part of the previous statement.

Not only was the application badly written, but the third-party team changed the requirements doc without informing us. And to top it all, their build that was delivered to us did’nt contain a properly filled up “Known Issues” document! And my client intends to make it to the market before spring!!!

The Rant:

This is a case of really bad coordination and mismanagement. When there are three entirely different teams working out of 3 geographically different locations, it is IMPERATIVE that everyone is on the same page! Why on earth do we have E-Mail??? Why on earth do we have VOIP??? Why on earth do we have Phones???

If it is still badly coordinated, it boils down to only one thing: “The organization that wants to sell that code doesnt care about the customer!“  When you have something that you intend to sell, the first and foremost expectation should not be to make money!  It is to give something valuable in order to get the money you intend to earn!

And in this project that I’ve been working on, there have been some things that I’ve definitely been shocked to observe.  And I’d take them as stepping stones in handling things in my life here on…

1. You cannot work for just money!  You have to work because you love it.  Working just for money kills the output.  And you will get your money, but someone else will suffer.  And it will boomerang back to you!  Sometime later… But, definitely!
2. Realise that someday, you may have to eat your own cake!  That you made for money!
3. Please take pride in your work!  Life IS full of shit! Nevertheless…
4. When you make something for your customer, make it with a sense of respect.  It’s called duty.  Not JOB!
5. People want to pay!  Believe me! People want to pay.  But they also want something of more worth than the money that leaves their pockets.
6. The best guys in the market thrive because they give the customers an experience! Not a commodity! And there lies everything about money.
7. A customer would shell out a lifetime worth of savings to have an experience. Steve jobs gave people an experience with the iPhone! Nokia gave people experiences with the N-Series! Sony Ericsson gave people experiences with their Walkman phones!  People love experiences.  People cannot love a product.  It is an inanimate piece of sh**!!!

Now, coming back to the crux of my post, organizations become market leaders with the right perspective of a customer experience in mind.  And then, where does it go???  A lot of companies strive to push the envelope in providing a better and a more fruitful experience…  And a lot more dont!!!  They just start looking at the big bucks!  No more quality, no more happy customers.

And their organization is now thriving just on old relationships in business, and on scale that they have as a market leader.  But for how long? When people that are part of the organization fail to attach themselves to it, and they just do their “JOB“, we’re in for a landslide into the abyss…

Wake up big guys, wake up!!!!