What exactly I am thankful for?

Sometimes the festivals come at most unfortunate times. Here in US, almost everybody is getting prepared to celebrate Thanksgiving. I will celebrate too but I am deeply saddened when I think what exactly I am thankful for. I was all excited to celebrate but yesterday afternoon I heard about Mumbai bomb blast and spent all day finding out if the situation has improved. Mumbai is an identity for India. Its free spirit, infinite opportunities have lured people from all over the country. This act wants to dampen that spirit, even though Mumbaikar will not allow that, but only Mumbaikar need not brave all the time and suffer.

It is a difficult time for all humanity, because we are dealing with senseless people who are strongly motivated. This is high time that we as country take some action because we have to help ourselves now. There is a saying "God help those, who help themservles". We need better intelligence network, better communication from common man to police authority, and their action. India is a big country with huge population. Its foolish to expect government authorities to take care of its citizen simply because it cannot have that big of infrastructure. We as citizens need to be a little braver and need to put some trust in our police system. In democracy, one had to bear the responsibility first then has the right. It also means that government need to come up with some plan. I still like to believe that we have excellent people in government who are motivated to secure the country and they can do it.

Even though there is feeling of helplessness in my heart, simply because of being 8000 miles from my country, but I have not given up. I am going to donate money to help families who suffered trauma but I am also going to raise voice being a responsible citizen. I am thankful for being an Indian citizen and strong democratic values imbibed in me!

Voice and Video inside gmail

Finally, it works for mac too...

http://www.google.com/mail/help/videochat/learnmore.html

The pursuit of happyness

Just finished watching movie The pursuit of happyness. It is based on the early days of life of Chris Gardener. never imagined a life like that... so terrible. The struggle that was shown,  so unfortunate, could not hold my tears.

Thank god, the movie ends well. All is not lost... We get to see that the honest, hard working man is finally successful. Thank god!!!!!! Thank god.......

Do not need to write more than this.........

Subroto Bagchi - defining success

I just came across one beautiful article by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting. He delivered this speech on July 2nd 2004, the Class of 2004-2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore on defining success . Here is the link 

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Welcome_Address_by_Subroto_Bagchi_at_IIMB

The essence of this talk is, 

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives!!

I hope you will also love the article...

Projects and babies

Every time a developer finishes a project and hands it over, it happens to be the difficult period for a him/her. Why? Anxiety about your work? Is this project going to be successful? yeah. Will there be a need of modification? Will the modification too drastic so the design invalidates and I do not have face to show :( . Yeah that happens too. But the reason is more emotional than software engineering.  Yes we can argue whether software engineering is an art or science. Being an engineer, I always think that it is an art (Yes you always take opposite side just to check if you can defend it :D)

I am still in the phase that every project I do, I am emotionally attached to it. It just happens that that project becomes passion. You are thinking over it night and day. How to write the better code so that it will not break anytime. Doesn't it happen that you don't want to leave the work? Mostly because you yourself are so excited to see the project getting up to a certain stage. You are working extra hours without you yourself realizing that.  It becomes fun to work at 12:00 in the night and finish one part at least, so that you are ready to solve next puzzle in the project.  I have observed that when I am deep in the project, I am not too worried about what I am eating, driving or planning for weekend.  I do not need to listen to music to concentrate. I am not concerned if people are chatting around. I am in my own world. Gallup's concept of engagement is very well defined. I am most engaged when I understand what needs to be done, how to do because I have the capability to do it the best :) 

It just happened that every project I have worked for all these years, I have learned something new. Most of my projects at my office required me to experiment. With experiment, there is always an uncertainty. Many times, all requirements are not clear upfront, we take a shot in the dark but eventually every thing works out well and yes the project completes!!!!

Even though I am not a mother, but I think babies are also like this. Most of the mothers must not even realize how the times flies when they are around their babies.  They are thinking about well being of the baby all the time. Now I can understand what mothers feel when babies grow old and leave the house to start their own lives!!! 

But "The only constant thing in this world, is change", so we finally bid good bye and move on! Not always for the greener pasture but to something new.....

Beautiful Omaha

There are couple of things in life which tell us the life is worth living. I have been living in Omaha for a year now and I have seen some of the best scenery in the natural setting. 

1) When we come down on 144 Street, from Military Street towards Dodge, there is Standing Bear Lake. One night after having dinner at friends place around 11:00 PM, I was driving down and it was a full moon night. I was at a corner, when I saw milky moon, whose shadow was reflected in the lake with all the green surrounding. That was one amazing view. In fact I stopped my car and did not feel like moving from that site at all.

2) One time I was on my way to Walmart on 99th Street in Northern Omaha. Somehow I decided not to take interstate that day and went by Military Rd. It was around 7:30 in June/ July and I could see orange colored sun going down hill. It was probably the best sunset I had ever seen.

3) In the night, when you drive on Dodge Street go from 72nd street towards downtown, you start the descend around 60th street, you see the street lights forming fancy M shape. Its a very pretty site. 

Sometimes unexpectedly you find these pretty sites and all the mundaneness of the life goes away.   All these great times, you feel like thanking god that you have eyes to appreciate how beautiful nature can be. 

The Pragmatic Programmer

When you get a reward certificate to be used on Amazon, you have millions of options to spend it. I was kinda confused whether I should buy a book named as "The Pragmatic Programmer" or get my favorite movie DVD  "Home Alone"? 

Hmmmm, very interesting. Is there really a book out there which tells me apart from theory how to do my job best? By my virtue of being the perfectionist at my job, I don't like the situations when people tell me that I wrote bad code, did not think of edge case. Nor that it has happened any time, but why not better myself so that it will never occur? After all its just a start of professional life :) 

Ok, I am not ready to read 800 page book on best practices where reading one page takes 20 minutes and understanding what I read takes 2 days :( After spending 10-12 hours in the office working with all new technologies everyday, do we need more reading?) 

I had heard about this book and this review helped me to make my choice ;)  

“If I’m putting together a project, it’s the authors of this book that I want. . . . And failing that I’d settle for people who’ve read their book.”

         —Ward Cunningham

It surely seems the book actually lives up to the promise. Lets review some of the first few topics that I have read.  One thing, the title of each topics are completely mind boggling! Following the tradition of "Head First" books.

1) The cat ate my source code:  

"Provide options, don't make lame excuses". 

Yes things go wrong, with all worst combination of various mishaps and downtime occurs. Monday morning is not meant to explain what I was thinking 6 months ago when I was working on the project. Hmmm.. So lets be practical. Just think what caused all this, do the analysis and do what can be done to avoid the situation in the future. 

Makes 100% sense!!!!

2) Software Entropy: 

However meticulous software engineers are, projects do not always have the best of the design and code. There is always some broken window left in the project and broken window gives the feeling that nobody really cares for the project. 

"Don't live with broken windows". Tells us to fix broken windows as soon as you find it. If you cannot fix, at least leave the comment, message to tell that you are working on it. 

I can go on and on with these handy tips of this book. 

Just amazing book! If you are a software programmer, find the meaning of word Kaizen and then your next hit is going to be www.amazon.com to buy the book :)

 I am sure you feel the same excitement  as me!!