work

Automatic launched this week

The startup that I’ve been part of for more than a year has launched this week : Automatic – Your Smart Driving Assistant. It’s a hardware device + mobile app + cloud combination that helps you save money by helping you drive in a more fuel-efficient way, monitor your car engine’s

60/40 rule

From Lessons on Leading by Jessica Steel : Leaders recognize that we should feel 60% mastery and 40% stretch in our jobs at any given time. We draw our confidence from the 60% we know we’re nailing, and we grow from the challenge of the 40% that is new and

Review of Cal Newport’s So Good book

Last weekend, I read Cal Newport’s latest book – “So Good They Can’t Ignore  You” and was very happy that I read it – it was just the sort of book that helps a person who is a few years into his/her career and is beginning to question many

Working out of Goa

I finally got to check one particular item out of my bucket list – working out of Goa. This was possible purely because of freelancing which means I can be anywhere as long as I’m getting the work done. When my wife and myself were planning this month-long road trip

Leaving Infibeam

Today is my last day at Infibeam. I’m going to miss working in this environment because I learned a lot about ecommerce and online buying in India. For example, I was surprised to know how much sales go up during Diwali (in hindsight, not so surprising, of course) and

Passionate Programmer book review

Every once in a while I get an email like this: Sir, I am a beginner to python and programming. I started with the C++ and found it hard so one day via google I found your perfect tutorial “A byte of Python”. I read the whole tutorial in one

Joining InfiBeam

Update: As of 22 June, 2011, I’m no longer with Infibeam. Thanking the community First and foremost, thanks to all who encouraged me, and offered support and help when I wrote about leaving my own company. Many people, without any personal benefit in mind, connected me to very interesting

The 5-year limit to being a coder in India?

Let me start with a story I had heard about long ago when I was at Adobe. There was this guy who had come in for interviews for a technical role. He passed all the tech interviews with flying colors, the team liked his personality and felt he would fit

The difference between fun and work

Reading a book is fun. If you have to do a review on the book for the newspaper by Friday, it becomes work. Writing code is fun. If you have a deadline next week, it becomes work. Spending time with that special someone is fun. After tying the knot and

One year since I had a salary

It has been exactly one year since I quit my last job. The good Things that I thought was important but didn’t turn out to be: It has been one year since: * I had to do something because I had no choice. * I had a boss. * I had to

Refocus on the Basics

Most of what I learned about programming was during my first year at Yahoo!. I wrote so much Perl code and dove into naive attempts at distributed computing, and the like. I was pretty proud of my code and that I put in hard work, and was vindicated when I

How Fresh Graduates Can Grow

As a small experiment, I had put up a skribit sidebar where anybody can suggest what I can write about. Little did I know that it would actually be used seriously. Someone posted the topic “On how fresh graduates can learn independently and grow. Instead of waiting for the Company

Thought for the Day

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products—they’re really complicated surfaces. We tried make something much more holistic and simple. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But

Career Advice

There have been many times where I’ve been asked for “career advice”, especially after a talk. I usually suggest them to ‘build a repertoire of things you have done, things you are capable of, things you like to do’. But I’ve never really been sure of this advice

Last day at Adobe

As Jeff Atwood said recently in his entry on Choosing Your Own Adventure: I’ve spent the last six months staring at this page trying to figure out what to do. With some trepidation, I’m now turning to page 10. Thursday will be my last day at Vertigo. I

Closed source on Linux is hard

Update: Please read the article carefully before commenting. If you notice, most of the problems being described here is part of Eclipse, which is open source. So, usability issues are faced by open source programs as well, and not just proprietary programs on Linux. The reason I wrote that title

Announcing Flex Builder on Linux

Now presenting the alpha of the Flex Builder IDE on Linux! (this was announced at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference). You can now create Flex projects, write code with intellisense-like hinting, compile and debug all within an IDE based on Eclipse, on Linux. You heard it right, it’s officially

Moxie . AdvancedDataGrid . OutInTheWild()

Flex 3 beta 1 is out, and along with it something that I’ve been part of – the AdvancedDataGrid component. An example built using the AdvancedDataGrid is embedded below (it is a SWF file, requires Flash Player 9 for viewing): Notice the tree view within a grid – that alone is

Evolution of Adobe Flex : now open source

That’s right, the Flex SDK is going to be licensed under the Mozilla Public License – this means the compiler, debugger, the huge libraries – it’s all going to be open source when Flex 3 “Moxie” is going to be released. This news was not so surprising to me because

Big Brother

Long ago, I had seen Nat Friedman show off a small Mono app that displayed the amount of time you spent on each application, and updated the chart in real time – so that you could clearly make out how much time you’re spending in the browser and how much

Outlook on Linux : Evolution Exchange

My laptop at work has some network configuration issue (I think) leading to Outlook not finding the server – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But every other application uses the internet/intranet just fine. Only Outlook doesn’t work and I’m tired of reading the mails from a

Moxie

Yep, Moxie. That’s the codename for the next version of Flex. And it was one of the suggestions by yours truly in the internal discussions. Why this name? My reasoning was: flex -> strength -> http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/strength -> mana, pizzazz, moxie, thew, … Ely liked the

It’s all in the mind

(Warning : I just started typing this post because the title popped into my head, so what follows might seem like a lot of rambling.) No matter how much we talk about talent, opportunities, and other things we can blame on, making things happen basically boils down to one thing – it’

But Flex is not open source…

My manager and myself were having an informal chat about the various RIA frameworks and platforms out there. To be honest, I wasn’t convinced about Flex and so, we kept on discussing the pros and cons, and it turned out that I learnt a bit about Flex this way.

Future Adobeans Needed

Quick note: * Adobe needs some Perl developers urgently. * Also, proficient developers with 2+ years (upto 15… but 15+ is also good…) experience needed. If you’re interested, shoot me a mail. Update : The above two requirements are separate.

Engagement Platform

If you were skeptical about Apollo (, Flash, Flex, …) like me, then you must watch this video by Todd Hay, Director, Platform Marketing & Developer Relations, Adobe. The RIA that he demoed was really something that would be amazing to use. More at adobe.com/devnet/platform/. (via MNR)

Adobe

First Day Today was my first day at Adobe. A month ago, it was so difficult for me to imagine going to a new place, working with new people, and entering a totally new field of work. Today, it was surprisingly easy. Perhaps it is a poignant reminder that the

Last day

Today’s my last day at Yahoo!. It’s been a great two and a half years. Sadly, it’s time to move on. I was just recollecting today about how much history I have here and how many things I’m leaving behind. Moving on is not easy, especially

Always on software

There are three software that are always open for me at work: 1. Konsole – for coding 2. Firefox – for email, internal websites, news, etc. 3. Gaim – for talking to colleagues It’s interesting that I don’t use anything else at all. Hmm, I can’t get anything done if

The Search

I just finished reading ‘The Search’ by John Battelle. What an amazing story to read. Learning about Bill Gross and his IdeaLab alone was worth reading the book, and he still keeps ideating, like Snap.com. Heck, even Picasa came from IdeaLab. There are many tidbits from the book that

Yahoo! Bangalore Hack Day

We had our first “hack day” at work today. The idea is simple – you get one full day (starting from 00:01 hours) to hack on your own original idea and you have to present it at 4 in the afternoon to your whole office. At the end, a set

Thought for the day

Love what you do. Do what you love. If not, then what’s the point?

YPodcast

Podcasts.Yahoo.com went live today. It’ll help you find and listen to podcasts as well as create your own podcasts. Many of my friends in Bangalore are part of the team that created this. Kudos to them for converting a concept to a product launch in an amazing

Any webdevs interested to work for Yahoo?

My team is looking for web developers who can work on a contract basis for 3-6 months. Knowledge of PHP, Perl, Apache, FreeBSD(or Linux) is required. If anybody you know is interested, please ask them to send their resume to me ASAP.

Yahoo! Bangalore turns 5

Happy Birthday to Yahoo! Bangalore!

Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005

We had a “Y! Bangalore Showcase 2005” on Friday, August 5th, 2005. It was an internal showcase where all the teams and groups have the chance to showcase their projects and interact and brainstorm ideas on how they can collaborate and use each others’ expertise. For more than a week,

It’s been a year

On July 1st of 2004 i.e. last year, I turned from an intern to a full-time employee at Yahoo!. Wait a minute, one whole year is already over! OMG! Hmm. A while ago, there was an internal discussion on why people have worked at Y! for years and years

UnderestimatedTwiki

TWiki must be one of the most underestimated tools out there. We use it quite extensively at Yahoo!. What is TWiki? Officially, it is a “Enterprise Collaboration Platform” (yawn). What that means is that it is a wiki software that is meant to be used for intranet information. I’ve

Ajax experts wanted

Yahoo! Bangalore is looking for companies in Bangalore who can do DHTML and Ajax (for contractual work) or even experts who can be hired. Please let me know if you have any recommendations.

Python Jobs

This is a sort of a deja vu thought but I’m going to write it anyway. There seems to be quite a hunt for Python guys in India, especially Bangalore. Jace’s client Partecs is looking for people who want to work on Python, Zope, Plone, Javascript, XHTML, CSS,

Connect the text

A while ago I was thinking about using a wiki to organize my notes, but I don’t know if even that scenario would be useful for quick note taking because of the conversion from wiki syntax to HTML everytime which causes a lag when saving the notes. I have

Do you want to Yahoo! ?

I have completed nearly one year and one month as a Yahoo i.e. including my internship. I even have a blog post on that on the day I joined. It’s hard to remember that just one year ago I was just a college kid. Just one year ago,

Everybody’s a salesman

If you believe Paul Graham when he says that hiring is obsolete, then you should read the ten commandments for entrepreneurs by Alan Morgan. It just reinforces the fact that everybody’s a salesman. Update : Paul Graham’s full essay is online now

Do you really need the MBA?

This one’s for all the I’ll-do-CompSci-then-MBA-and-become-a-manager-in-a-software-company types. From Eric Sink on “Geeks Rule and MBAs Drool”: The following is an example of one of the most common questions I get from developers who are creating a brand new software company: Where can I find a partner to be

The Job Spool

Today, I got a job offer in my inbox from … err, let’s just say a well known company. They say some quite interesting things like "We have received your profile through one of our employees and find that it matches some of the openings we have with us. These

A Blogful of Work

The blogosphere is full of news about Mark Jen getting fired from Google for blogging. Zawodny has the full scoop. The part that interested me the most is what Jeremy Cole had to say about it. I have been unknowingly following his three rules on what (and what not) to

Great movie after a great day

It was a good day for work. I worked non-stop in refactoring my project and cleaning up the code. So, I ended up the day by seeing "Ocean’s 12" at PVR Cinemas at Forum with my friend Azmi. The movie’s great. I liked the plot. There’s only

Yahoo! Bangalore looking for good hackers

Yahoo! Bangalore is looking for good people to get involved in some cool projects from UI to the OS! If you are interested, send me a resume and I’ll forward to them to the right guys. Extra bonus points if you have attended my talk at LB ;) Heh heh.

Yahooooo!

I am now a Yahoo! guy!!! The final round of interviews took place yesterday. They asked lot of techie stuff and some very interesting questions. I had 4 interviews one after the other and then Jayanthi (the nice lady from HR) immediately came and told me "You’re through. When