Destiny’s Child

Well , If your expecting to read  about pop music then you could stop here. There are always defining moments in your life, which makes you wonder What's the purpose of it ? School life is where you don't know much , also you couldn't care less. College life is where you start to know something, but you’re not sure about what things to care about. Then there is  the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and young enough not to care .  I think its the 2-3 year time period  in your job after college, where you earn enough to make a living on your own , but also could support your parents , you are a force to be reckoned with, as in your opinions matter.  Looking back at those three years after college , I thought I will use this post to look at three interesting stories that helped learn along the course.

One thing that I realized early on is that, its ok to fail , its ok to make mistakes. Its possible to succeed without failing at times, the question is could you excel at new things without failing? When I first moved into development , one of my first code change had caused a build break ( or in more plain terms a compilation error ) bringing the Release engineering and Quality engineering (QE) work grinding to a halt. What made matters worse , that the change that went in wasn’t requested by QE or Product management; It’s  just that I decided to take a few initiatives that would make life of every one easier in debugging problems , by making changes in diagnostics code. For the next few days , I knew how it felt to be famous for all the wrong reasons. A colleague did say to me People who have done build breaks went onto achieve big things like becoming Development Managers ( I didn't miss the irony ) to cheer me up. I did eventually fix the issue ( which turned out to be source code version control issue rather than anything in code ) . Moving along one month into release cycle, everybody could see the benefits of the change in helping RCA issues at QE and Customer environments later on. I couldn’t help feeling more vindicated for pushing in the change. This resulted in more freedom to make changes/features coming along my way. Moral of the story , Don’t wait for things to happen , make them happen .The actual failure really is not taking the risk to move to the next level due to the fear of failing and tolerating mediocrity.

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X men : First Class review

X men has always been one of my favorite movie series from comic books/Cartoons next to Spider Man. The final climax where Wolverine stabs Jean after professing his love for her in the X men : The last stand, is one of the most memorable romantic scenes , though its a tragedy. In this prequel, the movie takes us back to old days to reveal the lives of Professor X and Magneto before they were adorned with the titles . The movie starts the with same scene as the X men first movie in a second old war camp , where the young Erik’s  (aka Magneto) Mom is being dragged way , resulting in him revealing his ability to control metal. What follows is intriguing scene that sets the tone for the rest of movie between Shaw who wants to use the young boy’s ability through any means and Erik.

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Thoughts on Management and Computing

Recently , I have been dealing with multitude of both the above topics. I realized midway through , how management concepts could be applied to Computing and how computing concepts could be applied to management.

Management Network

Lets start of with how management concepts could be applied to Computing. One of the strategies, when you debut a product is to customize the product according to demographics and region in which your launching the product. Consider the Food market , whenever somebody launches  a new food item in America, the emphasis is to be big . Whether its the Cola’s , Beer , Burgers or the Cars (Hummers) Americans like it big , its one market where Size does matter. Now consider the Asian market , the individual purchasing power is not as big as has in the west . So you need to make the your products smaller and affordable to tap into the market. An excellent example of this is , the shampoo sachet. In the west you could sell a Bottle, but in Asia the number of units of 2 Rs  sachets will outsell the bottles , people will not buy an Bottle of shampoo on a regular basis . Going by the same example you have mini cola’s for 10 Rs for drinks , the world cheapest car nano . The nano  may not be your a typical car in the west , yet it reflects a scaled down version of a car made affordable for the rising middle class. The important lesson in business not to view a large population with low purchasing power as an liability , but rather as an market  to whom you could sell your products scaling down on features and size to make it affordable. Now where does concept come in Computing . In fact its one of the tenets of the Cloud computing i.e, Rapid Elasticity. The ability to rapidly scale in and scale out the resources according to the demands of the end user.  This could be server resources which are increased rapidly during live streaming of an cricket match for website and scaled back down after the match is over. It makes no sense to buy all that server capacity  since the sports event is going to be temporary affair , rather renting out the server makes sense. So the Elasticity that offers flexibility to user based on his needs is no different from the  Business strategy that varies your product scale and features based on demographics and purchasing power of the market your selling to.

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Cup of Joy

Well , its been a long hiatus from the world of blogging  . Anyways most of the things that the break was intended for is nearing completion .  What better way to start it again other than  the cup of joy.  All was not well , with frigging Reliance broadband being down for the last ten days ( seriously,  Anil Ambani should realize the word Reliance in Reliance Broadband is an oxymoron with its DNS server not responding for every 3 hours) .  Add to that I was in SQL training for this whole week , there were serious worries about the likelihood of me watching the India-pak cricket match for which even Gilani and Manmohan seemed to have bunked their office duties. As gracious and liberal as my company is (perhaps was with recent blocking of sites ) , they had setup giant screen in cafeteria , with ten 50'' LCD screens on all directions to broadcast India - Pak match . Its hard for you to,  not to see the match in any direction you turn your head in cafeteria.

As it turned out, things started to get better after lunch. It was more like watching the match in cricket ground , with so many people in cafeteria , with their faces painted in tri color  carrying Indian flags . The guys who profited the most from this was obviously the Food court restaurants.  Anyways these were the highlights of the day..

Seductive Moment: Was debugging T-SQL function , I heard a series roars of  from cafeteria that distracted me . Later came to know , it is Virendar Sehwags plundering Umar Gul with five  4’s in a over. Viru’s innings are like extra martial affairs , thrilling while it lasts , but always ends in heart break.

Generous nature Moment:  SQL trainer who stopped the training  midway and let us watch the match after  hearing  the roar from the crowd for Sehwag’s dashing four’s.

Flashback Award : Wajab Riaz ‘s  back to back wicket taking deliveries . Especially the in swinging Yorker to get rid of Yuvaraj , brought back not so good memories of Shoaib getting Dravid and Tendulkar with similar back to back deliveries at Eden Gardens test match.

Slippery hands Award: This one goes entire Pakistan cricket team .  The kept dropping so many catches . If it was a pin drop of silence , Guess who dropped the pin ? , the entire Pakistan team.

So Close Yet So Far..

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