By Sify, For Sify, Of Sify

One best thing about brain is, it stores almost all of the details we come across in our life. The darker side of this fact is, brain can't pull back all the details it has until its shown a needle of information or remainder. Considering this with the decision to move on from Sify for various reasons, I don't see any reason to move on from the people I spend time with, it doesn't matter the time was for fun, fight or work. But I wouldn't be disclosing whether I had fun, fight or working relationship and I leave it to the reading brain to pick it from its store of whatever it has.

It was during the middle of March in Gurgaon. Winter has just wrapped its shift and Summer just checked in. It was a Saturday I guess, routine housekeeping day. Cleaning, washing, and then do nothing with ever playing ZOOM Music TV. Those are days when I 'just started' to think Hindi as second language after English. Most Hindi words started appearing more familiar and understandable mostly by context rather than each word. Amidst this routine and as a surprise, there was an unexpected incoming call (calls to me are very rare considering the fact the I'm least mobile lover and I choose to decide when to take up mobile rather than mobile dictating me to take it up) at very odd time, around 9AM. Kareem, an independent HR consultant, from Chennai was on the line. Since this call came just couple of days after I changed my Naukri status as looking for job change, I was prepared and started the conversation. He mentioned company as Satyam and they are looking for developers.

Swiftly in couple of days, I got first level interview call successfully done over the phone with some named Mahesh and Senthil. Even now, I was in understanding that I would be joining Satyam, a great company with great integrity(it was then in 2007, before Ramalinga Raju's letter episode) and was excited to work in a public listed company for first time. Then a shocker was thrown, a potentially end game. I was asked to visit a Delhi office for video conference interview ASAP. Fact was and is, I hate traveling to new place without a very detailed cost and effort analysis. I usually try to find answers for What are the different transport mediums available? Favorably can it be reached by walk? What are the risk probability of conductor wala/taxi wala/rickshaw wala charging me extra by taking advantage of my language problem? What I can do if I miss last available transport medium? What I can do to avoid this travel? After considering Gurgaon's notorious cab wala, poorest ever seen public transport, and alien people around, decided to skip the interview and okay to purge the interest working with Satyam. Conveyed the same.

Soon, not sure due to what star formation, just in couple of days I got into situation to travel to home via Chennai. This time I called Kareem and got the interview scheduled at Chennai and this time while saying the address the cat was out. Yes, Kareem asked me to visit Sify. Amused and disappointed, was checking about Sify profile on net and kind of settled down after knowing even Sify also is a listed company, that too in United States of America, my dreamland. I had mad liking to stock market when I was in college and no money on hand. I followed Hang Seng(HSI) index closely every day, since that was the only index BBC tracked in Asia during 2000. After having money in hand, luckily I didn't have same mad liking for stock. That saved a lot.

By the time I was in Chennai for interview, couple of weeks gone and now I'm at government office kind of structure. Its called as Elnet Software City. Completed the second level successfully with some named Raj(the first person I met at Sify and didn't know then that I will work with him till last day last hour for all FIVE years in Sify) and done with the formalities of HR and the joining date has come very soon.

The beginning of Life at Sify was great. Not for reasons of huge money or great facilities or closer to home or native language or same skinned people, but because of great people with some of cool characters/attitude I have ever come across. Probably for first time in the job, I felt a real homecoming in a company. That might well be a clear case for spending 5 colorful years at Sify.
 

Here comes the real faces of the beautiful minds I spend time with. The first batch, I will not say team here since in most cases we never worked in single team but we were together not by design but by liking to each other for one or other reason. These are great set of people. Let me intro them from L to R: 

• Dhanaprabha, a great soul and cool mind. Never tired to fight with. Shared same cubicle row.
• Myself(on back of Dhana)
• Vasanth, the trip to erode for his marriage is memorable and I still remember superb marriage dinner. A great mokkai creator.
• Senthil, He is the guy who interviewed me over the call. That was the first and last time he asked me questions. Since then for almost 3yrs, it was me asking him tons of question.
• Siva, a techie.
• Suresh, my saviour from boring times. A dependable person to make mokkai. Never fights back, never questions. Great soul.
• Satya, cool guy. Joined Sify little later than me but at the end of my term at Sify, he own a home in Chennai. Not sure how he earned more than me, probably from in-laws I guess. :)
• Abdul, my another savior from boring times. Excellent human being but he is extreme in communication. Never attends my call. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for him, till the time he left Sify, we worked together in same team for all the different projects. Tons of time has been killed along with him.
• Logesh, a techie. I strongly believe he has traveled for long distance than Astronaut Armstrong. He travels everyday some 4hours between office and home.
• and Sunil, quiet guy.

 

While joining Sify, I was weighing just 60. 

 

 New people, from L to R, 

• Myself, 
• Hari, quiet and content guy. Makes quiet mokkai. 
• Abdul, he don't have interest in astronomy, but sometimes acts weird by staring strangely at different angles). 
• Rajagopal, interesting guy. Very matured. Shared some good mokkai. Got chance to met him after he left Sify. He is as ever. 
• Sundara Chandran, quiet and nice guy. World missed him so early. All of sudden, came his passing away news. It was great time with him. Believe, wherever he is, he will and should be happy.

 

The days of original Elnet Canteen is unforgettable. Now it has been given to some big commercial outlet but when I joined, it was run by a private individual and it was like typical college hostel canteen. Simple, poor menu, bad taste, cheap price but was very fun due to less restriction like outside food can be brought and taken inside. Almost 3 years, we had lunch together, picking girls for fun - decent fun - very decent fun I promise, post lunch we hangout around bike stand again for picking girls for fun - again decent fun - very decent fun I swear to god. 

 

New people, from L to R,

• Venki, manager, cool guy. Though never worked as team but had as many arguments as if a team. Always remember the sign he put for my BITS MS application when my reporting manager was away and I had to courier it on the day itself.
• Karthikeyan, amazingly quiet guy. Calm guy beyond my imagination. Have always asked him tips to keep quiet, he never replied even that question. I think that itself is a tip to be quiet which I never can follow. He made good fortune from his Puducherry in-laws. Thats one fact he agreed explicitly. 
• Bharath, fantastic personality and my reporting manager for almost a year. Learned what preserverance means from him. 
• Krishnaraj, great techie and cool guy. Makes mokkai often and makes the place around him fun.

 

New people on chairs(L to R),

• Kuppuraj, Excellent mokkai cooker and serves it deliciously. Got introduction to him lately, but after that no turning back. Often there is accusation that I make technology backed mokkai and reached only A class people, but this guy makes mokkai that can reach B and C class audience very well. Nice guy. I'm debted to him for a garlic breadstick. I hope to return it back ASAP. 
• Rajasekar, the great. Maintains his cool attitude come what difficult work may be. :) He troubles me many times but a nice guy.

 

New people,

• Pachai, on left with red zebra crossing tee, cool guy with strong liking to samiyars. After the nityananda episode, he appears to changed but not very sure :) 
• Sathish, next to Pachai in dark orange tee, he shared my native place. Extreme personality. 
• and finally Josh, on bottom right in dark red shirt, very fun loving and easy goer. I still remember, in this fungama event, he won prize in one of the tough competition, karla kattai event. Proved a strong guy.

 

New people, from L to R,

• Tamilselvan, What a guy. Maintains his composure no matter what pressure its. Quiet mokkai maker. 
• Krishna, Sathish, wrote about them. 
• Dineshkumar, a techie. 
• Pachai, this pose happened before nityananda episode but still not sure why we went into hiding. 
• Jude, an easy goer. 
• Kuppu, Josh, wrote about them.
• Mahalingam, time spend was small but still memorable. 

 

Here comes the people who usually spend time at Sify. Note I didn't say they worked in Sify. For privacy and fear, no names. from L to R. Just initials.

• Ms. PK, talented techie, but very angry women for good cause. She sometimes plots how to kill the non-vegetarians, so far not successful. 
• Ms. AK, spent most of the time thinking what todo with the computer Sify gave. Later she realized buying property in Chennai is costly affair, she went to create uncontrollable number of property file for Java programs. Nice way to overcome a problem you see. 
• Ms. CK, frequent Saudi traveler. I leave the rest for guessing. 
• and then its Ms R., Ms. ., Ms DP. 

 

Once my first batch left Sify to different places, the second batch of this people filled up the rest of my time at Sify. From L to R,

• Tamil, Kuppu, Pachai wrote about them. Mr. Veera, nice guy. 
• Suresh, Java developer. 
• Shareif, train companion. Thankful for bearing the brunt alone. 
• Ajay, young guy. 
• Vijay, vellore guy. Taken fun lightly. 
• and finally the groom Selva, fun loving. My next seat colleague, spent most of the time at office thinking how to change his computer login username. 

 

The batch which helped me complete the final leg of Sify time. from L to R,

• Yamini - very strong and cool attitude. 
• Deepa, techie and fun loving. Makes good mokkai. 
• Kousalya, terror :). Only second women in my core team. 
• Janani, big quiet mokkai maker. now a noisy home maker in Atlanta. Vidya, great techie and on top of the job. 
• Kannan, great manager. 
• Jayesh, techie and quiet mokkai maker. Thinker and it may appear to be sleeping. 
• Pachai, Tamil, Kuppu, Abdul, wrote about them. 
• Raghav, at extreme right, fun loving guy. Disappeared from the world from the moment he left Sify. 

 

New people, from L to R, Kishore, a terror, my core team.

• Prakash, reminds yahoo smiley. 
• Kuppu, we know. 
• Sadha, the java crorepati. After Java creator James Gosling, he is the one who made most money from Java. :) 
• Venkat, dedicated programmer for UK. for whole country. :) 
• Pachai, we know. 
• Karthik, my reporting manager till the last minute. Very straightforward. Goes by heart. 
• Prabhu, great human being and trying to be excellant developer. A great mokkai cooker. 
• On middle row, from L to R, Ms. , Ms. Ash., Ms. , Ms. , Ms. Vidya. 
• Sitting, from L to R, Meenakshi, quiet and composed. 
• And rest are terror. 

 

New people, just names, Java Venkat, Senthil, Selva, Jayagopal, Ravi and Santhosh. 

 

fun time at Karaikudi. 

 

fun time at Basera, ECR. New names, Anil.

 

Public mokkai making during the Valentines day competition. Won second prize. Official recognization for mokkai.

  

 The dream come true, during US visit. 

 

Some fierce competition. Intense dance and dialogues. Won second prize. new people, Jude Sekar, Rajesh, Ramki - blasting techie. 

 

Having great time at Kodaikanal. 

 

Regret the best chance to kill that guy. 

 

The only picture of Mahesh, my first reporting manager. 

Then finally came the conclusion,

 

From entry to exit, Raj. Thanks. 

 

The great core team. 

The bell rang loud and clear for one last time and that's it. It was colorful and thoroughly joyful ~5 years. Thanks everyone.

Jan 1, 2012
Atlanta

Back to Blogging!!!

Its long time since I have blogged about various pressing happenings. Have got into too much work but that happened for good. We have released one of our recent project Antzill.com - a games platform. You can check out that at this URL: http://games.sify.com. Proud to be part of this development team, and it always brings smile when your work gets recognized widely. Wish this reaches many more milestones and bring healthy competition and thus benefiting masses in one or other way.

Few Days @ Electrobug Technologies

While my employer FastB00king was creating the good ergonomically designed office, we were working out from premises of Electrobug Technologies which is in Sector 31 HUDA market in Gurgaon for sometime. Really had memorable time with Mani and EB HR Shikha. Me and Mani used to goto Ohm Sweets(which is a notable restaurant chain in Gurgaon not sure whether it has any pan North India presence) in evenings and have to tell about the rasagulla and chenna. Both are very good items which tastes superb if we take with other combinations like Somaza and Sola Puri.

Below is the picture of Electrobug workstations and the view is from my workstation.


In Gurgaon I was staying at Sector 10A which has really superb neighborhood but the problem is that to reach out my office I have cross through the crowded industrial area where huge number of people believe me or not.. nearly 10k people would cross me everyday while I walk through the connecting road to reach NH8. All thanks to Honda factory and other innumerable workshops build around that.

On the way to my office there is a Beer factory and crossing that area is another toughest one caz of its utter bad foul smell. Here is the view of that Beer factory from EB office terrace.


Following are the view of Sector 31 from EB office terrace,

Threat To Hardcore Programmers???

The worst nightmare of any programmer would be of jobless and not able to code with real goals. Since considering the current trend of IT demands, it is a remote possibility of such happening. But that was the case until I read this shocking article about the imminent threat to programming community who lives solely by writing some stupid, unformatted, deliberately crypt ed variables and function logics to keep the business people scared all time and putting them at bay even though it's possible to write very legible code with modern programming languages which has implementation purely based on the English language constructs.

But all this seems to be in trouble due to an revolutionary work being carried out by "Charles Simonyi" who was creator of Bravo (1974), Microsoft Word (1983), Microsoft Excel (1985), Intentional Software (2007, first release) softwares. He is now working on creating an automatic programming code generation software which is hoping to replace the cruel programmers and giving relief to Business people who can easily convert their plans into actions using his software.

Now have a look at what he is actually doing,


This fall the business world will see the first tentative release of a product that Charles Simonyi has been working on, in one form or another, for most of his professional life. No, it's not word-processing software, which the Hungarian immigrant developed at Xerox PARC and then took to Microsoft in 1981, and which helped build him a fortune estimated at $1 billion. It's more audacious than that.

Simonyi's five-year-old startup, Intentional Software, is making software so smart that you can simply tell it what you want to do. Lay down a few basic parameters, and it will write its own code. No programming skills are necessary.

"Experts [in other fields] can be much more innovative and responsive to their business, and see the resulting software immediately," says Simonyi, speaking from the deck of his yacht, one of the world's largest.

Humans, arguably, have done a pretty lousy job of writing code. Derailed software projects have shamed plenty of large companies. (See "When Bugs Attack," right.) The National Institute of Standards and Technology says such bugs cost the U.S. economy nearly $60 billion each year.

"The nature of programming is that you make mistakes," says Jonathan Edwards, a research fellow at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. "No one ever gets it right, and people have concluded this is as good as it's going to get."

Not Simonyi, who has always believed that software should do the heavy lifting for people. After all, we were staring at command-line prompts on green screens until he and his fellow Xerox engineers came up with the graphical user interface.

At Microsoft in 1995, after building the entire Office suite, Simonyi tried to go one level of simplicity further, with the programming equivalent of point-and-click. The project became an obsession and, seven years later, a startup. Simonyi threw out his code and started from scratch twice before he was satisfied. (He also found time to take a $20 million jaunt on the International Space Station in April.)

Intentional's technology centers on the Domain Workbench, a human-language and graphically friendly representation of the software as it's built. Much as blogging platforms like Blogger and TypePad gave millions of Web surfers the power to publish their own sites while ignoring all that pesky HTML code, the Domain Workbench would hand enterprise software design to businesspeople.

Here's how it works: Users write clear directions in text, spreadsheet, or flowchart-like forms describing what the software should do. In some cases, they can use an interface where lines are drawn between boxes and documents to establish the relationships and rules that an application must follow.

The information is sent to a code generator, which spits out the thousands of lines necessary to build the application. Intentional users must still have a software engineer on hand to help set up the programming language and to tweak it anytime a variable changes.

Henk Kolk, CTO at Capgemini, a Paris-based IT services firm and an Intentional client, says Domain Workbench is a godsend. A project that would previously have required 50 programmers working for five years, he estimates, could be completed with Intentional in "just a couple of months."

Kolk is running three pilot projects using the system, and this fall Capgemini plans to release a Domain Workbench aimed specifically at its pension firm clients. "We created a domain language for the pension world that is immediately understood and usable by those experts," Kolk says. "I'm a believer that businesspeople should be able to express what they want to do and generate software directly from that."

There's a healthy dose of skepticism in the programming community that Intentional will accomplish its goal. IBM and Cornell set up similar systems that were shunned by programmers. And MIT's Edwards is dubious of Intentional's attempt to patent its system in an age when open-source rules. "It feels archaic, frankly, to have all of this secrecy, the patents and NDAs," he says of Intentional, which has thus far released few technical details. "The only way you have an influence today is by giving it away."

Simonyi says he's "willing to take the risk" that owning the platform may slow its adoption. He's betting programmers don't enjoy working on the business aspects of software development - pension rules or HIPAA legislation, for example - and "will be delighted by the separation from the drudgery."

Some programmers agree. "Software's job isn't to be well written and cool," says Andrew Brooman, a 25-year programming veteran in Florida. "Its job is to solve business problems." If he's right, Simonyi's Microsoft wealth could be just the beginning of an even greater fortune.

Source: http://money.cnn.com

Hmmm... I need to think of some contingency plans in place in-case such situations comes alarmingly big... Any suggestions?

Oops!!!! End of a Long Marathon!!!

Yes I should say I got to celebrate the real Independence Day today. Today I'm very much relaxed and in highest level of confidence in recent times. Successfully released a BETA version of my project namely Samachar.com. I have given all the energy that I have regained after the recent happenings in my life to this project. In this project, I have got an interesting role to play and got all out support from all my colleagues, without which this feat in such a time frame is impossible. Many thanks to Abdul, Loga, Mahesh, Senthil, Suresh, Rajeshwari and Rajavelu.

A very good experience for me to take stock of how well a team effort can do and how important & difficult it's to be honest to all. Interactions with this many number of colleagues for a project is first for me and I'm happy that everything went fine with new set of challenges at different milestones while developing the project. Now I need to look back to document how things went through and how some can be improved.

I have talked about my experience with project, but haven't told what this project is all about. Samachar.com is a aggressive new aggregating portal which categorizes the news neatly for rich user reading experience. Samachar.com is very popular among NRI community to know more about the latest happenings in India. So do check out my project Samachar.com here and give me your valuable feedbacks here.

PS:
If you're reading this blog bit late, by this time we might be out of BETA. So check this URL then http://www.samachar.com, this is standard one which will have latest stable version.

My Sify Friends

After a long time I got time to make a blog entry. And that too with good memorable pictures. One of my friend Arun, who works with me at Sify got releived and moving out to pursue different opportunity at Wipro. On that we got a chance to snap up the final moments with him in the cam. Here are those....

L to R: Karthikeyan R(Yes its Me), Abdul Hakkim, and person who was in limelight on that day Mr. Arun

L to R: Suresh Kumar, Hari, Arun and Me(Karthikeyan R)

L to R: Me(Karthikeyan R), Senthil(Back), Jaycee(Front), Arun, Mahesh, Suresh and Vasanth

L to R: Vasanth and Arun
(Back to them is TN's most famous masterpiece to showcase its power in field of IT, yes its none other than TIDEL Park, Taramani)
My working place is in the building right in-front of the TIDEL.

L to R: Vasanth, (will update the name soon - Info: I'm new to Sify), Arun and Hari

And more,