My take on life - 13

I did quite a bit of thoughtful writing tonight. I created a Personal Manifesto and cleaned up my list of Recommended Books

Last week, I had gone to GNUnify, a conference organized by Symbiosis(SICSR), Pune. I had spoken on webservices together with Gopalv and Premshree.

An interesting event we organized was a Birds of a Feather (BoF) meeting on "Why you should be a FOSS programmer" that we had with the students there. My first observation during the BoF was that most of the students had no idea what FOSS is. One of them actually thought that FOSS was a programming language. Most of them had been absolutely brain washed by MS propaganda or maybe they had been brainwashed by their teachers. Not may of them had used any of the P languages (Perl, PHP, Python). I asked them this question - "will you like to work for Yahoo!, Google or Amazon or will you like to work for another IT sweat shop? If you want to work with the big names, then you have to know the P languages". Gopalv, Premshree, Pankaj and Philip spoke about their respective projects, how they had gotten into free software and how it had helped them in getting jobs. Gopalv pointed out how our education system is flawed when it comes to exams and assignments. In a class, you have to beat the others to be called a achiever. In the real world, you have to work with others to come up with something good. Working with FOSS allows you to collaborate with others and have a taste of how things work in the real world.

Our main aim in organizing this BoF was to get even 2 students interested in FOSS. Sadly, I am sure we failed to do that . However, we told the students about the mailing lists and irc channels that they could use to find help. I hope some of them eventually turn up there.

Danese was one of the speakers in this conference and she gave a good presentation on how to get into open source. Answering the audience questions on how to make money with Open Source, she said that Open Source allows you to make money by offering services, and India understands the service model well. This rankled me quite a bit. There aer ways to make money by selling FOSS products too - MySQL and SugarCRM being the prime examples. However, in India, you don't have any companies which make products. Lots of companies outsource their development work here, but except Tally (a closed source accounting software), I don;t know of any Indian companies making products. I am not sure why this is the way things are - one reason might be that product development is inherently a risky business. On the other hand, the payoff from a product is quite high.

I also met a bunch of people whom I knew only in the online world. We went to this amazing restaurant called "Horn OK Please". Even though we had to wait a bit to get the tables, it was really worth it. If you are in Pune, try out that restaurant.

All in all, I will say that this experience was really good. The students did excellent work in organizing the event, though I would have been happier if they participated in the event instead of just being a volunteer in it.

orthogonal - statistically independent, if things are orthogonal, then one thing can change without affecting others

Political freedoms and laissez fair capitalism are largely orthogonal, except in extreme cases on both left and right, where it tends to diminish democracy.

-- seen on some mailing list

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Taken from Kevin Sites in hotzone

  "I feel like we lost the best years of our lives," he says. "We
  weren't able to have any fun, and now today in Iran, what can we do?
  We just want to play our music. I mean, Madonna says time goes so
  slowly. But here in Iran time goes so fast... We're running out of
  time."

  "Why are you running out of time?" I ask.

  "Because we're getting old," he says.

The last two lines capture the essence of what I feel when I see a group of college students in a pub, trying to console one their friends who has had a broken relationship.

Yesterday night I was surfing through the idiotbox to see if there were any good cartoons playing when I came across the series Recess playing on Disney channel (or it might have been Nickeledon).

In the part that I saw,one of tha characters, Vince (an athlete) had come to realize that his brother whom he had always thought to be a cool , was actually a geek. Vince was devastated by this discovery and was sharing his anguish with his friends. He thought it was only a matter of time till genetics kicked in and he too would transform into a geek.

I am not sure how old the serial was, my rough estimate is 4-5 years old. It made me realize how at one time geek was a derogatory term. However being a geek is an fashionable thing now. People whose only claim-to-geekdom is that they have a Moveable Type blog (updated hourly) proudly proclaim to be a geek.

Just take those old records off the shelf
I'll sit and listen to 'em by myself
Today's music aln 't got the same soul
I like that old time rock 'n' roll
Don't try to take me to a disco
You'll never even get me out on the
In ten minutes I'll be late for the door
I like that old time rock'n' roll
                    ----- Old Time Rock & Roll - Bob Seger 

I too like the old definition of geeks - the ones that write php/perl/pyhton one liners, who know the language specs (or at least the urls where the specs live), or those who know arcane geometrical and calculus formulas and so on. Someone who know their subject deeply. In my opinion, blogging and podcasting(and other web 2.0 shiny objects) are so shallow subjects that even thought you may know the nuances of them well, I will not consider you to be a geek. But that is just my opinion.

Thanks to Sachac for pointing out this list of questions to review your year.

What did I learn this year?

Let me see. On the technical side I learnt quite a lot.

• a bit of Perl
• quite a lot of MySQL
• new things in PHP, especially related to web services and graphs
• lots of new stuff related to high availability and failover
• lots of new stuff in troubleshooting

On the non technical side, I did not learn much

• I finally read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
• I started taking steps to manage my time well. I am following the Getting Things Done forums and mailing lists, picking up great tips from them but have yet to read THE BOOK. It was this year that I learnt about emacs-planner for managing tasks
• I read a few management type books, they are not that bad

The lessons of life that I learnt this year

• I am much better than I think I am
• Family support and good friends are the most important assets that someone can have
• Don't try to get stereotyped
• An idea does not have to be big, it has to change the world
• It is a good idea to write and publish about every new thing that I learn.

What did I accomplish this year?

Quite a lot, if I can say that myself

• Got selected to be a part of Yahoo! Bangalore
• Moved from Delhi to Bangalore and established a household here
• One of the interns I mentored got selected to become a regular employee
• Got published in webzines
• Kickstarted the PHPC Gazette, which is still in its infancy but I am sure something good will come out of it
• Wrote articles on my website that proved useful to a bunch of people
• Spoke on Y! webservice at Freedel
• Got a good year end appraisal
• Discovered Terry Pratchett

Which accomplishments am I proudest of?

• Getting selected to be a part of Yahoo! bangalore
• Kickstarting the PHPC Gazette

Knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently in the past year?

Let me see.

• Written more articles
• Written more code for my favourite free software
• Read more Terry Pratchett

What will be my greatest lasting memories of this year?

• Getting selected into Yahoo!. Absolutely something that I will always remember.
• Moving to Bangalore from Delhi

In what ways did I contribute?

Not in as many ways as I would have liked to, just in small ways

• Helped my previous colleague in taking over from where I left off
• Started the PHPC Gazette
• Submitted one patch for AMO. I should have done more
• Answered a bunch of questions on php-general, linux-delhi and some other mailing lists and IRC channels.
• Supported my brother and sister for this year

What were my biggest challenges or obstacles?

• Not enough time management
• I am not punctual
• I am not caring about my health, even though I am aware that it might give me trouble later in life

What obstacles did I overcome?

• Reduced the time I spend in the office from 16 hours to 9 hours, though this change took place only in December
• Established a household in a new city

How am I different now than I was at the start of the year?

• I am more confident than I was when the year started
• I am more willing to voice my disagreements, both in person and over email
• I have stopped saying RTFM to questions now
• I am fatter
• I know how to better manage my time now (but this is still a ongoing struggle )

What am I most grateful for?

• The support of my family
• My job

What else do I want to reflect on?

I should have contributed more to Free Software projects than I do now, and by contributing I mean more in terms of code. I need to figure out a way to fit exercise in my schedule and lose weight.