Mata Vaishno Devi Yatra 2010

 

Me and my friends go to Mata every year since more than a decade now. After I moved to Bangalore I had limited options while selecting dates freely for the yatra and so I decided that when I go home for Diwali I club this thing also.

Interestingly this we had a great time during yatra because there was hardly any rush and managed to get Dormitory beds at bhavan also without any prior booking.

I now feel that one of the best time to plan the yatra should be near Diwali on a weekday because this is when you won't have to stand in long queues and sleep in bhawan without a shelter :)

Architect

This reminds me of the funny incidences in Seinfled when George used to say "I always wanted to pretend as an Architect", "I can be an architect" etc.

I too always wanted to be an Architect, not that one, but Technology Architect, My Inclination towards technical side rather than management was because I had faced a hard time managing a small team in one of my previous company and it was then that I understood that I am too soft to become a manager.

Few days ago I got an email from the HR saying that you have been promoted to be a Technology Architect, at once I was happy because this is what I wanted to be since long but very soon I also started realizing the fact that am I really good enough to hold this designation

I have seen a few really good architects in my company and when I compare myself with them I find myself lagging far behind. We all often find ourselves in a situation where we are supposed to be what we never have been before and the initial time in any such situation is difficult, because the transition is hard to accept


The funny part is that you are happy with the new compensation and benefits but you find it difficult to accept the new roles and responsibilities.

I am striving hard to learn technologies as soon and as much as possible so as to rightly justify my salary some day.

Samsung Galaxy i899 16 GB memory card issue

I installed 16 GB memory card in my Android Samsung Galaxy i899 phone, I am sick of it now it keeps on rebooting frequently and I have started getting some core process force quit thing also.

My Learnings of what not to do.

In office If possible don't escalate things. Appreciate in public and talk about shortcomings in private. This way you maintain healthy relations with your mates and then they work with a different zeal.
Make sure there is not requirement change from the client which is verbal, everything should be documented.
Assumptions can be fatal when it comes to requirements.
The moment you are out of the Airport remove the bag tags please, some people tend to keep it for months showing off that they just arrived from a flight. Me and my friends laugh at this a lot.

One year completed.

Me and Charu have completed one year of married life, life is so hectic these days that I am not feeling many things but felt nice when relatives called and wished us. many thinks to Dhiraj Ji and Ravi who wished me and shame on me I never even knew your birthdays :(
Coming back to the main topic, This one year has been full of events and learnings. Best things first ... I am feeling a lot different far more organized and complete like I had home made food in this journey to Delhi in train ( earlier I used to eat that IRCTC crap :) )
One year .. initially the honeymoon period, then came a phase when our differences started surfacing and we had a lot of fights, misunderstandings etc. slowly we learned how to get over these things and things started stabilizing. We are more tolerant and understanding now, looks like the fight phase was a good doze.
Also ever since I have been married I don't why but a lot times my mom has disappointed me a lot, she will say something which is right as per her, but since I married in a different caste the culture difference proves costly sometimes it becomes a family mess. This was ( is ) the biggest hurdle to overcome, I had to talk to my mom so many times to gear up to the modern times and bridge the culture gap.
My Papa is really cool in this context I love this personality in all the context but this part of his life is simply outstanding, how we'll he understands my issues.
I used to ask a lot of my friends after they got married as to how is life after marriage, in fact I was afraid of it that time, I am not, now. In fact life improves to a lot of extent once things stabilize. You start planning to next 5 , 10 years in your mind, something that we don't think about much when we are single.

Sept 10 project learnings.

I am in Sampark kranti train on my way to New Delhi, There is still some time when we unpack our dinner stuff and this is where I am getting time to pen down some recent stuff that happened in my life.
My current project in office - It stared off real cool and I was getting time to code and go to GYM, spend time at home almost everything was going smooth.
but I was feeling something wrong with the kind of execution that happening during the build phase. before I can explain what was going wrong it is important to give some more details about the project. I have a small good group of friends in office, also the manager and the architect that I've been working with, we have been together since almost two years now, so we have good understanding between each other.
The module that I was assigned this time had a lot of coding and was also dependent on a considerable amount of database work. The other module had relatively less coding and was coded by one of my friend. Also in this project one more friend of mine was introduced as the experienced DBA was involved in some other critical work.
So this new guy who was introduced as for database coding was relatively new to database programming ( He was a Java developer earlier ). Project started and in the build phase I was facing a lot of issues regarding the delay caused by the database developer. I was in a difficult situation as I was not able to continue smoothly and at the same time I was not able to talk about this issue to my manager because how can I speak against someone who is a good friend of mine.
During this time I was also actually thinking that do managers sometimes explicitly do this do avoid blame game situations during the project.
At times when It was becoming extremely difficult I did report about the incidents but nothing actually helped. And believe me or not I said to my self that may be this is a good proving ground where I need to prove myself.
I was also under a doubt that this proving ground could actually cost me a lot. what I started doing was that when ever I got stuck in a DB related issue I wrote him an email (and I was very careful not to keep anyone in loop, as it is not good to point someones faults publicly) and switched to some other task. All this was not so easy as it sounds it is like context switching that CPU does while multitasking :)
But I was thinking that I am now a developer with some eight years of work experience, can I take this challenge.
As things approached testing phase it looked like everything worked as planned and I was very happy about this execution within myself, I didn't blame anyone and everything finished peacefully.
In the testing phase however the on-site coordinator started twisting and turning the requirements itself I then realized that unlike earlier projects we didn't have a communications tracker about all the on-site communication taking an advantage of this the on-site guy didn't agree to certain things that we said were not requirements earlier.
I understood my mistake that I was too focused on one thing that db issue smooth working that I completely overlooked that the possible outcome in case of a missing tracker. A big lesson learned.