This is the E-age of an E-world. All of us are global netizens. There are flame wars, to e-jealousy (”Wow, that dude has a better life than I do!”) to mini self-proclaimed hotties (remember the duck faces and party pictures on facebook?). In such a time, is E-love. Yes, the true few thick pals I have, started off as E-friends. Even the person that I date.

No, it was not that unsafe. I did not (thankfully) encounter any pedophiles or sadists. The world of technology is sort of better that way. A while back S K Bohra started working on a startup Iddhis which, I found was a very nice idea, and just needed a little more fine tuning. The project is currently at halt. I sure was hoping that it will restart someday.

Skype does a decent job too! At least you tend to remember the latest look that your SO is sporting. However sucky the internet connection may be, at least you get to see a moving figure the other side.

The idea needed more than just flowers. Which, in my opinion is being done in a nice way by FernsNPetals. It needs the sharing of everyday events, something like a gtalk but with loads of more features. What better than an app for a smartphone?

Enter Pair – A mobile app that promises to fulfill most of my wishlist.

Looks simple to use and loaded with enough features. I hope it fills the void that Iddhis left.

So my older readers would know Sherra. Yes she is grown up now. And lives far away from me. A single phonecall from my parents informing me that she was ill made my head spin back in her direction. Yes I miss her. When I took her, I decided that Ill take over her full responsibility. I feel guilty for not fulfilling it now. It just feels like a first time parent. I dont know how a working girl may manage with a dog living alone. Yet I am contemplating on making things work.

I guess time would give me the solution and the right direction? Till then.. Miss you a lot sherra!

You wear them comfortable on your feet. The day you feel the need for shoes, you go to a store, try many shoes, then segregate them on the basis of the ones that fit you better. Then you go ahead short listing the ones you like more and you further narrow it down to the ones which you fit your budget. You finally buy the one.

Then you continue to wear them. Uncomfortable in the beginning, yet you wear them anyway, as the shopkeeper had said that they would soon expand and fit snugly on your feet. True to his words, it gets comfortable after a while. You get so used to the shoes that they become your best friend. A travel companion. There is no place that you go or want to go without your shoes. Your friends may have better one of varied designs and price, but not your shoe. Hence, you stick to your own. The long bond between you and your shoes seems endless and you forget the possibility of living a day without them.

Yet one rainy day, you discover that water has started seeping into the soles. You have no idea, weather it was the way you walked, or maybe the road, or maybe that noisy rat that lived in your basement. The truth remains, that the shoes now have holes. They become useless.

You still preserve the shoes to be worn on a non-rainy day day. And then, it rains without warning and your feet are wet! Soaking wet.

You decide that day that its time that you got a new pair. You go to the shop, and the process repeats.

But at the back of your mind, you keep wondering, weather you could have got the old shoes new soles? By that time, the old shoes disappear out of sight, out of mind and you have your new shoes waiting on your feet, ready to snugly fit.

I have grown with the belief that human beings are basically nice, and that, there is a good side of anyone or any situation. Such has been my stay at Bangalore (newly named Bengaluru for some reason) in India. From a state of ‘woah I dont know anyone here’ to a state of ‘woah I know so many people’ it has been an exciting one month with the kind of people that I have met here.

Firstly a Big hug to my room-mate for guiding me for the small things around this place to managing finances in the first month – Thank you for not being a shopoholic or a traveling freak, I would have surely felt peer pressured. Since this is my first time truly out of home, you have been a really nice friend who understands my little confusions regarding the tiniest of things in life.

A warm regard to the person at CIS to have given me such an awesome place to work in and for inviting me into the team with a cake. The prospect of the basement lab is making me really happy. Also added to that is thanks to the nice Hasgeek person who suggested me this place. A hug to the person who shares my birthday for making me meet his friends and for being that one call person living near my place.

I give a smile with thanks to the person from #h-i who got me the new bangalore number and who shared his two awesome friends with me. Thanks to his two friends for making me feel wanted and for bringing a smile to my face.

Big hugs to the gentoo developer lurking in #h-i for taking me to the nice party in Bangalore and to all the other #h-i folks who have taken time to meet me here!

I give hugs to the two crazy friends I met at CIS both electronic nerds and now all 3 of us own similar travel jackets (Yeah right, I am looking at *you*). Thank you my crazy friend number 1 of age 31 for taking me to electronic component shopping and getting me the ICs that I had never used or seen before. Thank you crazy friend number 2 of age 50+ to have taken care of my safety and comfort to reach back home whenever I am out with you guys.

Thank you my cool biker and crazy-chick friend for bringing all your craziness and clean heart to my life so randomly Thank you to the various CAs and lawyers who have been patient enough to listen to my wants.

In short, in case I missed out anyone please know that I got up terribly late and I am still sleepy for some reason holding my morning tea. Yeah, the last month was really nice to meet people, have a place to stay, get internet and to settle down. This month I hope would hold more fun

I was happy to receive the e-mail to address a TED talk in Chennai. Not only because I was happy to be talking at TED but also because I got to address the engineering students on a topic close to my heart, Open source hardware and its relevance in my life and how I see it in a future of Indian Education.

A few points that I would forever remember from my fellow speakers are:

Dr Alladi Mohan: He spoke about the state of education in the field of medicine, with relevance to any technical course of today. He mentioned that these days all the talented lot rush straight into the corporate world and then retire at home. His main expectation was that if the industry experts in their 40s took two years off to teach, the quality of education might greatly improve.

Neerja Malik: The cure of all the diseases starts only with the belief of getting perfectly fine.

(For a full list of speakers you can click here)

An observation that I made about the thought process of the students in general:

People who said – I did engineering but could not get sufficient interest to pursue it, but I am now X, and the best in the field of X, were more applauded than the people who actually stuck to their field and are making positive contributions to it.

I just wonder – why?

Let me face it. I am not a new developer. I have contributed some patches in my past, also, the code that I wrote for my ‘Summer Of Code’ might be swimming somewhere in a large pool on the Internet. Life has taken a new turn. I finished college, got a job essaying various roles till now. And yes, I want to return, return back to my roots, where, in those empty nights and weekends I was learning to proceed further, step by step. I want to restart writing code.

The million dollar question is, where do I begin?

The question asked by me is way too different, than that of a newbie. I am a person who has written considerable number of sensible lines of code but has got out of practice and hence am not as confident for my code to be accepted into any organization. More than my patch being accepted, I am worried about the usability of my code. This time, I dont want my code to be stashed away under a table again. I want my code to see the daylight. I want serious reviewers who take my code seriously and give me honest feedbacks with a scope of improvement in them.

Yes, I will rewrite and iterate the same code with corrections, but I want to jolly well see it in action.

Here is my list of demands :

1) I want a clear set of laid down bugs on the community page, with clear marks about the level of experience required.
2) I want the different projects also sorted on the basis of the programming language used, so that, without being threatened, I can start with the ease of my comfort.
3) I want an active community with the members of the project of my choice at least moderately active.
4) I want the status of my patch along with an honest feedback, with scope for improvement.
5) I want to know that one day the code I am writing will see the daylight, otherwise be guided to another project, which will.
6) I want to be able to have a newbie-friendly environment.

Any sane person might think – why must I do it? What is in it for me?

Well, once I am on the track, I will do the same, take the same care of the other newbies joining the community, all while my helpers might have joined bigger corporate places to work. Therefore, helping the community stay alive.

One of the awesome things about working/running a startup is that we learn so many small nick knacks about management. No, a tech company is not only about technology alone. Also, we never are able to quantify or keep a tail of the amount of work that we did, as we are constantly working on some part of the company or another, irrespective of being technical or not. All days are magically unified, everyday looks like a sunday or a weekday. We are the masters of our own time. Then comes the great word – Responsibility.

How much of responsibility is great responsibility. Is it the balance that we strike between work v/s earning? Or does it mean the responsibility to do/get the job done? Where lies the fine line of giving/accepting work? How to quantify how much of work each is doing, to avoid the blame game later on? Such questions often baffled and bothered me. When we work for a bigger organisation, we just have to do the work cut out for us. But as a new college graduate, when I jumped into running the startup, it proved to be a beneficial as well as a disadvantageous move. Beneficial in a way that I was a person full of fresh ideas. Disadvantageous, in a way that I never knew my capacity to work, or how much of work to take up, and how much to redistribute. I realized that we needed to ‘manage’ ourselves into performing a proper redistribution of work. Nandeep came up with the idea to use a project management tool.

Being a small bootstrapped self funded startup, we started our great search for the same. I soon realized, there are no free lunches. A project management tool is an immensely complex working piece of software. It needed to have the following basic qualities :

1. It has to be reliable and must have features to accept and adapt to changes.
2. It needs a calender.
3. It needs to have a simple and one-click style of update.
4. It also needed to hold the different categories of the work we had.

My very first project management tool using experience was with Basecamp. And yes, it was one of the best However, its way too expensive for a small 5 person startup. Hence came the first contender for the position – rule.fm

The business model is understandable. Up to 5 users the services are free. After that is a nominal amount being charged per month for the usage. Where it failed was, that it refused to function smoothly in different browsers and had loading issues. It was a very bad sign as while one is working, one does not want to spend a lot of time waiting for the browser to open the site on which one needs to constantly post updates. Also, its takes time to accept the usage of any tool. I wonder if the problem was only with the ‘free’ accounts or if they persisted in the paid accounts too. A non-entry in the software leads to further confusions in the smooth functioning of the workflow. The non-dependability led us to explore greener pastures.

The next tool that was used was Asana. Asana seemed to give the features that we were looking for. Not to mention the fully experienced team. The USP of Asana is its keyboard shortcuts. The very first time that we used it, was immensely comforting. Comforting to a level of ready acceptance by the whole team. Added to it was the choice to add up to 30 members. Although it is still in the beta stage, its being largely used by our company at the moment.

Hence we assign tasks for each other and link their names. Any update or deletion on that task gives us a mail intimation. Hence the entropy of confusion is far lower.

I remember a time in the year 2010 when I heard about the event “Yahoo open hackday”, I soon followed up their blogs, read the kind of cool hacks happening at the event. I wanted to be a part of it too! I had just begun to write my “Hello World” in python back then.

Passion coupled with situations courted by circumstances, I was managing the hobby shop called 9 Circuits. Little did I know that DIY would come so soon in such a big way in India Sudar from yahoo called me one day and spoke about the possibility of a hardware hack in the open hackday. I jumped on the opportunity! What better than to take Hardware hacking to a greater platform for the first time in India! I stalked Sudar and saw the awesome hardware hacks that he does all by himself. Slowly I found the whole group of people who play around with a lot of hardware. I found that the sensors and the microcontrollers excite a certain nerve of geeks and the non geeks alike. Its like a child looking at the first lego set. The very first instinct is to – Build!

My journey to Bangalore was a comedy in itself. There was my whole team assembled in a single room with ALL the hardware that we had. It was indeed difficult to pick what we have to take what we don’t. We really had no idea of fast moving items, as this was our first face to face interaction as a place to ’sell’ as we are basically a web based shop. The flight was pretty comfortable too. AirIndia does it well. The first steps inside Bangalore, and my instant reaction – “Its Cold as Hell!”. Coming from a diverse culture and climate it was tough for my delicate nose to adapt. As a result, I caught cold. Adding to that the Chief minister of Karnataka decided to step down. I realized that the whole fleet of politicians that I saw on TV, were coming to have a meeting at the same venue as the Yahoo Hackday – The Lalith Ashoka hotel. I had no idea how will they allow a girl with a full box of weird looking hardware. Added to the fact that I looked worn out beacause of the travel that I undertook right from Kothhanoor – a small village/town in the outskirts of the city (relatives FTW). I was neither a participant, nor did I have any proof of being the hardware vendor.

Sudar came to the rescue. He arranged for someone to fetch me. In the meanwhile, I was feeling really awkward, standing outside in front of around 50 cameras and press reporters. I finally managed to enter.

The place looked welcome and friendly with a few known and largely unknown faces. The very fact that the event had the JS guru, Douglas Crockford, made the event already epic I was asked to give a small intro talk to Arduino. The enthusiasm of the audience was a little low though. Maybe it was because of a half an hour long talk on ham-radio before me? But that gives no reason. I guess I just have to demo some cool stuff that moves next time! The ones who heard came rushing to the stall at the rear. Thanks to my partner for the event Pronoy, we could successfully handle the crowd. And the music was worth a mention, it did not disturb the working ears at all!

There were varied people interested in hardware. There were absolute newbies who were writing their first ‘blink’ program. Blink is like the “hello world” of the hardware world.To the people who mildly new about what to ask for at the counter, to the advanced robot making people
Several others had some idea about what to ask for at the counter, while some were advanced robot making people. We tried to answer everyone’s queries to the best of our abilities.

Sudar showed us a cute self-made robot which was controlled using the accelerometer on his phone. It was really innovative and interesting. Also, the food there had a lot of variety which confused my tastebuds (Note: I am a big foodie hence I thought it worth a mention ).

The main attraction of the whole hardware deal was that Yahoo offered to sponsor 50% of the hardware cost as a part to promote open hardware. Yes, I did find Sudar’s bot interesting and will feature his hack in the next post.

All in all, it was an awesome experience and a nice change for 9circuits, to meet and see many more hackers at the Yahoo Open Hackday.

To share a careless thought,
or work
and routes and sun and storm,
as a few more careless
streaks of hair,
entwine between my fingers
as I lie on
your chair, careless in thought.

To tell you about my lover’s vice,
and bore
you with his praises high,
and tell you how I hated him
giving a ‘look’ at ‘her’
as a few more careless
streaks of hair,
entwine between my fingers
as I lie on
your chair, careless in thought.

Sharing my highs and lows and
that bothers me most,
the deepest wishes unabashed I bare,
I dare to take the names out in BOLD
no fear
my dear
I know I am safe
as a few more careless
streaks of hair,
entwine between my fingers
as I lie on
your chair, careless in thought.

Oh! When can we,
have that tea,
again?

Princess ZAerA stood still with her long hair tied in a single knot. Ready with her sword – Khata-ir, which was gifted to her on the dawn of her initiation as the royal princess of Sumaastra. Her ears were trained to hear the smallest noise of the wind brushing through a new leaf. She was so absorbed that she did not notice the bead of sweat forming at the edge of her nose. It had been six hours now that she had been dispatched to fetch the royal turban from the clutches of the most feared animal of the Sumaastra forest – The vicious tigress Shlesha.

This was her first mission and she did not want to disappoint her clan.

ZAerA took each step with the precision of a deer. “Light and nimble” – she heard herself murmur. She was 5 when she began her formal education as a princess of the tribe. She was constantly told that her powers as a princess were there so that she could defend her clan and that her life was nothing but a chance to serve her people. She was now all of sixteen.

Her eyes narrowed to a faint motion of grass at a distance. She could not say if it was Shlesha or an innocent deer. she clutched her right hand firmly on her sword. It became a part of her. “A weapon is no different from an extension of your body part” – she remembered her lessons with each step. Today, was the day that she had been sent on a real life mission. She crept behind the large trunks of trees, making sure that she showed no signs of life around herself. She then saw the faint outline of Shlesha’s lair. It was fabled that even the brave of the bravest could not fight Shlesha.

Dusk was almost approaching by the time she reached her final goal. She hid behind the entrance rock of Shlesha’s lair. She crouched low and sat down in the ancient posture of the crouching animal ready to attack.