It’s been some time since I cut myself off from the rest of the world. So here’s a summary of things I have been working/doing/reading/ in the last few months.
- My colleague and I developed an idea, to build a product that deals with search. The crux of the product is a set of search algorithms for a specific domain. So I have been churning out thousands of lines of code everyday to develop a demo version that can be showcased to the concerned.
- The work is still in progress, and yet we decided to take it to the investors in the Silicon Valley. Theirs is a different world and it was my first hands-on(!!!) experience. The investor world works very differently completely contrary to what I have read in the media, as an outsider so far.
- My experience in the non-technical front with the investors has all masala stuff to make a blockbuster Indian movie.
- Coming to my favourite part. What are the tools and technologies I have been working with?To begin with Ruby on Rails with CoffeeScript in the front end. Lots of micro services built in NodeJS and Spring Boot running in Docker. Couchbase and AWS DynamoDB for in-memory and NoSQL. ElasticSearch for the query-based search. Machine Learning Algorithms based on the Random Forests, Bagging and Naive Bayes methods. FitNesse for Acceptance testing. TDD.
- I decided to take off from my consulting and training assignments. I also had a pretty bad experience and probably the only one in my several years of training. I had to train a group of developers on Groovy/Grails in MindTree Bangalore. Most people in the class were very reluctant to code throughout the course. And when I pushed them to code they began to crack open. They either didn’t have the pre-requisites or interest in coding. They had probably come expecting a power-point presentation. And the worst is a particular co-ordinator lady who in my opinion needs a crash course in basic etiquette and conduct. I say this because throughout my career I have worked very hard to stay away from people like this woman who are impediment to growth in a productive environment. If I were to deal with this client again, I am going to be doubly careful. This experience made to pull the plug of training for sometime and expend my energy on product instead of putting it in dealing with clients like this.
- I cut myself off from Social Media and deactivated(now deleted) my Facebook account. I have not been too much of an active user of Facebook. But this time I needed full concentration, so decided to quit. In fact, I feel a lot more rejuvenated and focussed and feel very happy that I had taken that decision. And thanks to this decision, my reading frequency has increased. I have already completed 5 books in the last 2 months. MS Life in Music, Creative Schools, Serverless Single Page Apps, The Golden Tap, Zero to One.
I still have a long way to go in terms of the product that I am building. It succeeds or bites the dust, the journey is one hell of an experience both technically and emotionally. And yes, I promise to myself that I will write more frequent posts from now. One post/week. 