Long Break

March 10th was the last day I blogged. It has been a month now. Mostly because of the roaming around that I do and partially because of the work. I managed to convince my manager that I had to go home even though I had no leaves. Ravindra was lenient enough to give me some leaves. I went home on the 27th of March. As usual the visit was mainly concentrated on meeting family members and relatives. I also managed to celebrate the retirement of a close family friend. The weather in Kerala was trying. Very humid and dry. I managed to play some badminton with some elderly guys but was pathetic at it. We celebrated Surbhi's birthday with style after reaching the office. It was a smooth month anyway !!!

Holi @ the office

The previous year we were on our way to Mukhteshwar when it was 'Holi'. This time around I celebrated the day before holi at the office !!

A different step

Its been about a week since I have been helping the guys out with some PHP. I thought to do so so that I could also get a hang of the language and the usages. But I'll say it came natural to me. The project was one which was partly developed and was currently being extended. The code written was awesome. Complex but Awesome.

The previous time I did PHP was in the college and I feel pity at what I did. No MVC at all. Just write all the crap in one php and render it. Pretty Lame and Bad. The code here was carefully split into Model-View-Controller and all the URL rewrites were also written. WAMP is the server and all the rewrites written into the .htaccess file. PEAR classes were used for database interaction and the Models were created using written code which generates the php.ini file. The view was programmed to render after the controller had done its job of initializing and assigning variables.

The stuff that attracted me was the Cookie usage. The stuff like filtering results and sorting was stored in Cookies with respect to each page. This had the advantage (disadvantage to some) that the page seems to maintain its state through out the life of the application (so long as the cookie is not deleted). Classes were written for each Cookie kind (say a cookie for search had a class Search) and initializers were set so that the value could be accessed via PHP. Great Idea !!!

I would probably do something of this kind if I get a chance in Ruby On Rails. Let me see if I could get something of this kind !!!

Extreme Entertainment

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. ~Hilaire Belloc

We started on friday at 1 in the night. Off to Shivpuri in Rishikesh. We were late by an hour and half but me and Ankur made the better out of it y eating some Egg Burji and plain Parathas. 17 in total we got into the bus and started our onward journey. The bus was great and the group was awesome. Pure entertainment from Don, Pappi and all the others. Puke fest was on from me and an 'unknown' personality. Then a grand sleep only to be hindered by the steer of the bus when it went through those hair pin turns uphill.

The place was serene and the camp side was breath taking. Tents were setup by our co-coordinator Vinod and 2 other helpers. They were adjacent to a narrow stream which lead to the main Ganges flow. They advised us not to go to the main stream but goto the adjacent one. The water was cold and the first thing we did was to go in an refresh ourselves. Breakfast followed and then started the volley ball matches. The sun was intense but we still managed to hang on. After the matches I was dragged by Abhilash and Ankur to have a quick bath which I thought I would have after the sweat had dried. Lunch followed and then we were told that we would be starting the rafting at 3.

All the guys were worn out. Rohan's eyes were bright red and some of them even had a quick nap. But all were ready at 3 to set off for the extreme rafting. We put our life jackets, wore our helmets and took a paddle each and went onwards towards the raft. The raft weighed 80 kgs approx. It was specially built so that water never stayed inside the boat for long. The 'rapids' were for amateurs and we were given strict instructions what to do. Vinod and his team excelled in training us for the rapids. There were 6 rapids and the 3rd one was the most fierce. I managed to secure a position on the 3rd row and sat on the right. Water flushed in but we did not budge. We stood strong and fended the fierce waters until reached our destination. We were allowed to jump into the water after a certain point as the water was harmless and we had our life protectors. The water was pretty cold and Aditya and Srinath who were in the water for a long time shivered all the way after they got of the river.

There was also a place were people were allowed to jump off a high cliff. It must have been about 50 meters high. I did not take the jump and Shveta kept on teasing me after she had made hers. I give no reasons for not doing the jump. I felt it better to stand and watch rather that do it myself. People may call me a scary cat but I never felt the need to jump. Dont know why. But it was awesome seeing all those splashes going wrong. Ankur displacing atleast 10 buckets of water after his jump, Shveta doing a titanic and getting a rescuer to jump into the water, Surbhi falling chest first which definitely must have hurt her, Saumitri being pushed off guard by the instructor, Aditya taking a running plunge into the water.

By the time we reached the camp we were all tired. I was finding it tough to keep my eyes open. After having a tea we are all up again. The camp fire was lit and we started having drinks and food. Many of them retreated into their tents and by 12 all were dead asleep.

The next day Abhilash and Amit woke me up by carrying me and dropping me on the sand. After that episode we started playing Volley Ball. Puneet wished to go for trekking but had only very little supporters. I tried to convince everyone but failed miserably. I now understand that I am just a follower and not a leader. I have always felt that a trip is always as good as the company you are in. Having to go trekking with just 5-6 people did not excite me.

After a dip in the water and beer we started off to Rishikesh. We saw Laxman Jhula and ate from Choti Walah. Then Surbhi left with her cousin and we onward home. Don entertained us with his wits and stories and many of us laughed our brains out. We reached Noida by 12 in the night and after taking the remains of the colas, namkeens, pulpy oranges Srinath and I went to the flat.

Post Production Stress

Two weeks before we went live with one of our products. A product where I worked personally for 4 months. I still do not feel I did justice to the product as the actual problems still glare at me when I see the application. It was a whole lot of work within 4 months and a more work when it went live. As the product was the first one to go live from us, we where a little tense. Some glitches here and there and I was all stressed out.

Its a whole big deal making an application live or into production. Especially if the application is not owned completely by you. The task of closely monitoring it, making sure that nothing breaks, maintaining the backups, ensuring that binding is done quickly and effectively if something breaks is completely done by the team. This is very tense. And I deeply appreciate all those managers who sympathize and stay beside their team during those stressful times. If you are answerable then you better have pretty good answers.

The build technique that was made is my main area of concentration this time around. Indraneel was the person in charge and I sat with him one time to deploy the code live. The scripts written via capistrano were excellent. The deployment can be to the test server or the live server. This requires issuing of different commands and writing separate tasks. The commands issued are remote commands and they usually are stop and start commands for mongrel. This application had also ap4r in it for asynchronous processing and therefore required a restart for that as well.

Monit has also been installed in this server and ap4r and mongrel has been configured to restart once stopped. The mod proxy balancer has been put along with apache so that mongrel clustering can be implemented. The balancer member written inside the proxy tags has an ip associated to it. This is where the actual transition in case of updates for the live application comes into picture. Using apache we could have something called a graceful restart using the 'apachectl graceful' command. Normally when a new code is deployed with all those changes and upgrades the server (mongrel in this case) must be restarted. But with graceful restart Indraneel just has to do minimal stuff. He first deploys the new code onto a server started with a different port, say mirror. Now what he does is change the balancer member port number to the mirror port and does a graceful restart. And wallah .. a work well done. This could also be automated if there were 2 virtual host files and according to the live/mirror deployment, the file is overwritten by the specific files.

Great work !!

What a week !

This week was a long one. Lots of work to be done, or atleast was asked from us. Amit and Abhilash had to put in extra hours to get it done and the work still continues as I write this post. My work is some what done so I am calmly sitting at a corner so that no one notices me.

The bugs that I got were all bugs which arose as a result of some miscommunication. Sometimes I understood it wrong, otherwise they interpreted it differently. 'They' are obviously NOT wrong. The major bug that took most my time was the one related to the Sortable list not working in IE7. I tried juggling with those classes but reached no where. At last a simple ' ' solved my problem :). The next major one was that the auto-completer in scriptaculous kept on disappearing when the container div's scroll was clicked. This was obviously because all the browsers except Firefox interpreted this as a valid auto-complete text field blur. The work around done was to entirely take off the onBlur event and be entirely dependent on the keypress(ESC key) and the selection of the element inside the autocomplete list.

Coding for the browser was also something we learned here. Amit had lots of problems uploading flv files via Safari. As I understand Safari gives a String Object instead of a StringIO object and therefore checking the content type becomes impossible. The attachment_fu plug-in therefore bombs and gives errors. Kudos to Amit for solving this bug.

To top it all up, I was to travel home today and my flight got canceled. Can't still believe it. This guy calls me up early in the morning to say that the flight has been canceled. He asks me the mode of refund and pleasantly says thanks. I had to spend a thousand rupees more to get a ticket home and am 'supposed' to go tomorrow. Let's hope that works out.

'Open' ness

'Openness is a philosophy that is being used as the basis of how various groups and organizations operate. It is a relatively new term to describe this general way of doing things. It is typified by communal management, and open access to the information or material resources needed for projects; openness to contributions from a diverse range of users/producers/contributors, flat hierarchies and a fluid organisational structure.' - Wikipedia

I was quite taken aback when the IT department here asked me to uninstall a trial version of Adobe Flex Builder which had about 60 days more of evaluation time. My intension was to learn Flex and try to build an AIR application using this great IDE. I don't quite understand why the trial version, which by the way expires itself, was causing a problem. It will expire anyway!

This brings us to the thought I have always had. Why is software made for the public, not publically made free !? Even if 'free' does not mean 'free' in FSF ways, it could at least mean 'free to use'. I understand that the code written has expenses and they have to be funded from somewhere. The Limewire style of have a 'pro' product along with the free version is a great way to go. Adverstise, minimally, in the product and that seems perfectly fine to me. But locking it up and opening it up to an elite set of people seems absurd and preposterous to me.

I as a developer find it great to share knowledge. I believe that sharing increases visibility and gives a two way development. When you bottle it up it is bound to burst some day. Open the code up and see how good your program is. How better you could get by people criticizing it. Could you handle criticism? Could you handle better programmers viewing your code ?
Food for thought.

Second Anniversary

Today I am 2 years old in my company, GlobalLogic. It has been a ride which had its ups and downs. Some factors are great and some stuff I just hate. I remember the first time I came to Noida, not knowing how I would even come into terms with the culture, weather, food and all the other oddities. I had my primary education from Kerala all my life after returning from Dubai and coming to North India was a unique experience.

The team here was excellent. Wonderful people with great insight and knowledge. The learning curve was certainly steep. I started out with some Ruby first. Playing with Watir and then learing a bit of Rails. Then came the Java part. Learning Java was the best thing that happened to me. After avoiding Java completely during the studies, I was forced to learn Java. Reading those great books about the Design Patterns and understanding the vastness of Java was great. I even dug into Spring, Hibernate, JSP and stuff !! :) . But all was good. I went on to doing some boring stuff after that, mainly concentrating on Jira. Some .NET also came by the way, but I was never a Microsoft Fan (I even bought a Mac avoiding the 'crappy' Windows).

Core Ruby On Rails came after that. Along with that came a great team. One which materialized the saying 'Work hard, Party Harder !'. I even gained the confidence to speak in Hindi !! Stuttle badminton, Carroms, Table Tennis, Alchohol .. You name it we did it.

The work was a little wayward. I guess that comes with the job. There is bound to be ups and downs and I try to cope up with them as much as I can. I have developed a sort of evaluating skill that I guess I did not have before. Even in estimating stuff, I think I do better now a days.

The trips that I have taken were awesome. We went to Mukhteshwar, Vaishov Devi, Kulu Manali etc. And they were all excellent. I got to meet and make a lot of friends. I never had these many Northie friends before.

It has been a very eventful ride and hope the ride gets faster.

Promoted ..

This is a great day for me after the day I got my first job and my first salary. This is the day on which I have got my first promotion ( hope there is more to come !!). The Paid Interviews required some work to set up their demo. The HTML linking ( image mapping) was done using the Geohtml tool. The basic HTML for three of the pages was done by Rohit and was changed some what. I was talking to JoyDeep regarding the Workstreamr Client when I was called by Ravi. I was to go to Manish's cabin and was joined by Indraneel and Aparajita. This was when Manish told me that the meeting was for me. I was then told that all of them wanted me to be promoted. They told me that my work was seen as a critical one and I was recognized for the work I have been doing.

For me a mere pat on the back does wonders. It boosts the confidence level and energy. It was refreshing to understand that the people whom I work with understand what I am about, what I can do and what I am capable of. Having a set of people who trusts you is a great feeling. It helps me personally to do more. Squeeze more juice.

Thanks for all the help and support that you have given me. That meeting would stay in my heart for a long time.