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.

Beard Day !!

I just got my beard added to the All About Beards website. They have approved it and have put it up in their site. This is great feeling considering the fact that it took me a long time to actually have one. I'm in the process of getting a bigger one right now as Kamal Hassan has. :)

A lot to do ..

I have started enjoying some of my free time so much that I now make free time to enjoy. Staring with playing badminton, I will get better at this, to learning how to play table tennis. The carom board has been taken over by some people from another project and we could not play because of this. I have started going to the gym as well. But work has to be finished within the time frame and I strive to finish all the important work. This post is all about Rails.

Before Rails I knew what an MVC was and how to implement it. But never got an entire framework bundled with all the features. I am a relative starter in this field but it took little time to understand how great is rails when considered as a rapid application development platform. The tests also was a pro as I never had written a single test when I was doing JAVA [:)].

The usage of helpers like link_to_remote and form_for has been great as it greatly reduced application development time. I also found it better to write all the configurations in a yml and load it via the environment file that to write static classes which returned all these. And the plug-ins that it gave. Just awesome. Think about not writing a single piece of code for the authentication and tagging features. It even has Lucene plug-ins. I have also used the paginating_find plug-in.

The stuff that I hear most from my friends is the problems that ActiveRecord has. As per Abhijat, it took 13 secs to execute a simple query with limit and 3-4 secs without limit. I also understand that loading with include is actually transformed into join statements which is bound to up the query time and object creation time. 1+N problem ! And their effort. I also liked wrting rake tasks as they are so ruby ! :)

I also see that even though twitter is having so much problems extending, a lot of rails sites have come. Slide Share is one of them. I also saw this site called Crazzyegg. They use nginx and mongrel servers. I have not seen a site use mod-rails as of now.

Reactions

The post has a peculiar title because I had a quite heart warming one when I went through the Workstreamer blog. Theres a post titled 'What Does Your Workspace Say About You?' and that just jots down a instance where a desktop uses the Workstreamer client. It feels so much refreshing when something that you have done goes out in the open. The whole stuff was created from scratch and I also had the help of the twitter client snitter (code). The Open APIs where also designed and with the help of my dear friends Abhilash, Rohan and Abhijat.

I also found that Workstreamer had a community in Facebook. There are pictures with me in it too. Extreme right here.

Nice to be part of a great team. KUDOS !!!