Naaka gang

From Shlok and Vishal's Birthday

All the US members of the Naaka Gang were are our place to celebrate Shlok's first birthday. Had a great time!!!

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what others say you can't

I have been waiting for almost two years to write this blog post. The reason being for the past two years I have been working on a software project at Netapp, which most people thought was a foolish thing to pursue however it got completed today (I cannot reveal the details of the project for obvious reasons).

It all began three years ago (2007), when I had delivered two successful projects in a single release. At that time I was confident than ever and came about with the idea of this "foolish" project. I remember giving a presentation about the "foolish" project and bragging about it making into the same release that had my previous two projects. I was super certain that nothing could stop me from implementing this project. I went about designing and implementing the project and after fighting some tough battles was able to finish it in about 6 months by mid of 2007. I was feeling great about myself. However the worse followed as people started using the feature I had developed. It failed miserably and caused lots of pain especially since it started blocking the work of the other teams. My changes were about to put the whole product at risk and that is when sanity kicked it and we had to back out all of my changes towards the end of the year.

This failure was one of most embarrassing periods of my life. It was difficult facing the reality that I could fail, as I had never failed before. Also the worst thing was my manager (at that time) had taken a huge risk along with me and I had let him down. It was extremely tough sucking my ego and accepting failure. But in the end I did.

After the fiasco, I was almost about to give up on the idea when my manager came up to me and offered me a second chance. Second chances are extremely rare in life but I was fortunate (have always been) to get one. However this time I decided to slow down and not rush with the whole thing. I also tagged along with a senior engineer who was simply super brilliant. I had to do lots of soul searching after the failure and I did that by reading lots of books about the techniques of crafting a high quality software. Reading the books, practicing and working with my collegue I realised how naive I was. I started acknowledging my short comings and started consciously working on them. It was lots of hard work but when I look back now it was all worth it.

Since I had failed the first time implementing the project everyone was really skeptical about our second try. The battles we had to fight, the investigations, the measurements that we had to conduct, were ten times harder than before. However we stood strong and weathered all the storm. The first victory was getting our design accepted and we succeeded at it after presenting it to some of the senior most engineers at Netapp located at different geographies around the world. However once that was done my collegue had to leave our tag team and I was by myself once again. The next challenge was driving the implementation. This involved lots of coding, sleepless nights debugging, conducting inspections, reviews, no weekends. Everyday during the implementation phase I use to find a new problem however the thought of me getting a second chance kept me motivated to fix everything that stood in my way. I kept on going until finally when I have merged in my changes today.

Truly this has been one of the most exciting journeys that I have had as far as my profession goes. I can only hope I am faced with similar challenges again in the future. However I have learned some really important life lessons on the way and would like to share

* Opportunities are not given, you need to create or grab one for your self. True success lies in not doing what everyone else does but in doing what no one else wants to do.
* Failure is the biggest stepping stone for success. If you don't fail that means you aren't pushing hard enough in life. It is worth failing 99 times inorder to succeed once.
* When you fail, you just need to grab yourself up and move on. (This is applicable in relationships as well)
* Keep your skepticism in check, we tend to be more skeptical as we grow old. Too much skepticism is the surest way of killing new ideas and innovations.
* You need to keep on updating your knowledge. The day you stop learning anything new you are as good as dead.
* You live only once and hence it is important you do what you really like and are passionate about (Even today writing good software gives me the same happiness as writing my first C program)
* At the end of the day, career, money, success and fame do not matter if you don't have a happy family to come back to. For home is the place where your heart truly is.

Yoga

Had given up on Yoga since Shlok was born...But have started back again...Unfortunately haven't got back to the complete yoga sessions that I use to do every morning...Anyway however crazy my schedule is (especially managing work and home along with Shlok)...I somehow squeeze out 15 minutes each morning for "Anulom Vilom" and "Kapalbhati"...

Have skipped the gym for couple weeks now...hopefully will get back on a regular workout schedule as well...

And oh yeah and haven't read anything lately..that sucks too..

Saturday evening

Have been working most of the weekend...However yesterday evening was fun, with Abhinav, Poonam and Poonam's mom at our place for dinner. Poonam's mom is flying back to India next weekend and we really wanted to invite her for dinner at our place. It has always been fun to meet Abhinav and Poonam over weekends. Before Shlok we use to play lots of games or watch movies on saturday nites (with Vipul and Heena joining us sometimes). However our definition of weekend fun has changed now, it is mostly about having fun with our kido.

Leap Forword

One of my dear friends from my under graduate days, Pranil Naik, has started a project in India to promote spoken and written English skills amongst financially challenged young men and women. The project is aptly named Leap Forword. Will be working on getting it promoted in the US.

Shlok one month old

Shloky will be a month old tomorrow....It's hard to believe that it has already been a month since he arrived....Waiting for him to grow up a little more so that we can go camping and kayak-ing together in the summers.

Sunday Evening....

It's green outside and is drizzling a bit, I am working on my laptop while listening to Celtic music , with Shlok sleeping besides me on the bed, Tanu and her Mom are cooking food downstairs....At times Life just seems perfect...

Good Weekend

One of my friends (Satish) from Clemson bought an awesome house (or should I say a mansion) in Cary, NC. We were at his place Saturday evening for a house warming party. Besides happy times, the best part of the evening was awesome food.

More RAM....more speed

Added some more RAM to my (> 4 year old) laptop and the multimedia experience has improved a lot. I am planning to buy Dell XPS 1530 but am waiting for some good deal on it.

Leadership

Saw Carly Fiorina's talk on the Stanford website and it was a really good one. Carly explains the difference between management and leadership in very simple terms. Management basically involves simply producing satisfactory results under the given constraints and conditions. While leadership involves bringing change in the order of things. Leadership also involves three important things namely Capability, Collaboration and Character. Capability to ask questions and hear the answers.

Another important point to learn from her talk was that people who stop learning get jaded while people you keep learning are much more energetic. Also it is important to note that it's not the most powerful or most intelligent who survive but ones who adapt easily to the change in environment. Couldn't have agreed more with this.