Update: As usual, good comments at HN.

I’ve been trying to put it in words for a while, and failing utterly every time. swombat gets to the crux of it wonderfully:

At the same time, something really bothered me about my work. It felt pointless. One project I did (whose output was basically a PPT and Word document outlining the successes and failures of a client project), which took two and a half months, had, as its only apparent purpose, the promotion of the person who had led the project. Accenture was paid (quite well) so that I would sit there and produce a piece of paper that justified this person’s promotion.

To me, that didn’t seem like a good use of the precious few years we have on this Earth. In fact, the feeling that I was wasting my time was really killing me inside (I’m not exaggerating).

My life in Accenture before Startups

Indeed. I’d be surprised if anything in the Indian “Big Companies” are any different – perhaps worse (thoughts/experiences?).

There is a silver lining though:

One of the most crucial things I learned in Accenture was how to hold back my habit of being blunt and direct with everyone. I learned to be smoother and far more effective. That’s a valuable thing to learn.

As Vijay would tell you, that’s something I’d definitely find useful – something that every geek would find useful (relevant link about geeks being assholes, and excellent HN comments). Perhaps a stint at Infosys would help me there? :D

Succinctly written post that every engineering college student should read.

Ofcourse, someone should write a post called “CS, EC or EEE?” “Neither” for high school students, because for a lot of people the answer to the question “Should you do Engineering?” is a huge “No”.

The comments section is even more awesome. Choice quotes:

A sympathizer/astroturfer/cognitively dissonant person writes:

Are you saying that anybody who can browse the internet and knows about the computer can do our jobs? Don’t you think we would find that a bit insulting? It might be true in many cases where the proper training can make a monkey do our jobs, but isn’t that true for many fields? Aren’t monkeys being trained to pilot airships?

And is responded with multiple ‘yes’es. I was quite astounded, surprised, even enraged when I heard someone working there describe his job as “I do nothing, really. I’ve to press buttons and record answers in excel sheets. Rest of the time I can hit on the girls and do my own thing. Nobody cares. It’s more fun than college!”. Sigh.

Also, another point mentioned by someone anonymous:

6. Brand name: Students feel that Infosys, TCS, Wipro are great brand names. It is far from the truth. Infosys, TCS, Wipro are embarrassing brand names to write in your resume with the exception if you want to join another Infosys, TCS, Wipro like company or Cognizant, Accenture like companies who are ready to hire any crap that comes out of Infosys, TCS, Wipro. Good technical companies know that these brand names are like balloons. They look big from outside but has only gas inside. Actually an engineer from a good but less popular startup has more chance than a person from Infosys to get a call of interview from a big technical company.

“Working at Infosys for 6 years!” only sounds awesome to maamis who want to buy you for their daughters.

Another typical attitude that boils the blood of anyone with a tiny bit of work ethic:

hello all, what if someone(CS/IT engineer) is not interested in engineering and he wants to do mba from a very good college. But he needs time for preparation. So he make decision to join tcs/infosys/wipro (cause he didn’t get job other than these companies), only for job experience and he can get time for preparation of CAT/XAT/snap/cet etc.. Will it be a good decision??

And of course, the actual ‘client’ who gets shafted:

I am quite alarmed by Sam’s response, especially his 5th point where he writes that the Indian vendors send their employees to work on client’s site not because they are proficient in technology but because you need to factor in everyone’s needs and desiers. Excuse me! We need good technology people. Why can’t you guys just be professional and keep your personal lives and poverty away while discussing technology?

I highly recommend you guys go and read the entire blog post *and* the comments. Especially if you’re still in college. The placement cells at many colleges make it appear as if these are the ultimate companies ever, that you should fast and pray for 30 days to get a job there – but they have no other go. This, and their reviews at Glassdoor (Infosys, TCS, Wipro, HCL)

I’m waiting for this boom to crash. And burn. Mass de-brainwashing is important for our future. This topic definitely needs a bigger rant from me someday.

Stolen Disclaimer:

ALERT: If you are not interested in making a career in engineering, lack the confidence to do so, or you are very content with working for one of these three companies for reasons that are valid to you, you may stop reading this and go back to what you were doing before landing on this page.

Thanks to Shankar Ganesh for pointing this out to me.

I was finally able to order my Canon 550D from Flipkart. Their customer service was awesome – both on twitter (when the camera was out of stock) and via the phone after it was ordered. I ordered Cash on Delivery, and despite some minor issues with the delivery person (uhm, so I’m supposed to hand over 39k, and then open the box? What if I found a box of bricks?) – I got the camera within 3 working days of ordering it. Impressive. Flipkart is awesome :)

I also got the 50mm 1.8 (underhanded practice by flipkart – they say free and then bump up the cost to match. Didn’t matter in this case since I was ordering it anyway, but definitely not cool). Incredible lens. I haven’t even tried on the Kit Lens yet – playing with the 50mm has been so much fun. Will review both camera and lens once I’ve played with it enough.

Might renew my flickr membership soon – tried 500px but wasn’t good enough. Any other suggestions?

Very late one. I’ve been using this since last September (as those of you on twitter and following me would know).

It was on 2.1 for a long, long time – and even after 2.2 came out (first unofficially and then officially) I didn’t upgrade for almost a month (thanks to a missing usb cable and some laziness). I then upgraded to official 2.2, then one of the ‘Stock’ bootloaderless ROMs, and then to InDroid 3.0, then semi-bricked my phone (trying to install InDroid 4.0) and finally settled on Kyrillos.

In the spirit of Anna University, I’ll now list “Disadvantages and Advantages” ;)

Disadvantages

1. It’s reasonably slow
2. GPS Does Not Work. There’s a hack to enable it, but still, geez.
3. I’ll occasionally need to force close apps
4. TweetDeck isn’t snappy
5. Playing Angry Birds will give you a headache (super slow framerates!)
6. Sometimes even the SMS app will be super slow
7. Searching for contacts is a major pain
8. SMS unread marking is incredibly awful
9. SMS storage is limited
10. GTalk can only use the first account synced
11. Swpe very, very annoyingly keeps offering you tutorials every time you misspell a word
12. Occasional Touch screen freezes
13. Not quite usable in direct bright sunlight, even at full brightness
14. Battery lasts for at most a day (I’m used to them lasting a few)
15. Auto rotate is too sensitive, cannot be turned on
16. Camera is awful
17. Vibrate is nowhere near good enough
18. Loses data connectivity at times, and needs to be restarted.
19. Loses reception way too many times
20. Never going to get official updates from now (Froyo itself was delayed by a few months!)

Advantages

1. Only 10.5k. This was when I bought it (~September 2010), so obviously newer/better phones on the market now. But when I bought it, this was the best value for money
2. It’ Android

Considering all these, I still love my phone :D Moving from a ‘dumb’ phone to a smartphone was an incredibly life altering experience, and you can’t beat me into going back to a ‘normal’ phone again. Email/Twitter on the go is just awesome. I could’ve never afforded an iPhone – Android is the PC of our times :)

A while back, I moved my blog (from a wordpress install whose data I lost) to my own platform (HiSlain).

After several close calls, I’m officially moving from HiSlain back to WordPress. I just don’t have enough time to maintain all the things I wanted in a blog platform in HiSlain, hence the move back. However, it satisfied it’s purpose – I learnt to write code I could use, others could use, and others could contribute to. The old blog is still around (all permalinks would work) if you’re interested.

It’s good to be back :)

I miss writing posts in Vim though – expect to find/write a plugin that’ll let me blog/compose from Vim. Suggestions?

It was exactly six years ago that I started blogging. My first blog post ow seems to be rather childish, but considering I was 14 then, maybe it is excusable :)

I’ve moved across several blogging platforms and urls in the meantime (Blogspot, wordpress and now my own custom engine. I’ve sadly lost a good portion of my blogs thanks to a domain loss and a server crash. Sigh.

Also, looks like I’ve been writing code for almost eleven years now! Not counting my turboC years, that would be 8 years now. Not bad, eh? I’ve been coding for more than 60% of my life :)

No, I’m not going to blow your mind by telling you I’m going to do the SICP exercises in BrainFuck :)

I just wrote my first brainfuck program. Might as well be my last, but not sure. Tape-based turing-ish programing seems fun, so maybe I’ll try that again with something more expressive than brainfuck (or maybe that is pointless?)

And I’m doing the SICP Exercises. In MIT-Scheme. I’ve put them up on GitHub. I’m doing this with the FPUG-C SICP Study Group, so hope I’m able to complete it all this time :) Big props to Balaji for organizing it, and letting us get away with the free coke and coffee!

I just finished 1984. Had finished Animal Farm and Brave New World a while ago. Orwell is scarier, but Huxley seems to be closer to real life already – I know several people (perhaps too many) who wouldn’t flinch at all at the world Huxley created. Scary.

Sanity is not Statistical

I’ve started keeping devlogs, recording productive activity every day in an attempt to publicly shame myself into doing productive things. This is the delayed april edition

Apr 30

Impromptu talk at ChennaiPy meet. Then fun discussions at Nerd Dinner. No code, sadly.

Apr 29

Google Instant mostly works on yenWikipedia. Made a release. More exams.

Apr 22 – 28

Nothing much done. Exams and stuff.

Tecoholic forked yenWikipedia and created a Firefox extension. Adding features faster than me. Yay! :)

Apr 21

Started exam mode. Two units in OOAD done. Fixed proto.in.

Apr 20

Long discussions with Kishore about data model for BRi. We’re going with the simpler one. Also, spent a lot of time discussing ideas for his new project with @notnarainan. Was fun!

Scraped entire Pune bus data into neatly structured JSON files and sent ’em to Planemad. Let’s see how that turns out.

Started using SIO. Installed Variables Extension and started on Loop Extensions.

Apr 19

Updated ShortURL to use base64 instead of 36. Helped Kishore start writing tests. Nothing productive much

Apr 18

Removed / private / from LoadBalancer and Title. Patch got through. hexmode believes I’ll not have any problems getting commit access. Nice :)

Met gsathya, genghiz9, stattrav, superkiddo and idlecool at bessie beach today. Was fun.

Apr 17

Not so productive day. Finally applied for commit access after more prodding. Removed one more / private / from Title.php. And that’s about it. Incredibly unproductive day today.

Apr 16

Slept through most of the day. @since calculator turned into a statistics generator, and lead to discussions about removing / private / declarations. I poked around, found a change to $wgLanguageNames that tstarling had made that had broken a few extensions. Went in, fixed them (except one of them, which was so incredibly broken beyond repair). bawolf committed them (YAY!). Unlike the UtfNormal patch, which was second hand, this was my own code so felt good :)

They (Happy-melon and bawolff) also suggested that I apply for commit access, since I seem to ‘not break things too often’ :) Let’s see if I can keep that reputation.

Have work lined up for tomororw – get rid of as many / private / bits as possible.

Woke up, checked/fixed visibility modifiers in 3 more files. My sleep schedule is very messed up.

Apr 15

Meat of code for @since calculator ready. Not many people enthusiastic about it in ###mediawiki though. Sigh. Think I’ll sleep early today.

Apr 14

Chrome extension close to v0.2. Options page now pretty. Learnt some more awk. Slight IRC stats mentioned on ###mediawiki (Reedy came out on top!). Have my own bug to fix now. Might have to resort to awk and grep skills (hope it won’t come down to that though).

Kishore came home. Fun time. Spent lots of time discussing BRiWiki and how it fits into the new architecture. He tried to build out 21H with his ‘Segments’ idea, but (as I had predicted :P) it was rather very complicated. Let’s see how this turns out.

Apr 13

Chrome Extension for adding links to other language wikis works! Took me a while to figure out the entire thing, but finally! Wheee! Have it ‘released’ on Chrome Extensions site. Srikanth paid the one time 5$ fee for me (Thanks:D). Wrote an email to wikimediaindia-l, should wait till tomorrow for response.

Learnt quite a bit about Chrome extensions. Not bad at all. Also started learning awk. Useful tool.

Apr 12

Working on Chrome Extension to add links to other language wikis when english wikipedia link turns up in google results. Reasonably working (with Instant turned off, that is). Need to figure out a few more things and I can get it to ‘run’ and release.

Discussion about Extension:ShortUrl on wikitech-l. Apparently IDs aren’t exactly unique ‘identifiers’ in MediaWiki. Need to find a way around.

Fixed a bug in the MediaWiki API documentation. Yay!

Apr 11

After long winded attempts to fix Extension:ShortUrl’s toolbox functionality ended with me banging my head repeatedly on dead ends, I finally fixed it. The issue was addHTML not doing what I thought it would (add HTML to current position), misunderstanding what die() does (kill output at current location, not output in general) and not asking clear enough questions on ###mediawiki.

Also hit a bug when it wasn’t documented when (version) a particular method was added to a class. While I was able to workaround, might work on a script that adds ‘since’ information to all functions.

Chat with PlaneMad about good things for briwiki. Kishore is doing wonderful work with the recursive RDF export. Should be fun, the days ahead!

Also, fixed audio issues on desktop by moving to PulseAudio.

Apr 10

Slept most of the day. Fixed mwclient issues and made 0.6.5 available from PyPI. Tried installing GNOME 3 again (via jhbuild, released moduleset). Failed miserably again.

Apr 9

Played Cricket with Kishore. I won (HAHAHAHA).

Spent the night there. Packaged mwclient 0.6.5 to fix login bug. Kishore wrote code to import current stage data into briwiki. Yay.

Apr 7-8

Frantic last minute grab to get GSoC proposal done. It still has typos and style issues I didn’t have time to fix :(

Everyone has their GSoC proposal in. Madhu’s went in after a bit of late drama about her application status being set to ‘withdrawn’ in mentor’s dashboard. Intervention by _ke fixed things up, and everyone lived happily ever after :)

Apr 6

Madhu’s patch was accepted :)

Wrote good amount of GSoC proposal. awjr says it’s in good shape. Sumanah suggested I fix more bugs, so on the lookout. Had a skype convo with awjr about the current, twisted manual workflow that I’m going to help automate.

Apr 5

Helped madhu write a patch. Pointed karthik in right direction for sound systems.

Started writing proposal. First long chat with awjr. Helped Kishore a bit with his GSoC proposal.

Apr 4

Helped Madhu with GSoC a bit more. Started working on the wikipedia offline bits. Finally got in touch with awjr.

Apr 3

Speech at GNOME.asia. Best I’ve given so far. Hall of around 100 poeple was full, and people were actually sitting on the damn stairs! I was damn in the zone, and it was quite well receieved. Even the jokes went over well! After the GStreamer talk, I gave a pitch about GSoC. Then there were lots of questions. Fun!

And then hung out with people from #h-i. Super fun :D Then spent a few hours at jace’s place, trying to coax mwclient to work.

Left bangalore and landed in chennai in a bus.

Apr 2

Nothing at all. Developed parts of my presentation for GNOME.asia. Missed first day ‘coz I overslept.

Apr 1

Went to bangalore by unreserved general compartment for GNOME.asia. Fixed up CV on the way – stealing template from lut4rp. Also talked on IRC to apergos from the train – prompting her to tell me to ‘set a Hitman on her’.

Wrote Extension:ShortUrl, my first mediawiki extension. Works, and was well received in the Indian Wikimedia community.

I’ve started keeping devlogs, recording productive activity every day in an attempt to publicly shame myself into doing productive things. This is the delayed march edition

Mar 20 – 31

More contract work for more money.

My dump patch to meidawiki got commited, then blasted during Code Review. This is what I get for trusting other people’s code blindly, especially after 5 years. Lesson learnt. Fixed all issues, and now waiting for a review before commit.

More help for Madhu’s GSoC, on and off. Same for Arun and Karthik.

Decide to give up on dumps (no concrete work found) and pick up wikipedia offline, after post to wikitech-l by the offline guy saying he is looking for people.

Channels #mediawiki and #wikimedia-tech are quite fun, actually. Not bad at all.

Started writing php code. Not that ugh, actually.

Spent 3 days at In50Hrs. Prototyped the CollegeReviews thing I was always dreaming about. Concepts were fleshed out really well. Need to spend more time on this thing.

Mar 15 – 20

Almost got fix to Mediawiki that made dumps 5% faster. Now just need to prove it on a larger scale before it gets accepted.

Did contracting work for some decent money. Feels pretty good.

Started helping madhu with her gsoc. She’s darn smart.

Mar 14

Did bits of resume.

Mar 1-13

Some amount of Mediawiki work – getting it to run, learning how to profile it, profiling the import and export process. Identified a hotspot in the export process (UtfNormal), need to try to get a fix in.

Moved main system from Ubuntu 32 bit to Debian 64 bit. Yay. Tried to jhbuild gnome-shell and failed miserably. Boo.

Started helping other folks with their GSoC. Yay.