June 9, 2014 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

A sunny Saturday at BeaglesLoft.

Siva sent me, Krace, Kartik and Sayan an email asking whether we would be available on the 7th of June to volunteer for the first offline Django meetup. I was only too happy to receive the invitation and replied saying “I believe I can make it”.

The next mail in my inbox is where I found TechBuilders. The email was from the BangPypers mailing list posted by someone called Niranjan. This is the link that was in the mail:

http://techbuildersbayesianreasoning.splashthat.com/

Even during my time at HasGeek last year, I used to keep wondering why isn’t there any learning related to Math happening among all these Computer geeks who were working on Python, JS, Ruby, etc. I even had a decent conversation regarding this with the one person whom I found to be interested in the Math aspect of computers. His name is Abhijith and we became friends at the Fifth Elephant conference last year when he signed up to volunteer for it.

Suffice to say, visiting that link, when I saw that these people were trying to bring Math and Computer Science together, I knew it was something that I could not miss at any cost. I sent Siva and the rest of them an email then and there itself saying I had stumbled upon this TechBuilders meeting and might not be able to make it for the Django workshop.

I love teaching and hence was extremely upset about missing the Django workshop. However, on the other hand, I felt like the TechBuilders people had read my mind. It was, as Paulo Coelho would say, a calling. I could not resist going. Also, I had to give up on my Saturday writing as well.

It was being hosted at Haggle’s office. The people working at Haggle were the ones behind BeaglesLoft (a playground for creators and innovators) and also behind TechBuilders, their initiative to teach the Bangalore tech community something that it is lacking. The office was just a 5 minute walk away from my home.

The mail which we received from Asya, the quick witted community manager at BeaglesLoft, on the day before had asked all of us to be there at the venue exactly at 10:30AM and not to follow the “Indian Standard Time”. Little did they realize the inevitable force they were reckoning with. The meeting started at 11:00AM.

The event was supposed to start off with Sandipan from JustDial giving a talk on how they were using Bayesian theorem at their company. Unfortunately, he had some emergency and could not make it. So Niranjan, who is the founder of Haggle, took the stage and started off by introducing us to what the whole deal was about.

The thing that I liked about Niranjan was that he was not pretentious. He really observed Math was not a part of the IT culture, along with the liberal arts being treated as a completely separate entity as well. He wanted to create an atmosphere where these things would co-exist and would value each other’s importance. There, he was doing it.

Not just that. I have heard many people twisting their words to indirectly mean “spread the word”. Niranjan directly told us to do it. His conviction to doing this impressed me. Apart from taking the initiative to build the community, I must say he is a really good teacher too. He taught me Math and that, is amazing.

If you were to meet me before my 4th year of college, I would have told you, without question, that I was going to become a Math teacher. So when he talked about Mass Probability function and the Bayesian theorem in a way that I could understand after more than 2 years of staying away from it, it felt really great.

You must read his series of blog posts on Bayesian Reasoning here: http://beaglesblog.tumblr.com/tagged/techbuilders

We were asked to read them before attending the meetup. Having been the college kid, I put it to the last moment as usual. An hour before the meetup! I finished off all the posts within 45 minutes and it was time to leave in order to reach the venue on time. That dreadful feeling of not having revised what you had learned that dawns upon you on the morning of the exam day was on me. I know, it is funny. But to know that it was not something to worry about, made me feel even more excited to attend the gathering.

Towards the end of his session, he proposed a few use cases where Bayesian reasoning could be applied so that we could break up into teams and work on modelling them.

One was about a Rikshaw driver. Suppose you were one and someone came and asked you to take him to Jayanagar, how would you apply Bayesian reasoning to know whether it would be profitable for you to take him there.

Second one was about the problem given on the blog itself, identifying a person whom you meet in the US as being from Bangalore or not.

The third one was the famous Monty Hall problem. Even though I say it is famous, it was the first time I was hearing of it. It is an interesting problem which makes you realize why Math ain’t your gut feeling. It is a bit crazy, but yeah, read it.

We decided to then split up into three teams of 5 each. The decision was followed by an interesting 5 minutes of trying to figure out an algorithm to split us up. Whether the count should start from 1 and go until 5 before the 15 us were through or whether it should start form 1 until 3 until all of us were through. The confusion was funny enough to have while we were learning Math!

I was in team 2 consisting of:

Sandeep, an IIITB graduate who was going to join Haggle in a few months. He was sharp. The moment we gathered around a table to “brain-buzz”, he came up with this idea of building a recommendation system which would analyse the social media streams of users and figure out what sort of restaurants he preferred to eat out of.

Ashray, who was working with Haggle already. A strong and silent person, I would say. He was as keen as the rest of us on learning together.

Ashutosh, who is Sandeep’s junior at IIITB. He is awesome. When I was struggling to get the basics really strong, he took my pen and paper from me and taught me the reasoning from step 1 patiently, with examples and proper explanation. I hope to see more of him over the coming days.

Last but not the least, Fasil. I would define him as exuberant, but not the BSing kind. He was very outspoken but knew exactly well what he was speaking about. He was working on his own startup.

By the time we had discussed and modelled our recommendation system, it was time for presentations.

Oh, and I forgot to mention the drinks and biscuits that were there all along! No, no, seriously. What kind of a chump would I be if I did not mention this after eating 6 of those delicious cream biscuits right under the nose of my team mates while they were busy building the recommendation system!

Asya, Reya and Tania made sure we had the best atmosphere for thinking and solving the problems at hand. These are the times when I really see the importance of good community managers. They make other people’s lives easier. I never saw myself like that when I was at HasGeek I guess. I just hope others did at least.

It was time for the presentations and team 1 was the first one to go in front. They had build a model around detecting the person who was sarcastic. After analysing manually a few 100s of a person’s tweets and identifying the sarcastic ones in them, each person was assigned a probability of being sarcastic based on how many times he was sarcastic among his past 100 tweets.

This was done for more than a few users. After having built the prior data, when a new tweet came in, you could use the Bayesian reasoning to find out what was the probability of that tweet being sarcastic given it was from a particular user. They had a few numbers as well for demoing this.

Second one was us. Well, I have already explained what we did. The interesting point that Niranjan made was to use more than just words for our probability calculation. Because if we were to just look at words like “Pizza”, “Burger”, etc, then we would miss out on differences between sentences like “I hate pizza” and “I love pizza”.

Once ours was concluded, team 3 came in. They had a funny use case. I have learnt to take things in a lighter note and I hope people don’t jump around reading the use case. It was about the probability of a girl going out with you given the fact that she smiled at you. As funny as this was, for a few of them to think of something like this, would mean that the social media that we have today would have already gone miles ahead in terms of taking advantage of us on similar terms. It was scary.

Niranjan came up to conclude the presentations. This is where he asked us to spread the word and help build the community. He left the rest of the afternoon as an open invitation to do anything sitting together or to move out.

They were taking memberships for the community and I “sold my soul”, as Asya put it. We hung out with each other for an hour or more, getting to know each other better.

I met Samarth, a smart lad who was a Hardware hacker by passion working at Infosys. His face was familiar and there was only one question that I could ask him about it. “Were you there at any HasGeek events?”. Yep, he was there for Droidcon 2013.

Then there was Vamsee, who was a kindred soul when it came to people calling him “Vamshee” adding that all-too-horrible “h” right in the middle! We shared our grief with each other over how inconsiderate people were towards our feelings.

Then there was Ashutosh, Jha (because I really can’t remember his other part of the name), Fasil, Prateek, who asked me, “Hey, aren’t you that guy who wrote that Eventifier blog post? That was amazing”. I was so happy! Jon from Minsh was there. It was good to meet him after such a long time. He was the first few geeks whom I interacted with as soon as I had joined HasGeek. Definitely a part of what made me grow.

We shook hands and were about to leave when I met this unassuming young fellow at the stairs.

“Hey, don’t I know you?”

“I am Rishab. Umm.. Do you know me?”

I unleashed my secret weapon once again.

“Were you at any HasGeek event before?”

“Oh… Were you at MetaRefresh 2013?”

“Yeah, I was a part of the organizing committee”

“Okay. Maybe you heard about that guy who gave a talk on CSSDeck?”

“Oooh! It was you! Now I remember… Cool man”

So that was him. He had generated a whole lot of buzz with his flash talk at that conference. He said he was working on his own startup now. I bid him goodbye and was on my way.

Now I have an excuse to learn Math. I hope these folks keep at it. It was amazing.

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May 4, 2014 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

My beginning and journey so far with Eventifier

The beginning
——————-

“Yawn”.

I was quite irritated being disturbed from my peaceful sleep by my phone ringing. With sleepy eyes, I looked at its screen. It said:

“Jaseem Abid calling…”

“Oh man, not now.”, I thought. Not because of any personal reasons, but just because I was craving for that deep sleep and my mind working was the last thing I wanted at that point. I put it to silent, ignored the call and peacefully went back to sleep.

When I woke up after an hour or so, I found a message that Jaseem had left.

“Hey, there are these guys looking for a Python dev. Wanted to talk to you about it”

(Detour)

This happened sometime in September 2013, while I had already submitted my resignation at HasGeek. I had talked to other folks and was looking around quite desperately to find another job. There were a handful of people whom I talked to before I made the decision to resign. If not for the support offered by people like Arpan & Vamsee, I would have probably gone into a state of depression. They were kind enough to let me learn from them by staying with them in case I wanted to polish up my programming skills. Sajjad was another person who gave me hope by introducing me to Gautam and considering my engagement with Akshara Foundation. That, however, had been on hold since they were trying to figure out a road map for the next year and said they would need at least a month before letting me know.

Even Kiran had introduced me to Sameer from Next Big What. He recommended me to them as an excellent writer. Discussions were going on with them where they wanted me to complete a few tasks before they could take it forward. Since I expressed my interest, as delicately as possible, to write code, they gave me a data set, asked me to Visualize it using JavaScript and write a report on it. JavaScript! Visualizing data sets! I was doomed. For all the Data Visualization hacknights and JSFoo conference I organized and was a part of, I had never written or read a single line of JS.

However, if not then, when I was going to learn programming? I intended to give it my best shot. I had not quit HasGeek then. I was a full time employee. Hence, I had to do this task in the midst of all the emails and organizational activities. I had one week time. At the end of piling up all the tutorials, copy-pasting code, trial and error fixes, I finally managed to do a really, extremely crude bar graph visualization of the data set. No one would be able to understand the joy that I felt at being able to do that. Also, since I had finished this by the evening of the day on which I was supposed to submit it, I had to finish writing the report in an hour, which I did. I think it was a sad piece of work and that they were not quite amused. Suffice to say, there were no further interactions.

You can find the code as well as the report here: https://github.com/harisibrahimkv/d3_viz

The situation was really quite dire. I had no industry skills in terms of programming apart from the few incomplete pet projects I tried to do during my time with HasGeek. Since my job was mostly related to organizing, emails, community management, etc, I never could find an uninterrupted stretch of time to dedicate to learn writing code. After all, I do realize that managing humans is far more rewarding and complicated than managing code.

You must be thinking how I found the courage to actually submit my resignation without having another job or the necessary skills to attain one. Well, I guess many people do it and it is not so much of a big deal. Let me tell you though, it was and still is a really big deal for me. Anyway, there was a person behind me finding courage to take the step forward.

(Following is one day before I submitted my resignation)

Sudar Muthu is a loving Husband, a caring Father and a passionate programmer. Even though I had heard his talks before at HasGeek events, we got to know each other better when I approached him for doing a hands-on public workshop on “Processing Data using Pig”. We used to keep in touch after that and we met each other again at PyCon India 2013, which happened at the very end of August. That was my first ever PyCon and I was glad I attended it. I was catching up with friends over breakfast. I could relax and take my time to do it since I was not a volunteer (although I ended up pushing boxes, selling T-shirts and packing participant kits).

In the midst of breakfast, Sudar walked past me. I called out to him.

“Hey Sudar!”

“Hey Haris, how is it going? It has been a while.”

“Not bad. My first PyCon. You have a talk today, don’t you? Looking forward to that. Feels glorious not being responsible for anything that is happening around me for a change”, I added with a chuckle.

We chit chatted for a while. At some point, the conversation shifted in the direction of me explaining that I was in a troublesome situation where I wanted to shift to a programming career and I could not leave my current job unless I found another job, which was quite impossible in the current state of affairs. He had just one question to ask.

“Do you need to have a job?”

That caught me off-guard.

“W-What?”, I asked, stuttering.

“Are you in a situation where you need to have a job? Where people are depending on you or you have big loan to repay or something?”

“Uh, no. Not really….”

“If you really believe that you are not doing the right thing, then this is the time to make the difference. Before financial aspects become a responsibility and burden. Take some time off and make *absolutely* sure that you make the most out of it. Otherwise it will be an even worse situation”

I could only look at him with wide open eyes. I would not say I was in a shock, but it was something quite close. I could feel my brain rewiring, dropping certain assumptions, bringing up new plans, constructing alternate routes, opening up new doors, and a little devil at the corner who would damn my soul if I were to fail myself in taking and executing the right choice. All happened in a split second.

We chatted for a while more regarding this. However, my innards were bursting with a sense of anxiety and excitement.

“This is it. I am going to do it”

On September 2nd, I submitted my resignation.

(Coming back to where we left off)

I called Jaseem then itself. He explained that there is this company called Eventifier being run by three friends.

“They are not hardcore techies, but are really nice guys. I am planning to work with them for a month and see if we can continue the engagement. I’ll whatsapp you Jazeel’s number. He is the CEO of the company.”

This is back when I had whatsapp and the Nexus4, courtsey of HasGeek. He went on for a while longer talking about the company. He ‘whatsapped’ me Jazeel’s number.

Quite frankly, I was not amused. Due to my extreme ego of thinking I was destined to be the greatest person in the world, I thought, “Well, yet another startup somewhere. The Akshara one looks more promising. And oh! These people are building a product having something to do with social networking!”

Whatever is the opposite of fanboy-ism, I used to be that when it came to social networking sites. I never had any proper justification for my thoughts I guess.

I tucked the idea away in a corner of my mind and moved forward. October came and whatever I explained in terms of Akshara and Next Big What happened then. I was at home for a week during October for Eid. One of the days, while I was watching some movie on my laptop at around 8’o’clock in the morning, my phone rang. It was an unknown number. I attended the call.

“Hi, is this Haris?”

“Yeah, this is Haris”

“Oh hey, I am Jazeel. Jaseem must have spoken to you about me. I am calling from Eventifier”

“Ah yes! I remember. I am so sorry. The days have been too busy that I forgot to call you”

“Its alright. He said you were looking to move out and find another job. How are you placed now?”

“Well, I am talking with a few people, but nothing confirmed yet”

“Yeah, the thing is, we are also looking to hire a Python developer. We just moved to Bangalore a couple of month’s back and are planning on expanding”

Jazeel went on to explaining what Eventifier does.

“Also, we got funded by Accel. So, would you like to meet and talk sometime soon?”

“Ehm well, you should know about my Python development experience as well. I don’t have any experience writing production code. I have used it for my projects at college as well as to do some pet projects which you can find on my Github profile. I guess that is about it”

“Oh cool. Let’s talk about it. Are you in Bangalore now?”

“Uh no, I am at home in Kerala. I’ll be back on Wednesday. Maybe we can meet Thursday early morning? Say, around 9?”

“Sounds good. I’ll just confirm with the rest of my team and let you know over email”

“Cool”

“Okay, bye. Oh and how old are you?”

“Uh, 24. Why?”

“Nothing. Just wanted to know. I’ll send you an email”

“Alright. Bye”

“Bye”

On Thursday morning, standing in front of the Accel partners office, I just cut my call telling Jazeel I had arrived. After a few minutes, someone tapped on my shoulders. I turned around and saw this handsome looking young man with a slightly golden colored beard and hair, standing behind me with a smile.

“Haris?”

“Yeah”

“Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Jazeel. Let’s go in.”

We shook hands and he led me in. I had to sign in my name in the visitor’s register, after which we went to one of the meeting rooms. He asked me to wait while he fetched someone else whose name I did not quite catch. At the moment, tension started creeping up my spine. I thought to myself,

“What the hell am I doing here? I haven’t even prepared for an interview! Heck, I should have at least read something up about their company. Oh my God…”

My thoughts were cut short by Jazeel entering the room along with the “someone else”.

J: “Hey Haris, meet Saud. He is the Chief Designer of Eventifier”

I was a bit amused. The CEO was as old as me and now he brings in another 25 year old saying he is the chief designer! “Gosh, this must be like an army of Ershads!”, I thought. Ershad is a friend who dropped out of college during his second year. A genius hardcore programmer and a Free Software enthusiast. He used to be the winner of all tech competitions around Kerala.

S: “Hi. How are you doing?”

Me: “I am fine, thank you. How about you?”

S: “Good, good.”

J: “Yeah so… Nazim will be here in a bit. He is the CTO”

Augh! What am I going to tell him, what am I going to tell him! Technology scared me.

Me: “Ah okay. Well, maybe to begin with you could elaborate a bit on what we discussed that day? I mean, about how you guys founded the company and what it is about?”

Jazeel and Saud together explained their adventure. That story is already told and hence I won’t go over it. Towards the end of it, the door opened again. A simple looking cool person with long hair and an almost-French beard entered.

J: “Meet Nazim”.

Me: “Oh hey, I’m Haris”

N: “Yeah hi, I’m Nazim”.

He had a really soft voice.

Me: “Well, as I was telling Jazeel, you guys should know I don’t have any experience writing production code. Only a few pet projects and a handful of tutorials is what I’ve got. Apart from attending and organizing the best workshops on Python and Git, I’ve never actually quite gotten down to using them.”

There was laughter around the room.

Me: “What do you guys use and what sort of a workflow do you have?”

I could not believe how humble the three of them were. Very down to Earth, soft spoken and very gentle. I have met a lot of people during my HasGeek days and I must say almost every one of them had one point or the other where they would try to sell themselves showcasing their talent or skill and asserting they are good at it. Nothing of the sort came from these three. As far as I am concerned, after having accomplished so much and establishing a company, if you can be so humble, that is quite an asset.

N: “Yeah so… We use Django and Python. And we have made a git repository on Github where we push the code. We pull from there onto the server and deploy it”

Me: “Uh okay. Um, is that it?”

N: “Yeah, that is pretty much it”

Me: “Cool”

J: “We’ll get Ajay, our adviser, to meet you now”

With that, the three of them went out. I sat there for a while. Ajay came in and asked me about my previous job and a few metrics related to it. It was a short conversation. After that he went out. Jazeel and Saud came in.

J: “Yeah, we are happy to have you onboard. Ajay also felt you would be a good fit”

Wow. That was fast. Was it that they did not hear what I said about not having any experience or whether they chose to simply ignore it? Whatever it was, I thought getting to be in the company of these people would be an unmatched asset. I had almost made up my mind.

J: “So what do you feel?”

Me: “From what you have told me, I’m interested in going forward as well. But you should know that I won’t be able to contribute to your code from day one onwards. Maybe you can send me a small task that I could work on in order to get acquainted with the technology?”

J: “Sounds like a good idea. I’ll tell Nazim to get in touch with you regarding that”

We discussed the joining date, which would be on November 11th, a Monday, since I was leaving HasGeek on October 31st and would be at home for a few days after that. We decided on a salary as well, after which we parted.

I was leaving for Goa that day along with Kiran and Zainab to attend NitroDroid. I remember calling my Mom and Dad while I stood waiting to embark on the KSRTC bus to Goa and telling them I had made up my mind to join Eventifier.

On Octoer 31st evening, I was sitting with mixed feelings. I tweeted out this the day before: https://twitter.com/harisibrahimkv/status/395799344231616512. I believe those emotions are better kept inside of me and hence I shall refrain from writing them. Around 5, I packed my bags and got out. My eyes watered slightly.

The Journey so far
————————-

I have never pulled an all-nighter in my life. Until the day came where I had to finish Nazim’s task. I finished them on the 9th of November at 6:00AM, having sat through the entire night. No coffee, no energy drinks. Just working.

On Monday morning, at around 9:00AM, I tweeted this and got out. Full of excitement, I reached there only to find Jaseem there. He waved to me from the great glass building and asked me to come in. I obliged and went in, thus starting my first day with Eventifier!

PS: Meanwhile in the Founders’ home.

“Nazim, Nazim! Wake up! Haris has tweeted! I think he is already there.”, Jazeel was frantically trying to wake Nazim and Saud up, having himself only woken up at about 9:45AM.

“Wha, what?”, Nazim stuttered, waking up lazily and rubbing his eyes. “Oh! We have to go now.”

They had hired their first employee.

***

Bryan Adam’s “Summer of 69” is one of my favorite songs of all time. There is one line in that song which says, “Those were the best days of my life”. That is exactly what I have to say regarding the past 6 months. On different levels, it has worked out really great.

First of all, establishing a routine. I was adamant about establishing a work life balance. Although a few people advised me against doing that during the early days of joining a company, I did not pay heed to it. I should say it has worked out quite well. From day 1, I would wake up at 6, finish off my chores and prayers, bath and leave to office around 7:30. Breakfast would be from the Madhurai Idly Shop near my office. I reach my desk by 8:15 – 8:30. I check my mails and Twitter for half an hour and then jump into work. Usually it is even earlier. Since the office is a shared space, two other companies use the space as well. However, none of the employees come in before 11 or so. Hence, I get a lot of peaceful time to work. I would leave back for home latest by 4:30PM every day. This way, I avoid the rush hour traffic both in the morning and in the evening. Weekends – absolutely no work. Even if I laze out completely, I used to refrain from work. This was not the best of things to do, and I am rectifying it slowly. I was more than glad that the company allowed me to maintain this.

I took up cycling. A gazillion thanks to Sam Kocsis for letting me have his bike, a Bergamont Vitox 6.2, while he was going back to the US. It has been a tremendous experience the last 6 months cycling wherever I go. The concept of having to wait for transport has become so alien! The best part is, the grey areas of traffic where a cyclist can easily find his way through traffic. However, I must say most of the motor vehicle drivers are inconsiderate towards cyclists. They blow their horn and give looks that says, “Why the hell are you even on the road butt head?”. Anyway, I am enjoying the ride.

Cooking was another interesting practice I started. It is amazing how the human mind and body works once you decide on doing something. It adapts pretty well and delivers. Although not a master chef, I can make decent food for myself hence eating home cooked food and bringing the cost down as well.

All this would not have had its fun if my work did not go well along with it. I was amazed at how pleasantly all three welcomed me into their team like a family. At times when I get excited about something that I am working on, I stay back late and feel lazy to cycle back home. During those days, all of us go back together to their home, which is close by to the office and I spend the night there. We kick up a ruckus now and then with the football they have in their home. However, lately, Nazim skilfully bent the ball to go and hit the mirror hanging on the wall just above the basin. Suffice to say, they are ‘mirrorless’ now.

I started learning Django. The craft of software production, at least to get things done, was not so hard as I had thought it to be. I started delivering within two weeks. From then on, things moved forward with quite a pace. Exploring different ways of doing things, looking into cleaning up code, a couple of rewrites, etc.

The most interesting part is working with Nazim. Being the CTO, he is the one who wrote the entire code base single handed. Jazeel was on Marketing and Sales while Saud was on Design and Administration. Hence, for a person with 3 years of hands-on experience with Django, he has always let me do my stuff. Elaborating on that, whenever I am building something, I would discuss now and then about it with him. The funny thing is, he would know that the implementation would have a bug if done that way. However, he would never say that up front. He would let me do it. I would happily do it, test it on local or staging and it would fail. I try to isolate the bug and ask advice on what might have gone wrong. He would sit back on his chair, legs crossed and say,

“I am not sure, maybe something went wrong with <that particular part of the code>?”

Guess what? That would be the exact part of the code which would be causing the bug. As such, my respect for him has continuously grown.

I believe I am off to a good start on my plans to get into teaching. The learning experience has been amazing although I myself think I have not worked hard enough. Well, it has only been 6 months and I believe there is a lot to come.

Saud is the one who comes earliest to office among the three. Around 10:30 to 11:00AM. A pleasant soul to talk with. He always inquires about how life is, about family and in general whip up a sweet conversation. Someone to whom you could open up to completely and he will sit and listen patiently until it is over. Now that Praseetha has joined us, he has the job of being a mentor as well.

Jazeel, being the face of the company, is the cool dude around. Lately he has switched over the US timings since all his calls with clients are during the night. He usually comes to office around 3PM or so and starts his day then. He has his own strong opinions on matters which he is not even in the slightest sense afraid to shout out. Conversations with him leads to insightful discussions. I guess getting through to the customers is the greatest skill that a sales ops should possess.

Oh, and at times, we go around working from different places as well, like the Ants Cafe and Mr. Beans It has been amazing so far and I pray that it continues to be so. Our team goes strong with 6 including me, Jazeel, Nazim, Saud, Nawaz, who is a sales ops and Praseetha, whom I have written about aplenty before.

—————————————-

Comments from Twitter:

My beginning and journey so far with @eventifier. http://t.co/BFpmcOrpG0

— Haris Ibrahim K. V. (@harisibrahimkv) May 4, 2014

https://twitter.com/codepodu/status/462882923377471488

@harisibrahimkv ha ha 😀 Great to see you having a nice time at Eventifier. Let this be one the best decisions you ever took! @codepodu

— Ershad Kunnakkadan (@ershus) May 4, 2014

@harisibrahimkv @Eventifier Wonderful story boss. Have a great time ahead! Wishing you all the best 🙂

— Shrayas (@shrayasr) May 4, 2014

@harisibrahimkv @Eventifier glad to see that you are happy. +1 for the routine and daily rhythm.

— Aravind Krishnaswamy (@twitortat) May 4, 2014

@harisibrahimkv Good read! I admire your daily routine @Eventifier

— Adhil Azeez NV (@AdhilNV) May 4, 2014

@harisibrahimkv I am really glad things have worked good for you and I had a very small part to play in it. Best wishes 🙂

— Sudar Muthu (@SudarMuthu) May 5, 2014

https://twitter.com/V1mal/status/463218501520355328

.@harisibrahimkv completes 6 months at @Eventifier, his journey so far http://t.co/kGlnpfYzWs what a joy reading this post #humbled #startup

— Jazeel Ferry (@acemi10) May 5, 2014

@harisibrahimkv @Eventifier Loved the way you wrote it. courage to quit while uncertainty prevailed. admitting failed job search. All of it.

— Sumit Asok (@sumitasok) May 6, 2014

Today's biggest chunk of inspiration! 🙂 "@harisibrahimkv: My beginning and journey so far with @eventifier. http://t.co/JGRj8d99qi"

— Aman Aalam 🥑 🇨🇦 (@AmanAlam) May 6, 2014

https://twitter.com/jaseemabid/status/463820977818714112

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May 3, 2014 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

A short review on “Aadu Jeevidham” – A Malayalam Novel

How I came to read the book
————————————–

I closed the gate after getting out of my Mom’s home’s compound. The turn-wheel turned and the latch fell into place with a clack. It was almost 9PM and I was sure Mom would have been waiting for me to come home to dinner. I stepped into the street lane of the main road connecting the village center and surrounding places. It was dark. Fortunately, still today, night is related to darkness in my village. However, since I was quite close to an intersection which connected the lane that lead to my house, to the main road, there was one street lamp and a few shops that were still lit. Junctions sleep late. Around 11PM, it was guaranteed total and utter darkness except for the light coming from the mobile phone screens of late night drunkards.

The shops alongside the road, adjacent to the house’s compound belonged to my Grandfather. Once he passed away, the ownership was transferred to my Grandmother, who, immediately transferred them to her two male children (my uncles). These shops consisted of tailors, phone booths, groceries, textiles, photography studios and foreign goods, most of them having been there for almost 15 years now. I took a few steps and crossed the first mobile phone accessories shop, when I reached in front of the Matrix. The tailor shop was named so far before the movie came out. They had shifted shops thrice within a 500m vicinity. The owner Ismail, known to everyone as Bava, was quite a popular character in our village. Apart from his lean, really lean figure, what made him a fan favorite was his quick witted conversations. A laugh was guaranteed whenever you spoke with him.

Along with him inside the shop, I could also see Shihab. I will refer to him from now on as Shihabka, where “ka” means brother in my mother tongue. Almost all the times, that is how you address your elders. He is the poster child of social activeness. Along with a real pleasant humor sense, he has an incredible charisma and a dedicated will to help anyone in need. I have never been able to figure out what his motivation is for being so helpful. Suffice to say he was the one who helped me find my accommodation when I moved to Bangalore.

The front of the shop had a glass wall. While locking down, they had a shutter in front of it which they would pull down and lock it to the latch on the ground. I waved at them. I could not resist going in. Who wouldn’t like a hearty laugh in between this busy life? We exchanged greetings and chatted for a while. Bava was busy since he had a lot of orders come in the previous days and the customers kept on calling asking whether their dress was ready. Shihabka and I were discussing about when we were both returning to Bangalore, as both of us worked there, in the middle of which he suddenly asked,

“Have you read Aadu Jeevidham?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I have not read any Malayalam stories”

“Then you should read it. Come with me. I’ll get you the book from my home”

He seemed pretty decisive about it and I thought it would be a nice experience too. I hopped onto his motorbike and headed for his home, which was on the fields, at the bottom of a small hill. It was almost 9:30PM. His Mom made Sulaimani (black tea) for both of us. Over tea, he explained about how elegant and creative the writing was. About how it would draw you into the author’s world and make you feel like you are living it. It was a short conversation and we left his place by 9:40. He dropped me off at my home and we parted exchanging Salams.

I must say I am glad that this happened in my life.

About the book
——————–

Last month, I finished reading a Malayalam Novel for the first time in my life. At some point in my childhood, due to the inspiration from my Brother and Sister, I started reading comic books, short stories, kids’ novels as well as classics. However, each and every one of them were in English. The only times that I had read anything in Malayalam were the stories and poems from my school text books. Since all of them were read with a sense of tension about the teacher asking questions on it the next day, I don’t remember any joy that I had derived while I was at it.

“Aadu Jeevidham”, translated directly to “Goat Life” in English, is the story about a typical Keralite Muslim man and his journey to the Gulf in search of livelihood. I must say, the most wonderful thing about the book is the language itself. I do not deserve to talk about it from a literature perspective as neither have I read other Malayalam novels nor have I learned the language too deep. I entirely mean that the language is wonderful from the perspective of the language being in ones own mother tongue. There are certain quirks and colloquial constructs that you have in your mother tongue which expresses the meaning of a word or a context much better than any other means of communication. Hence, although I have read quite a few English novels and stories in my life, this one novel got through to me the most.

To further elaborate on that, I was able to understand the emotions and feelings of the characters much better. I was able to picture the scenes much better and most importantly, it was like a conversation between a human and I. As if someone was telling me the story rather than me reading it from the book. Of course, this could be the case with every other book written in ones mother tongue since there is nothing that I have described here which is peculiar to this novel. I will just have to read more and see whether in terms of the language constructs he had used, this novel stands out from the rest of the others.

The novel talks about the dreams that a person would have and how reality dawns upon him to crush not only the dreams, but his entire life as well. Najeeb, the main character in the novel, is a jobless husband, with his wife expecting their first kid in 6 or so months. One of his friends tells him about an opportunity in the gulf, upon which, after discussing with his wife, he decides to take it up no matter what happens. After somehow begging and borrowing enough money for the commission and airplane tickets, he spends one last night with his wife before he leaves for Mumbai to catch the plane.

The conversation during that night is bitter sweet. They talk about how he would go there and earn a lot. How he would come back in a year and bring gifts for his newborn and his wife. Purchasing a Fridge and a TV, laying foundation for their new home and all other ‘luxuries’ that they could think of.

He leaves the next day for Mumbai and stays a day or two with his friends there. However, before he left for Mumbai, his neighbor’s son had gotten a Visa to the gulf as well. Hence, both of them were traveling together. The other person was a brash young kid, full of life and full of expectations.

The actual story begins when they reach the gulf airport and don’t find anyone waiting to pick them up. After waiting for a long time, they see a torn apart mini lorry revving up the road that leads to the airport. It stops midway and an Arab jumps out from it, wearing a white Kandhuura covering him from top to bottom and with a turban on his head. He walks here and there for a while looking frustrated and finally spots our two young gentlemen standing over there. He comes over, takes their passport, looks at it and then looks at their faces. After what looks like a face analysis, he gestures them to get in the truck. Happy that someone finally paid them some attention they jump in. The Arab takes them on a long ride. A very long ride, into the heart of the desert, where they reach during midnight. Najeeb gets down at some unknown place and sharpens his hearing. He hears the slight braying of a goat.

I do not want to give away what happens then and how the story develops. The author’s depiction of the desert is off the charts and extremely gripping. Maybe someday I’ll gather enough literary skills to do a rewrite of this wonderful piece of work into English.

A million thanks to Shihabka for making me read the book.

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January 15, 2014 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

Jitendra Vyas and The Bangalore Front End Developers

The following blog post was written a while ago. Due to one reason or the other, it never got published. Well, the wait has ended!

It is just like “Wolverine and the X-Men”, but a way more creative bunch.

******
Jitendra Vyas is one among those who were enthusiastic about art and design even before the Internet was widespread in India. Passionate about experimenting and learning new ways of web design, he was always on the lookout for further knowledge and experience. As such, it was important to him to find people who knew more than him; to share what he knew, and to learn what he knew not. It was this yearning of his that led him to bring together the Bangalore Front End Developers community.

According to him, in this world where tools and technologies are changing so fast, the ability to understand and start using a tool is equally important as having a thorough understanding of the basic concepts related to web development. “It is one thing to say you know HTML and CSS really well, but it is completely another when you use notepad to type in your code”, says Jitendra. “You have to pick up tools that will make your life easier, tools that increase your productivity. Without them, you will be left behind in no time because these days, speed is as important as quality”.

His career as a web designer primarily started when he joined a software firm in his home town Bikaner, Rajasthan. There he started experimenting with HTML and CSS as a way of bringing his design skills onto the web. He found Dreamweaver to be extremely helpful in this regard. With fiery enthusiasm, he explored and experimented on his own, thereby learning a lot. Even though his company fared well, his thirst for exploring new horizons couldn’t be quenched remaining there. After 3 long years of work, he quit.

His thoughts on design as a profession were quite insightful. According to him, finding a good designer is not that hard if you stop comparing them with each other. The trick is to search for them at the right place and be open to hire them from any part of world. However, it is a bit difficult to always give them the correct combination of interesting work as well as good pay.

He thinks that as far as a company is concerned, just hiring a good designer is not enough. You have to listen to them, give value to their thoughts, give them the freedom to experiment, give them time to read UX blogs, invite them to attend product meetings, send them to design conferences if you can afford to, buy them good books, etc. Designers should not be considered just as a pixel decorator. The more he understands the expectations from a project or product and about who the target audience are, the better he can design. Also, a good design is not a guarantee of good user experience. There are many cases where even fantastic graphic designers tend to lack in UX skills. Due to that reason, everyone should be involved in design decisions. Good User experience is a team effort and everyone is a part of that – Designer, front-end developer, copywriter, back-end developer, product manager, etc.

From his experience in the industry, some (not all!) good designers don’t prefer to work at big companies because they think they would not be able to make good designs with their own vision, as well as because they might have to work with people who have less understanding of design than them. He quoted the following:

“The enemy of good design is rarely bad design; more often, it is politics, and poor understanding of the problem at hand”

Moreover, as a freelancer, you are free to choose your own clients and interesting projects and can earn even more money than a regular job, if you are really good at what you do. However, if you are able to find the right enterprise, this shouldn’t be that much of a problem. There are actually many good designers who work at big organizations as well, and these people make designs too.

FED

Being at Bangalore, he looked forward to meeting people with similar interests and learning new technologies related to front end development together. He used the most popular and easiest method of reaching out to everyone – Facebook.

He put down his initial thought on the UX India group. He received an amazing response as many people out there were excited to find a kindred soul. The replies and comments from them was the motivation that Jitendra needed to take the initiative to form the Bangalore Front End Developers group, comprising of a group of elite developers from Bangalore. The group came to be on 26th August, 2012. Read his first post in the group.

Things kicked off when Kavita Arora of the Bangalore Designers group invited Jitendra for giving a demo on SASS for one of their meetups, which was held at CIS. This was done as a joint workshop along with FED.

The group started growing when Jitendra started adding developers from his network to the group. The growth continued when his friends added their friends and so on.

Still being in the early stages of growth, they have not fixed any strict schedules for meetings as of now. Yet, the group is very much active, brimming with discussions regarding the latest and coolest front end technologies.

Apart from just geeks talking to each other about heavy duty front-end issues, they help each other out whenever one of them gets stuck at some point. They have online meetups every now and then, by which they are slowly moving forward on the beautiful journey that lies ahead.

The group is thriving with 800+ members today and instead of simply increasing the head count, they strive to keep the group alive and productive with the ones who are already there. In Jitendra’s own words, “It is easy to start a group, but to prevent it becoming useless, is hard”.

Jitendra specially thanks Praveen Kumar, Mikul Gohil, Maulik Suchak and Pulak Kanti Battacharya for helping him to keep the group going strong.

Maulik Suchak says

First, FED is not a term for me. Its a platform where Geeks becomes ‘SuperGeeks’. As we already know, there are lots of things that keep happening day by day in the Front-End world. This is the group where you can share ideas, meet front-end geeks and share tricks!

Talking about the future of the group, I must say it looks very bright. If we do something with good cause, people will surely admire it. Moreover, all of us are putting in our best to keep it alive.

Personally, I like the group because the people there are very enthusiastic and active. We even have plans to take this discussion out from Facebook to our own website if we can achieve it. We are thinking of organizing outings as well.

Mikul says

FED is great! I have never seen such an active group. The good thing is that people are friendly. We joke, we fight and we help each other out. It is just like family to me.

FED has many talented people in the group. I would love to work with them if I ever get a chance. It has helped me in many ways as a developer as well. I had an illusion of knowing a lot about front end development, but after joining this group, I realized that there are still lots of things out there that I need to learn and explore, things that I did not know of in the past.

Bangalore is the place where people come to develop and educate themselves, to make one’s self the best there is. This group has many such motivated people and to have people like that around, makes a lot of difference in your work as well. From getting help to fix issues when you are stuck at some point, to getting to know the latest trends in the market.

If you want to learn something new, then this group has a lot to offer you.

Praveen says

Jitendra started this group after we were discussing about SaaS in User Experience India fb group. We decided to organise a meetup where we got to meet many other front end developers and got a chance to discuss about the workflow each one uses. We also pledged to never hoard the knowledge we learn/acquire and always share it in the group. Then we had a Google Hangout on various CSS frameworks. Non-bangalore folks joined in as well.

I was under the impression that all good designers and front end developers had moved to the valley and nobody stayed back in India. However, the group proved me wrong. I think it encouraged a few of them to come to Bangalore (to attend events like Meta Refresh and then meet other members)

So far, I’ve learned a lot from the discussions we’ve had in the group and I see regular meetups/learning sessions happening in the near future. I hope this encourages developers from other parts of India to start their local user groups as well.

It would seems that Christian Heilmann is an active member of the group. Check out what he had to say once: https://twitter.com/codepo8/status/405747481201229826

In a interesting turn of events, Praveen accidentally made the group a secret one, which unfortunately, was an action that Facebook doesn’t let you revert. So if you want to join in, you should be friends with someone who is already in the group and they have to send you an invite. You can see the current members here: http://labs.apnerve.com/bangalore-frontend/

Well, that’s it for now folks! Here is to the future!

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December 22, 2013 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

Being a part of the Mozilla community.

It would be appropriate to start by saying that this is my baby step, the first step in trying to contribute back to the Mozilla community for all the effort that they have put in in order to connect people around the world and make amazing products. To be quite frank, I used to have an impression (as is my impression about all things amazing) that all this talk about “community” and “contribution” were only meant for the elite and masters of technology out there, two of whom I know being Sajjad and Nigel, two hardcore techies.

Now I know am wrong.

This realization came about due to two reasons, which I will come to later.

I started using Firefox almost 7 years back, when I first got my computer, about which I have written here. Chrome was not there then. As mentioned in that post, I was quite new to computers and my understanding of browsers was that they were what people referred to as the “Internet”. So I went on using “Internet”, unaware of the fact that I was using Firefox for about a year. Thinking about it now, I am not quite sure when I started understanding about browsers for what they were, but since then, till the December of 2012, I continued using the same.

I was employed by this time and the pressure of having to learn and understand technology was on me. In my journey of understanding more about computers, I used to do the online courses at Udacity and Coursera now and then. However, one day during the course, the video classes started to crash with a message, “An error occurred”. A reload used to solve that, but this kept on happening until one day, I just could not watch any of the videos.

I got irritated. Showed it to my colleague who tried opening up the same video link in his Chrome browser. It worked. I switched.

For the past 10 months I’ve been using Chromium, until recently, after I shifted my career to becoming an Engineer, when I found out my RAM was being eaten up by Chromium. I tweeted out saying this and without further delay switched to using Firefox. I would have been happy using it and simply going forward, if not for Firefox’s response. It was not too much of a big deal, but I was touched. At that instant, I felt I was a part of something bigger.

This was one of the reasons why I had the realization that I mentioned earlier. I came back home and started looking for opportunities so as to how I could get involved even further. I landed up on their contributions page. I filled up my email id, chose my area of interest as “Documentation and writing” since I was more confident in my writing skills than my coding skills at the moment, and submitted the form.

This is when the second reason for the realization hit me. My friend Haseeb. He was passionate about the Urdu language as well as about community development. Both these combined led him to take part actively in translating Mozilla to Urdu. His contributions were not at all gone unnoticed when he received an invitation to be a part of the Mozilla Summit in the U.S. a couple of months back. So have an open mind to contribute, with whatever you know and whatever you are passionate about. Hence, here I am, having reached the point where I had submitted my volunteer form.

All this was done in that adrenaline rush, which I knew had happened to me more than once before. However, nothing of the sort would continue as all would end up in a couple of automated emails that I would receive asking me to act. The same happened here as well. Though things would have continued like that, even before I had the adrenaline rush die down, I received one more email. This time from a certain human being who goes by the name of Janet Swisher.

Even though she told me that technical documentation was where they were best setup to bring in new writing contributions, she did not discourage me on what I had pointed out saying I was better off as a story teller or a biographer than a technical writer when it came to writing. With the promise of passing on my remarks to their creative team and reading my blog posts to provide her feedback, she ended the mail.

That part where it conveyed it was not just about them and what they wanted, but also it being a part of what I was and what I could do, was quite heart warming. I replied and we exchanged a couple of emails where she pointed me to a couple of links as well as read a few blog posts that I had already written, complementing me on them. It was her suggestion to take the first step by writing a personal blog on what Mozilla means to me.

At this point, more than just thinking in terms of Firefox, I was inclined to think of a bunch of nice people trying to strengthen human relationships across the globe around technology. Hence, I was inspired to write about how touched I was with their effort to actually take the time to reach out to a complete stranger and offering to help him out. And here I have written about it. May this be the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.

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December 5, 2013 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

A year at Bangalore, a year with HasGeek.

“This is official huh?”, I asked.

“Yep. Hop in”, replied my brother as I got into his car.

This conversation happened a year ago. A year ago when a certain ambitious lad landed in the Silicon Valley of India. A lad who would skulk away from a conversation happening in English, a lad who had only seen two places outside of his state in his life. A lad who had not been on a flight since he started remembering things, a lad who knew only his brother’s home and the home bound bus boarding stop in Bangalore. A lad who was afraid of smartphones, who was allergic to social networking, who did not have a bank account and did not even know how to use an ATM.

Well, things definitely have changed. Yep, they really have.

Although October 8th, 2012 was my “Official” joining date at HasGeek, since my brother was coordinating volunteers for Droidcon India 2012, both of us decided to drop by CIS office in the afternoon on 7th itself to have a talk. Someone passed by us when we reached there on the bike and I was asked to go and meet him. Apparently, this was the jovial and cool Mr. Kracekumar whom I know so well today.

My first time at CIS. I had heard a lot about the place and I had pictured it to be a glass building with a huge lawn, fancy tables and chairs, with a lot of atmosphere. Suffice to say I was surprised when my brother walked me into a home.

We went up the stairs. And there they were! Among many others, two of my bosses. My mind’s fuse was blown.

“Oh my God, what are so many people doing here? And do they all speak in English? I can’t talk to all of them! I should have just come here tomorrow and met with Kiran and Zainab alone. Then at least I would be shown my desk to sit and work at so that I would not have to talk to too many people just yet. Hey, isn’t that Anu whom I met for last year’s Droidcon? And where is Sajjad? God, what should I do now? Since I don’t know the rest of them, maybe I should not care. I will just say Hi Kiran sir and Zainab ma’am. But is that what I should be calling them? Or should I just use their names? Gosh, Zainab looks different than the last time I met her and is this the office that I was dreaming about for so long? This is just a house, isn’t it? Maybe I have gotten something wrong here”

And thus went the thoughts. I don’t know if anyone there including Ashwan, Anu, Krace, Zainab, Kiran or my brother noticed how uncomfortable I was. I let the introductions be made and just shook hands saying “Hi”. I was asked to sit down while they discussed about the volunteer training and coordination.

My heart was beating fast. “Is this an interview? They told me not to bring my resume, so what are they going to ask me? And I have to speak in English!? Maybe my brother will talk to them and I can just get by with a couple of yes’s and no’s”

“Haris, would you like to come and sit over here?”. My heart burst. Well, not literally. It was none other than Mr. Kiran Jonnalagadda himself. There was a big chair on the other side of the table, which, I had made up my mind about, was for one of the bosses to sit on. It was this chair that was given to me. I felt totally out of place, uncomfortable and what not.

By this time Praseetha also reached the office. She was much more composed and I just could not understand what was wrong with me.

“So Haris”, said Zainab, pulling a chair and sitting next to me. “What are your expectations in working here?”

“Gulp”, I pulled myself together.

“I, ummm, I don’t exactly know how things are done here. But I can help you with whatever I can. Logistics, management, your blog and you can mentor me to learn how to write code”.

I had no clue what “logistics” meant back then. The only thing I could say with confidence was that I could help them with their blog. I was wondering what kind of stories they would have me write.

“Do you know Inkscape?”, interrupted Kiran.

“Not really, no”, said I.

I remember him having a “Then you can’t help me much right now” look on his face. However, Zainab picked up the conversation.

“Well, here is how things are. Kiran needs a lot of documentation to be done. With the events and the code. However, we will need to sit and discuss about it. So we will get to that. But for now, since JSFoo and Droidcon are close by, there are a lot of tasks that needs to be done. I’ll brief you about it over email, alright?”

“Alright”, said I.

Once we were done there and about to leave, I felt incomplete about one thing. “Gosh, I did not ask about the office timings!”

“Zainab”, I called out. I guess I had made up my mind about ma’am and sir by then. She turned around. “Umm, so by what time should I reach office?”

She let out a hearty laugh.

“There is nothing like office timings. Frankly, I don’t think any of us are going to be here tomorrow. And I don’t mind wherever you work from as long as you get things done.”

I was baffled. Thoughts rushed in. “No office timing? What am I supposed to do? Where is my seat? No cubicle? So how do I talk with all of you?”

She was gone by then. My brother and I went back to his home.

Thus it started.

It has been a nice ride all along.

I should say that Bangalore is an awesome place in terms of finding and meeting people. It is a networking person’s dream come true. The fact that educated people from various parts of the country have accumulated in a certain place gives a platform for people with niche interests to easily find and meetup with each other. In my case, it was writing.

I went to my first ever writing workshop which was hosted by Gaurav and Nisha, both former Tehelka writers. It was brought to my attention by Ashwan, someone whom I have been terribly missing. I’ve already written about my team here, and he is one of them. It is nice to think of those days where he would sit with google maps on the wide screen monitor and would walk me through the entire world, sharing stories and histories related to many a place.

I have had my fair share of experience planning and organizing events while being at HasGeek. One of the things that I have realized is that the amount of ground work and grunt work that goes into producing the kind of events that HasGeek does, no matter how excellent and smooth it looks to participants attending, is tremendous. To keep up the spirit for that kind of work during each and every event is just amazing. I guess my colleagues are made of sterner stuff. All of them.

Kiran had always been this person with a strong and silent personality. Quite frankly, someone whom I was afraid of to talk to and be heard from. During the very rare occasions when he would say “Good job”, the feeling of happiness was so strong that I would text my brother at the very instant saying, “Kiran said I did a good job!”.

I still remember the first time my throat going dry when Kiran talked to me about how it was completely wrong dealing with people in a fire and forget manner. I am not sure if I was able to understand and implement that lesson during my time at HasGeek, but I guess I have done a not too bad job at it. I hope so.

In contrast, Zainab was this lady with a cheerful and open character that you could, without thinking twice, share whatever you had on your mind with. I am not sure how I would have made it through the first couple of months if she had not patiently sat and listened to what all I had in my mind. Sometimes even taking the time to go out for a chai to talk things over. Impressive how she could find time for all that despite being overburdened with work.

I am not sure career wise how much the work I was doing has helped me. All the people whom I have talked to has told me that at some point in my life, I will look back and realize how much valuable the things are that I have done. I guess I haven’t reached so far down the road yet in order to look back and feel like that. At least, not yet.

However, life wise, it has been just amazing. How much I have learnt and experienced! Starting from eating food stuff, fruits and vegetables that I had never eaten in my life before to travelling around India all the way from South to the North. I mean, trekking and working on the Himalayas? How often do you get to do that? Apart from Triund, Mcleod, Dharamsala, Delhi, Mumbai, Hampi, Pune (my first flight), Goa (my first scooter ride) and of course, exploring Bangalore.

All through these journeys as well as through my entire one year, I have to say that Kiran is the most selfless man I have ever seen. Making sure we know what he knows all along the way. For all the whining that I have done saying that I have never had a good mentor in my life, I would be lying if I said I did not find Kiran to be a really good one.

I hope to document these travels at some point. I have already written about my volunteer management experience during The Fifth Elephant over here.

This post would not be complete without mentioning the rest of the people in our team.

Jamna, who joined us around January. She and I were the ones who actually worked as a team most of the time since both of us were involved in handling the workshops at HasGeek. A lady who transformed from her shy self to one who does public speaking, organizes and manages geeks as well as takes up initiative to bring order to the whatever chaos she finds around her, within a span of less than a year. Both if us have learnt a lot form each other and I must say I’m truly inspired by her sheer amount of sincerity and dedication.

Supreeth, the quick witted, well traveled young man who always had a joke or story up his sleeve. I haven’t found anyone as skillful as him when it came to getting through to a person. He would be able to find some anecdote or experience that the other person would be interested in and then, he starts weaving his web. One who is well read as well, he has always been there to correct my English whenever I have made a dumb mistake or been there to help whenever I have been at a loss for words.

Nimisha, the illustrator who joined us from the North East. A very cheerful character who just love pets, of all kinds. Rabbits, cats, dogs and I wouldn’t be surprised if I found a baby dinosaur in her home! A really good company whenever you feel like talking to, always ready for some fun, a die hard coffee addict, you can behold her drawing skills if you visit the HasGeek event websites and Flickr photo streams since Fifth Elephant 2013.

I have to mention Mitesh and Devi as well. However, they have been involved in the tech side of things mostly. Working remotely or from the Microsoft Accelerator. That reminds me, towards the last few months, we had three offices! One at CIS, one at the bakery, which we shared with the amazing team of TripThirsty comprising of Sundar, Kingsley, Sandeep and Anenth, and the wonderful (and extremely mouth watering) cup cake factory of BiteMe run by Kingsley and his wife Divya, and last but not the least, one office at the Microsoft Accelerator

If I were to write down the names of people whom I have come to know and love over the past year, that is going to be pretty long list. I will refrain from doing that and just say that I will keep in touch with all of you because I want to.

I have moved on now. With valuable lessons learned and interesting observations. I work at Eventifier now along with three awesome guys namely Jazeel, Nazim and Saud. I was a geek herder. Now I call myself the Python tamer. Things are looking bright.

Here is to the future!

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July 15, 2013 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

The Fifth Elephant – Bonds made.

My 9th month working at HasGeek. Being away from actually writing something non-trivial has taken its toll. However, the time I had in managing a part of one of the biggest HasGeek conferences, the Fifth Elephant, deserves a blog post.

The main reason why I am writing this post is because of the wonderful time I had in working together with the volunteers who came forward to help us and make the event a memorable one. My involvement in organizing the event was pretty much zero. I kind of felt bad not being able to understand and take over anything from Zainab while she was managing the speakers, sponsorship, ticket sales, marketing and a million other things including inventory for the event. Even though I was neither experienced nor comfortable, I did help her with talking to the workshop instructors to get their installation instructions ready as well as with managing the volunteers.

It all started when I received the following mail from Iliyas on June 19th.

Greetings !

Fifth Elephant is coming soon 😉

As you know I’m an active participant and volunteer in many FOSS conferences in India. I would like to contribute my best to this event as well.

Please do guide me for the point of contact / organizer.

Thanks.

For some reason, I knew that this responsibility was going to be on my shoulders and I am only too glad now that it was.

Once I received that mail, I talked to Zainab about it and she told me to round up the usual suspects. Well, no, not the group manipulated by Kevin Spacey. But a bunch of wonderful people who are always there to help out us at a HasGeek event. They’ve been supporting us even way before I joined the team.

Without delay, I wrote to all of them and narrowed down their availability based on their commitments and other responsibilities. Among the usual suspects who came this time were:

Anand. The force behind PyCon India for this and the past year. A passionate programmer and a hardcore Python expert. Sit through one of his Python trainings and you will come out mind blown with the realization of how much more there is to learn.

Haseeb. The young lad hailing from Gulbarga. Passionate about open source & free software, he is an active contributor to Mozilla’s Urdu translation. His contributions have not gone unnoticed and as such, has been invited to the US for this year’s Mozilla summit.

Anenth. The cool and simple fellow with a thing for Android. One among the founders of ideophone, he is someone whom I hope to get to know better in the coming days. Especially since we share the same office space now.

Sidharth. Genius. Well nothing more is to be said about him. Still, it would be worthwhile to mention about his extraordinary skill of remaining calm in any given occasion and facing it with a cool head. Lately, it seems that he has been having visions of the dark side. May God protect him.

Vamsee. This name always brings back a lot of good memories. Especially from the good old days back when I volunteered for Droidcon 2011. Those were one among the best couple of days in my life in more than a few ways. Anyway, this Rails dude is one among the coolest and most reliable people whom I have ever met. I was only too glad to see him at the event.

Sandeep. One of the founders of ideophone along with Anenth, he has been there supporting HasGeek since a long time. A mallu brother, if I may say so, he is one another person whom I am looking forward to get to know better in the coming days.

Jitendra. An artistic interface Engineer. A gamer by heart, he feels that HasGeek is one of the best reasons why you should consider staying at Bangalore. Passionate about trying out new stuff and as such, always a learner.

Well, that covers the usual suspects. Now for the ones who came forward willingly to help in spite of it being their first time as well as them being busy with myriad of things ranging from interviews, to night duties to daily office hours to commitments at their homes. In no particular order:

Iliyas. As I had already mentioned in the beginning of this post, he was the one who set the universe in motion. He had been volunteering for events and organizing meetups for the sake of communities since he was 16. He believes that is the best way in which he can contribute back to open source. One of the most wanted figures during the conference, he picked up the ContactPoint app in no time from Mitesh and helped to get it up and running all over the venue. In fact, almost all the first time volunteers came to know about the event through him. Without doubt, if it was not for him, we would have had a hard time getting volunteers.

Anusha. The beautiful young lady who was only too nervous to volunteer. Sister of one among the usual suspects, Ashwin. This time, he wanted to attend the talks as a participant and hence, could not volunteer. However, he made sure that his spot was not left vacant and he convinced her to come forth to volunteer. Even though extremely doubtful of herself at the beginning, it was amazing how she came out of her comfort zone to handle her tasks flawlessly. Hope she had a wonderful time at the event as well.

Abhijith. One of the most reliable and pleasant personalities that I have ever met. He was dedicated to make the event run smoothly as much as us and was someone who took the tension off my head with his presence in an auditorium. He had his interviews in between the event and I pray that he got through. A mathematician at heart, I hope I can get his help to learn a lot over the coming days.

Ali. The cool one whose presence was felt almost everywhere during the event. He reminded me of myself when I volunteered the first time as he had just completed his 3rd year exams. Enthusiastic about technology, he made the most out the event by handling registrations to mic to camera as well as by paying heed to the talks that he found to be of interest to him.

Vinay. It was admirable how he found the time to come forward and help us despite running his own firm. More than once in between the conference, he had to run outside to meet clients, seal deals and hurry back in ensuring that his duties were taken care of. I wish him all the success with his venture and may his willingness to help amidst his busy life be rewarded in plenty.

Ralph. A jolly, energetic and enthusiastic person who impressed us all with the amount of dedication he showed towards his duties. What was special about him was the fact that he learned from each context he was in and shared his learnings with us without any shyness. He possessed one of those rare qualities which was more than just doing his best at what he was doing, to improvise and act based on his observations. Hope his family was not too hard on him for taking a three-day volunteering sprint. He he.

Niraj. The pleasant young chap who walks around with a smile on his face all the time. Someone who became an expert camera man within a day, he spreads joy to the ones around him with his quick witted jokes as well as his sudden burst of words. He certainly has learned from his uncle Vijay and is one nice guy to be with.

Basavaraj & Rajshekar. I would say these two were godsend. When I had a couple of volunteer withdrawals towards the event, I was sort of feeling a bit tensed until these two came forward to help. Friends of Charitra, who had to unfortunately go back to his hometown due to the sudden announcement of his project demo. I could not get enough time to know both of these young lads well enough. But I will make sure that I do. Raj had his interview for a job on the second day of the event. Here is wishing him all the best and hope he gets through.

Sagar. Although his plan was to volunteer just for helping out Edouard during his MongoDB workshop, he decided to stay back and help us out as much as he can. This young man was present everywhere amusing us with his charming personality as well as insights. A lad with lot of potential, I hope that he chases his dreams. Let’s see what stirs up after he watches ‘office space’ which I recommended for him.

Zubair. My roommate. One of the best friends I have ever had. An open source lover at heart and a passionate learner of every day things. He observes, takes input from all that is around him, improvises, concludes and executes the best possible course of action. Even though a bit reluctant to come over, he was only too glad that he came over in the end.

There were others as well who came forward but just could not make it due to their commitments and responsibilities. Charitra, as I mentioned earlier. Rinku, who offered to help even though she had bought a ticket. Pradeep, who had a lot of last minute work popping up. Vinayak, who was there for the first day and then couldn’t make it due to work. Asif, who fell sick. Here is wishing him a speedy recovery.

That sums up all who came forward to help. I haven’t got the photos from the event yet, but I will post them here as soon as they are up.

I am not sure whether I was a good task master. Whether I gave them the chance to feel what I felt back in Droidcon 2011. I hope I did. And I really hope that they had an amazing time and finds it in their heart to take initiative and volunteer for a lot of events.

Of course, this post won’t be complete without mentioning the amazing HasGeek team of Kiran, Zainab, Krace, Supreeth, Radha, Nimisha, Kingsly, Gaurav, Jamna, Praseetha, Mitesh and Devi, who gave more than 100% for the success of the event. But they deserve a post for just themselves.

Here is to the future! May the bonds that were made last long and strong.

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March 28, 2013 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

The rising sunsets.

“No hangovers this time!”, Rakesh was adamant about it and his friends had no say over it.

“Sheesh, alright, aright…”, said Midhun. “What else do you want to do?”

“Let’s do something totally wicked, eh?”, Rakesh had the million dollar smile on his face. That meant he already had something on his mind and his friends, who knew this, waited for him to spit it out.

“Are you saying we aren’t wicked enough at our parties!?”, blurted out Ayer.

“Heh, we are wicked alright. But this time, we want to break all boundaries. Go wild and do something we have never done before!”, Rakesh was bursting with excitement.

“Out with it already man”, said his friends in the same breath.

Rakesh’s eyelids came down a little, his lips went on either side of his face; a perfect naughty grin. Midhun raised his eyebrows, not being able to read Rakesh’s mind. Ayer and Vishnu had already given up on guessing because they knew Rakesh was in one of those peculiar moods where his brain was working at its peak, the only difference being that this time it was not on debugging code, but on planning how to celebrate new year’s.

“Well folks…,”, Rakesh started. “believe it or not, we are going to see the sun rise over the horizon!”

There was a deadly silence. His friends could not even begin to fathom the meaning of what he had just said.

“See the sun rise over the horizon!”, exclaimed Ayer. All ghastly thoughts came pouring into his head, the first and foremost of them being waking up in the morning! He had not done that since his High school and he was pretty sure his mind would get a nasty shock if he were to wake up that early and start thinking about something, anything.

“Yes Ayer”, Rakesh interrupted Ayer’s thoughts. “That is why I said it is going to be something totally wicked”.

“But still..”

Rakesh laid out the plan, “Okay guys. We are going to Konark, the archaeological site on the eastern border of our country. We are going to sit on that darn beach and see the sun of a gun slowly come up out of wherever the heck it hides during the night. Unless any of you are going to say no, I am going to book the tickets”

No one had anything to say. They were totally taken by surprise and off their guard that either they could just sit there gaping, or they could not say anything, thereby approving Rakesh’s proposal.

They did both.

So it was decided. The 4 friends were going to Konark, the eastern beach, to see the sun rise. The tickets were booked and the preparations were made for their journey.

After a few weeks, they started off on their journey, a two day train ride, which was supposedly to end in a shocking new real life experience that would make all of them better human beings.

They made it to Konark in one piece. Reached there early in the morning, got together all their stuff and figured out the location of the Hotel where they were going to put up for the week. They had a good rest, cleaned themselves up, had a good lunch and by evening, decided to go out and figure out a perfect place to go and sit the next day morning to see what they had come to see.

The 4 friends walked a while, on the way passing by the amazing Sun Temple. The beach was almost a kilometer away from the temple and they covered the distance on foot. It was vacation, and they were cool with time. Finally, they reached the beautiful, golden colored beach.

“Ah, here we are!”, said Rakesh and emptied his can of drink.

The four friends sat down, the gentle breeze blowing on their faces, the calming rhythm of the sea soothing their hearts, the wide stretch of open water lying wide open in front of them. They felt at peace.

They sat there for a while, getting into a conversation amongst themselves, cracking jokes and sharing a few life stories. They were having the time of their lives, and the setting sun added to the lovely feeling around, bathing the world in a reddish tint.

Vishnu could not help but praise the scenery. “Guys doesn’t the setting sun simply look awesome?”, he said pointing to the sun. “It turned red from the fiery yellow it was a couple of hours ago. Simply amazing…”

The others nodded, remaining calm and silent, enjoying the scene. Suddenly, Rakesh had this terrible feeling inside him.

“! What the…!?”, he almost sweared.

“What’s wrong?”, asked Ayer.

Rakesh looked as if he had seen a ghost. His eyes were almost bulging out and his face had an expression of complete disbelief on it.

“Dang! The sun sets!”, he exclaimed.

“Ha ha.. What did you think? That it stays… ummm… What the!?”, it dawned upon Ayer, which in turn dawned upon the others as well.

Rakesh flipped out his smart phone and checked the GPS to know where the heck they were. The phone showed the location, which was correct. They were on the eastern beach at Konark. The train tickets were correct and even the hotel accommodations were fine. And yet there they were, sitting on an eastern beach, watching the sun set.

“What the bloody hell is going on guys?”, a tone of disbelief and fear was there in Rakesh’s voice.

After a long time of puzzled looks and freaked out replies, the friends managed to find out what was going on. It seemed that the beach at Konark started from an eastern tip, went down south a little, then took a sharp turn towards the west, running a few hundred kilometers in that direction, and finally turns south again, proceeding thusly till the southern tip of the country. So what happened was that they were almost in the middle of the large strip of beach that was headed west, and thus could see the sun set into the sea facing westwards. The interesting thing that they figured out was that if they faced east, the sun could be seen rising up from within the sea as well.

The case was completely weird. They were now in a place where they could see the sun rise from the sea and set in it as well. However, what they came there for. was there, and that was what they wanted.

They were made better men, when the four of them waited since 5am the next day, and saw the sun coming up from within the sea, slowly to light up the world in all its glory.

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January 21, 2013 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

Learned Web2.0 the hard way.

So, Kiran decided that he wanted to make “funnel” (http://funnel.hasgeek.com/) as a separate application so that people could use it for their own events and stuff. After all of us at HasGeek had a face to face discussion regarding the matter, we reached the point where we had to think of a new domain name for the app. The discussion was left off at there, only to be reinitialized again on the IRC last Friday night.

People jumped in and started suggesting names – funnelit, thefunnel, heyhofunnel and funnelwhatnot. The list went on and on and on. It is hard to contain one’s temptation in such a situation and yours truly had his own share of contributions to make. Well, until what happened next.

Yours truly is “kaakku” on IRC and he came up with a brilliant name. See what followed:

* chandan_kumar (~chandan@112.79.36.144) has joined #hasgeek
<kaakku> Funneller.com?
<jace> fnlr?
<anandology> funnelr.com is web2.0
<jace> funnelr?
* tazz (~gaurav@115.114.59.182) has joined #hasgeek
<anandology> 🙂
<jace> yeah, we’re not 2.0

There you go! Kaakku was sitting there in front of his computer thinking what the heck was going on with all the sudden web2.0 references and the misspelled rip off of his brilliant suggestion. He did feel something fishy going on, which took his thoughts to the man, the machine, street hawk. Err.. I don’t where that came in from all of a sudden, but what I meant is that I went to Mr. Jonnalagadda, and expressed my state of ignorance in front of him, only to be faced with a roar of laughter from him as well as the King, Krace!

Ha! Laugh or no laughs, I was not going to go until I got my answer. I was there on a mission, a mission from God. Or, Whatever..

So Kiran decided it was worthwhile to take a few minutes off his coding spree and explain to a certain geek herder what Web2.0 was all about.

Well, it seems Tim O’Reilly coined this term, Web2.0, meaning that web had evolved into its next phase from what it was with just the static pages hosted on a lot of computers. (Man, I just have to say this. Oh really!) Anyway, this thing caught on and people started coming up with all-things-2.0.

Kaakku found the story really amusing and funny. However, he thought, “Yes, that is a really amusing story, but what the heck does that have to do with me suggesting ‘funneler’?” He thought that through his mouth, which carried it to Kiran.

Kiran continued with the story. Somewhere around 2005 or so, a certain photo sharing site was born, or rather, was built by a certain excited group of people who always would shout out with joy. They came up with the idea of the site and a perfect name for it too. However, unlike human names, you were not allowed to have more than one website with the same name. These guys thought hard and long and finally came up with a solution, a solution that made Mr. Kaakku embarrassed on a certain Friday night on a certain IRC channel.

The guys omitted the ‘e’ from ‘flicker’!

Just as the Web2.0 revolution, the idea of ‘omission’ caught on which led to a wildfire of startups and projects all having misspelled names, omitted letters and what not.

“Ah! Here we are!”, thought Kaakku, feeling enlightened and less stupid, having learned Web2.0 and spelling mistakes the hard way.

But come on guys! I suggested “funneler”! Who the heck took out the el’s and eeeeeee’s!

Lesson learned: When someone mentions Web2.0, they are making fun of you. Lol!

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December 9, 2012 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

A few writers, a few snacks and a lot of Gyan.

One of the greatest joys in life is that of meeting people with common interests (Not on facebook, thank you!). This is the exact reason why I signed up for the writing workshop by Gaurav and Nisha. First of all, thanks to Ashwan, a man of many talents, my colleague at HasGeek, for bringing the workshop to my attention.

As much I love working and being a part of HasGeek, I was constantly wondering whether the city had something else to offer me. The last two days have been wonderful and the city assured me that there were wonderful things that it had to offer. I just had to get out, open my eyes, and look.

A few writers, 9 to be specific, including yours truly (if you can call me a writer) got together at a certain open, airy and yet shady place to share their passion for writing as well as to help each other out. Gaurav and Nisha, the ones who organized and brought together all of us.

Gaurav was this calm person with a gentle voice and a wonderful smile who sat there, listening carefully to whatever was being said and discussed, to offer advice out of his long years of experience. It was evident that he had the big picture in his mind and it would be years before I could get even somewhere close.

Nisha, on the other hand, had this very outspoken attitude which got through to all of us. A very friendly person who had almost the same amount of experience as Gaurav, she was pouring out suggestions of various books to read that none of us had even heard of before. The critiques they both gave for our works were very thought out and clean that we could identify where we were doing it wrong.

In no particular order, here comes the rest of the crew.

Azeem, a good looking, well built fellow who was an avid lover of fiction. All through the two days, he kept fictionalizing whatever was thrown to him and he did a marvelous job at that too. It is always heart warming to see motivated people who yearn to achieve something and as such, I hope he soon finds his graphic designer and gets his comic book published asap.

Deepak, the plump man with a wonderful humor sense whose writings were more directed towards the little hilarious things that happen in one’s life. We almost never tend to pay attention to those little things that brings a grin on our face. He captures those moments wonderfully with his writing, at the end, leaving all of us laughing, and making us think of those little incidents in our own lives.

Ranju, the cute lady hailing from Chennai. Words flow from her fingers so smoothly and yet so meaningfully and hilariously that you feel alive listening to her read out her writing. It is admirable to see how wonderfully she establishes her thoughts through a few quick sentences. I’m never going to forget how she merged the blog writer’s and drunk guy’s story into one!

Sam (I wonder where Frodo is. Also, her real name evades me at the moment). Maybe I am wrong describing her as nervous, but her face lights up with emotion, be it laughter or tension, when she expresses her thoughts. A writer seeking to find that perfect rhythm which would entirely convey her ideas to the world, she was a lively character through both the days.

Lalana, PrintOooooo! I don’t know why I put it like that, but I just did. Hey, it is “sosaysharis” after all. Just kidding. Well, frankly, I really enjoyed listening to her talk. She had this highly animated style of saying things that you could never feel ambiguous about the feeling that she was trying to convey with her words. A lady with a really nice smile, in her writings, I felt envious of finding the one thing that I always sought. The attention to detail and the vivid descriptions which capture the imagery of a scene so beautifully. Someday, I hope to write like that.

Last but not the least, Leanne Pais! WhooHoo! “The girl who kept turning back to assure me that she knew how to drive and her brakes were working”. Man she is going to kill me for this! Oh yeah, the only girl in the world who has had the privilege of having me on her bike. He he… I could have said that she was the first girl with whom I rode on a bike but hey, I’ve just been to a writing workshop and I should write things differently. All in all, her suicidal story (or “The story about one guy committing suicide”, as she would have me put it. Lol!) and the ghost who was enjoying his own funeral really made us all stand on our toes. I hope she finishes her work and gets them published soon.

It was a fun two days. Even though I had attended the workshop with writing just fantasy stories in mind, the way they structured the course and the feedback that they gave ended up in me writing up a small, non-fiction story from my life itself.

The idea was to pick one of those embarrassing moments of your life that had a lot of potential to be written but, you were too embarrassed to write about it. I roughly drafted one such incident that I had when I was a kid and wrote it down in about 250 words, as per their request.

They made us elaborate what we had written to double the size. That was interesting because you had to elaborate the already laid out content. Trying to do that (and in my case it was pushing the limits), I realized it was possible to breathe life into your story in more than one way. Setting the scene, including those tiny bits of information that you think has no relevance at first, etc, came out.

The critiquing of this piece was done seriously. No one held back and the thoughts we shared on each others’ pieces were really helpful for the next re-write that we did. Both Gaurav and Nisha were extremely serious in pointing out the subtle tweaks that could have made the stories better.

After this round was over, we were asked to re-write the story once more. The difference that sprouted in everyone’s writing was unbelievable! I never thought I could put more description into what I had already written, but, following the advice that all of them gave me, I really did make the scene more descriptive. I will post my piece shortly so that you can see what I mean.

It was an awesome experience and extremely fun. Thanks again to Gaurav and Nisha for putting this together. I look forward to more such gatherings in the future.

Cheers guys!

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November 15, 2012 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

Perseverance, sacrifice and friendship.

Life has changed for me and suddenly I have this feeling that I’m at the driver seat. Till now I was just a passenger and the paths were already laid out. I just had to go with the flow and I was sure to reach where I was heading. However, today it is not like that anymore. There is no “system” that I can just blindly follow. I have to think, figure out what I am doing and what I should be doing.

It feels good.

One of the things that I have missed is writing. The frequency at which I blog has come down considerably. I used to think that I wold naturally find time for it. I understand it is not so. Keeping things in perspective and finding time for what you want to do is becoming a more and more challenging task with each passing day. Time is flowing by and unless I act quick, things might reach a point where the currents would be too strong to swim back.

I find myself in the company of a man who has a vision. The yearning to bring about a change in the way things are. A strong and silent man who does not even show any signs of the slightest of frustrations on his face. I find myself in the company of a man who follows his dream of bringing together a community. I’m still ignorant of how all it came to be. But what I am sure of is that he is not alone.

I see a woman who loves her husband dearly. A woman who sacrifices her time and her career just to see her husband succeed. From many have I heard how lovely it was to behold such a relationship among all the hurried life in the city. She is always in search of what her place in such a surrounding is. Her thoughts go far beyond the pleasant smile that she wears all the time on her face. Her thoughts go here.

A motherly figure to all of us, I see a woman who strives to teach her two little children the ways of life. A kind hearted and empathetic person whom you could turn to whenever you feel life is too much to take. She will bring you back to reality, advising you for the best.

Three brothers. One who has traveled around the world much. Biology is at his heart, knowledge he has of almost everything, enthusiastic he is about tech and more than everything, cool he is! Whatever problem pops up somewhere, let it be tech, life, logistics, inventory, people, everyone’s first option would be to turn to him and the wonderful thing is, he always has an answer, and that too, a really sensible one.

One who loves mother Earth. His love for her reflects in his ways with the ones around him. A cute brother, always watching out for you, ready to help you at any moment. People like him increases your trust in humanity. You start to understand what it is like to be there for someone when you are with him. Relations, what ties the whole world together, he holds each and everyone he has, close to his heart.

One who loves to be one among us. His tech thoughts as well as jovial nature deep behind all the well kept. cool looking hair, beard and mustache, he is always ready for a laugh whatever mind boggling thing was up. Always ready to lend a hand, he hates bugs. Both in software and in real life. He exterminates both of them quite skilfully.

Last but not the least, imagineer. The silent, creative girl who works magic out of her fingers. Designs and art are her mastery and she conjures them up from thin air. Extremely quick in picking things up, a guaranteed wonderful designer who is soon to be famous. She is blooming to one beautiful flower from the cute bud that she was.

Kiran, Zainab, Radha, Ashwan, Sajjad, Krace and Praseetha, respectfully. HasGeek. Oh, and yours truly too.

It was amazing to see the dedication and sincerity with which everyone performed their roles last month over the two huge events. Perseverance, I saw in all of them. Mentally taxed, physically tired, ill, none of them were ready to quit and take a rest. There were things that needed to be done and they knew they were the ones who had to do it. There were no backseats. Working late into 3am, they sat and slept when everything was finally set. I realized that there was more to life than just watching out for yourself.

Sacrifice. That is how you work as a team. One for all and all for one. You are there for him and he is there for you. That is how it works. Of course you can call in sick and go lie down. But that was not a decision any of them were ready to make. They stuck together and pulled through. Many had lost track of time and many were taken ill. They got over it, and they did it.

However, all this comes with a price. All of these has a side effect. A beautiful one at that too. The bonds that were made. Small jokes in between rush hours, little chats over dinner and tea, they found themselves amongst a group of people who had something in common. They all wanted to make this happen. And they did.

I never expected to be a part of something this diverse. I still wonder where I am going to fit in. Hey, but what’s the rush? Life has just started for me and I want to make this happen as much as all of them.

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October 5, 2012 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

Is execution important than vision?

I had a pretty tiring day.

Being at the town, I started walking from a certain point, under the blazing hot noon sun, visiting each and every slipper shop on the way, trying to get hold of a certain brand which I had been using till now. I walked and I walked and to my surprise and dismay, reached back at exactly the point that I had started, without any luck whatsoever. Tired and wounded, not to mention disappointed, I went and had a drink. I sat and rested my overworked feet for a while. I got up again and started walking towards the bus stand in order to catch a home bound bus.

Just when I had taken 4 or 5 steps, there was this shop to my left. Out of inertia of having asked at each and every shop that had slippers in them, I simply stood outside and with an air of sarcasm , asked the owner whether he had the brand that I was looking for. I got what I was looking for from there.

The lesson that I learned from this happening is that always start the things that you want to do just before you are actually going to start doing it. In the philosophical sense, this thought has many implications. However, having experienced this first hand in real life, I’m bound to start applying this thought to the various aspects of life.

Anyway, that was just the icing of the cake and the above three paragraphs were not in my mind at all until I thought about how to begin this post that I wanted to write.

Reaching back home, I turned on my laptop and checked my mails. I happened to stumble upon this thread. I simply went through the replies and happened to click this link, with no particular reason. That was Diaspora page of Jishnu. Since I was tired from the day’s happenings and wanted to rest, I was simply browsing and as such, scrolled down along his posts. There I stumbled upon the following video, which is the primary reason for this blog post.

Usually I had this idea of talks by technical people getting boring and monotonous. This was exactly the opposite. Moreover, this was not a talk but rather a sort of Q&A session. I was not planning to sit through it completely, but the more I listened, the more I got interested to listen to the rest and hence, I finished it in one shot.

Mind you, I’m not saying that Linus is the epitome of perfection or anything of the sort. He maybe, he maybe not. I just wanted to think and improvise on some of the things that he mentioned during that session and that is exactly what I am going to do.

The fist and foremost being the title of the blog post. Is execution more important than vision? Vision as in, a dream of how something should be.

Well, according to Linus, he personally was in favor of getting things done rather than thinking and dreaming constantly of a bright future and end up doing bits and pieces. He takes the analogy of a man walking, looking at the stars. He has vision. However, unfortunately, he fails to see the potholes that are in the way that he walks because he is not looking down. Hence, he stumbles upon them and falls down. Linus does not completely criticize visionaries too as it is possible that the path that guy is walking upon might not have potholes and as such, he will achieve his vision.

This is a very interesting point because everyone can have ideas. People can have tons of awesome ideas. They can dream of things that should happen and keep on dreaming. As much as I admit that you should dream until your dreams come true, sometimes (most of the times), people simply end up only dreaming. That does not help.

What makes you different, or better, worthy of being alive, is when you get things done. Linus even quoted Edison where he said, “Success is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration”. That is more or less true. Passion, inspiration, dreams, ambitions, etc all are just thoughts in the wind until you work hard for it, and achieve it.

With this thought in mind, I thought about how I have been over the past year and it was quite interesting to see the difference.

Started my blog – “Yet another guy who has access to Internet registers yet another blog on wordpress”
Wrote posts – “Yet another blogger who has to put in his blog, everything that happens to him”
Wrote posts consistently – “Hmm… Yet another consistent blogger”
Wrote stories – “Most definitely not a personal diary”
Technical posts – “Not just philosophy and stories. Useful posts”
Crossed 100 posts in a year – “Wow, I did not expect this guy to keep at this for so long. Still…”
Published a book – “Awesome. This guy is actually getting things done”

I sure as hell would like to meet that omnipresent dude who commented on my stages of blogging. However, the point that I was trying to make was that even though I hadn’t realized it till now, I was following my passion and getting things done. I needed this push as I have in my drafts, 4 incomplete posts that I started writing and half way through, started thinking about how it should be and the impact that it should bring about to a reader. That thought is good, but it should not be as strong so as to pose a hindrance to what you are doing. Otherwise it ends up as the case mentioned earlier. I have these amazing vision and thoughts but I’m not actually doing anything for it. Now that I have that idea in my head, I’ll be finishing those posts soon.

Hence, as much as it is important to have a vision, it is as important to get things done as well.

Another interesting thing that he mentioned is being open about your feelings regarding something. He quoted his own example for this statement which was that one guy who worked on a certain kernel feature, got suicidal when Linus told him that the kernel did not want that feature. This would not have happened if people clearly knew about how Linus wanted the project to be.

I was not a big fan of extremism. However, taking into consideration the above scenario, there are times where being an extremist pays off. I mean, him being like that in regard to his project does not mean that he is like that with his family. The point being that there are occasions where you should stand like the Pole star and there are occasion where you should be diplomatic. I mean, Linus could have called that guy for a cup of coffee and started the, “Listen, I knew you’ve worked really hard” thing, but seriously, that attitude would have left the entire kernel project in once heck of a mess.

To the question of whether all the students should be made aware of the open source movement, his answer was thought provoking. The point is that everyone need not be made to learn programming or anything of th sort. However, the ones who have the spark in them should be given the chance and the proper encouragement for learning and improvising on it. He mentioned the cheap Raspberry pi board available where out of 100 boards, 99 of them might be lying in the dust. Still, the important thing is that one board gave an interested person the opportunity to learn and that is what matters.

This is true in real life also. When you try to do something for the people, instead of worrying and spending time on getting everyone involved and interested, you should be more set and concentrate on helping out those who are genuinely interested. We tend to forget that in our path of achieving a “noble cause”. Once you get through to those who are interested and when they start to do wonders, the influence will become bigger and will spread.

Well, that’s about it I guess. That session was something that I desperately needed and I’m glad I did not stumble upon it any later.

Thanks Linus.

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July 20, 2012 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

We need good teachers.

It is no secret that the standards of teachers nowadays in colleges and schools are pretty low. Since most of them consider teaching as just a process to earn money, the ethics and true meaning of being a teacher has been ignored and cast away by them. That being the case, numerous people are out there to take up teaching as a profession.

These days, whenever I talk to someone about teaching, they tell me that it is one of the most easiest jobs in the world. Do you know their reasoning for that remark? They say that you’ll have to work only 2 to 3 hours per day, you will have lots of vacations and if you get a Government teaching job, then swell, you can slack off as much as you like.

Slack off? You have to be kidding me. This is the common man’s view regarding teaching and unfortunately, the views of most of the teachers nowadays too. Since both the teachers and common ma agree with the same idea, there are more and more people trying to get into the teaching profession so that they can ‘slack off’.

However, the funny thing is that there are good teachers among us. But they neither make it to school nor to colleges. I talk from the perspective of a fresh Computer Science graduate here and hence, my views maybe restricted to this field only.

These ‘good teachers’ among us are those who are passionate about what they do and have got an extremely good talent in teaching others what they know. Unfortunately, none of these people have their profession as teachers. from what I have seen, most of these people are in the IT industry, working for a software firm or something of the sort.

What I’m saying here is that the society, and more importantly the students, need people like these. People who have passion and people who actually know what they are talking about. People who can guide the young ones on the right path. People who can be followed.

Alas, these people are unavailable. They work in the industry on technologies they are passionate about and earn a lot more than a teaching job. So what need do they have to teach a few? I think there is a need because otherwise, the coming generation is going to have a hard time thinking straight.

I think it takes an enormous amount of will to dedicate one’s self to teach the new generation just by understanding the situation the young generation is in. I don’t know if it is a responsibility as such, but I definitely know that it is a service only those people can give. I guess no one can blame them for not doing it, but I believe that they can make the world a much better place to live, they can make a change and bring forth a ray of hope.

However, assuming that these people do come to teach, they are not going to do much of a good job if they have egoistic superiors breathing down their neck. The institutional politics is something that they don’t need to put up with because they are there to offer a service. Not to “show” that they are offering a service. Hence, there should be other outlets for these kind of people to come forward once in a while and to be able to share what they know with the young ones.

Pramode sir is one person I have seen as such. He realized he had something to give to the society. He teaches, and the beauty is that he teaches on his own, without any “department politics” or “bossing around”. He took a risk upon himself by doing what he did. To stabilize one’s self in such a way by establishing his own institution. I wish the society or the Government supported such initiatives so that we would have more people like him.

My aim is to become a teacher. I want to learn well and then teach about what I know. I have seen many knowledgeable people in the IT industry who say that they will teach/train if they get paid a huge amount of money. It might be true that what they teach is worth that much, but I believe they are forgetting the deserving ones out these, who cannot afford it.

I agree money is important, but money simply is not everything. I wish, hope and pray that those people who have the skill and knowledge to make the difference in the society, to set aside at least a little of their time to teach those young ones, who deserve to be guided.

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July 6, 2012 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

I’m not a FOSS fan boy.

“FOSS fan boy”. That term is really scary. It says in a single breath that the person described by that term is nothing but attitude.

“FOSS fanboys will never understand that, because they need to believe that they’re freedom fighters in a revolutionary war, like characters in their favourite animes”

This is what provoked me to write this post. Trying to draw an analogy, during my college life, I have seen a lot of students getting involved in politics. I have always wondered what got them so interested and dedicated to the cause. I used to find it absurd that they spend time on useless discussions, strikes and fights. I even have discouraged many of them from going after politics and “ruining” the time they had at college. As far as my analogy goes, the belief that something great or superior is there to be achieved by our little actions, is what drives the people, and I believe that there is something free software is destined to achieve.

I’m not sure so as to how this belief is instilled in the young minds. I don’t exactly know how even I got into that mindset. But somewhere along the way, I did.

People always like to make themselves believe that they are important. They do that by mingling with the ones who make them feel that they are important. Once they realize which group of people makes them feel important, they will start actively working for it.

I believe that is the truth to getting followers. In some aspects it is easy to provide the motivation because the actions of the group are easy to be imitated. That is the case with political parties as it is easy to be one in a crowd and shout. You can always get attention and feel important without doing much. You just have to make some noise and be somewhere by the side of the mob.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way implying that politics is bad. On the other hand, what I’m talking about is the “Fan” attitude. A more meaningful (and unparliamentary) way of putting it would be “All fart and no shit”.

Another observable example are the “fans” of celebrities. It is one thing liking a certain superstar and it is completely another treating them as God, spending time on putting banners and posters of them everywhere and picking fights with anyone who says he sucks. Most of the youth these days, sadly, involuntarily falls into this trap. The seriousness with which they “fight” to support the celebrity is rather… admirable?

There are still many examples like football fans and cricket fans where all they do is talk without ever having kicked a ball or having held a bat.

Now coming to FOSS. I entirely agree that the ‘fan’ culture is there for that too. Basically, it means that you keep on talking about philosophy without an ounce of technical knowledge. The “keeping on talking” would be fine if you would only spend a little time on it. However, with fan boys that is not the case. They keep at it day and night.

You see certain ‘free software enthusiasts’ commenting about Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman saying that they are not right. These ‘fans’ would not have even cloned the kernel source code yet and they say “Torvalds was wrong to do that, he was wrong to say this” and stuff. I mean, the Linux kernel is such a huge project being maintained by one guy collaborating thousand of developers from across the whole world! You have no clue what that management is like nor any idea regarding its implementation. All you have done is to sit comfortably at your home, open your laptop, read some stuff from here and there and there you go! Somehow you are man enough to advice others. XKCD depicts this wonderfully. Take a look below.

As far as I can see, that attitude is not something to feel proud about regarding FOSS. Let me mention a few people who love FOSS and have done much for it and yet are humble.

The first one would be my brother, Noufal Ibrahim K V. He neither talks philosophy nor tries to correct the “wrong person” on the internet. He lived his college life by tinkering with the internals of the Linux OS and thus learning much about how a computer works. He says that it was the Free Software Movement that brought about the freedom for this kind a thing to happen and thus he respects its existence. He works for the internet archive which is a non-profit NGO dedicated to archiving the whole of internet (as crazy as that sounds!) and yet he does not simply criticize others.

The next would be Ershad. He is just so enthusiastic about computers that he would give his life in exchange for it (Just kidding!). He gets to voice his opinion because he has done much for the society due to his love for FOSS. Not only has he a really good technical knowledge but he has contributed much with it. Both through programming as well as teaching. Personally speaking, he was the main reason for the small light of hope that was lit at our college,

Then comes Praveen ettan whom I have gotten to know over the past few months. Nothing more need be said about him other than that he is a Debian developer! Which means that he spends his time and effort, without any return whatsoever, for maintaining packages for the Debian Operating System. That, my friends, is how you contribute to society. He has strong philosophical beliefs which he puts forward and there is nothing wrong with that because he is one person who tries heart and soul to keep the spirit of Free Software alive not only through words but also through actions.

Now coming to the essence of the post. Am I a fan boy? To an extent I am for my contributions are questionable. Also, since I have been a great ‘fan’ of comic book superheroes like Batman and Wolverine, I’m pretty easy to get excited about “fighting for the goodness of the world”. So the comment at the the beginning of this post applies in my case.

Thanks Sharat for opening my eye. I am not going to be simply “one among the crowd” and shout. Till now all that I have done is to make chances for a few people to come together and learn a little but I see that is not enough. I will try to better myself and one day, I shall speak.

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April 29, 2012 by Haris Ibrahim K. V.

DebianUtsavam 2012 – Medal of Honor!

Yet another memorable event at MES, Kutipuram! I must say I’m starting to enjoy my life now. I had no clue the event would turn out to be such an enjoyable one when Praveen ettan first mailed us telling us to get it together on short notice.

There is one milestone in my life that I simply have to mention here and that is, it is the first time I’m getting a medal in my entire life! I’m just so happy that it was for my effort at teaching too. Here it is.

Day 1 (28/04/2012) – Welcome to GNU/Linux!

After attending the release party not a month ago which consisted of about 10 people, I was amazed to see around 30 for this event. Most of them were a group of young foss enthusiasts who knew they had to learn about it and they wanted to learn too.

The event was scheduled to start at 9.30am. But holding up the philosophy of “All good things to those who wait”, we started the event sharp at 10.30am with Ershad, the tallest foss hacker among us, inviting the new ones among us to freedom as well as rejuvenating the rest of us. I could say he got through to us with his cycle. Lol! His session lasted for about half an hour and at about 11:00, it was time to get techy and Nakul was the one who was going to get us so.

Let me mention Nakul and Kiran here. Nakul has this “Alright everyone! I’m here so you guys have nothing to worry about. Let me handle it” attitude and his presence made the entire occasion joyful. Whereas Kiran had this “Yup, you are doing great and all of us are learning from you” attitude. Both of them together were an awesome team in organizing as well as getting the event to go forward smoothly. Great and awesome guys to be with. Its an honor to have gotten to know them.

So at 11:00, Nakul came forward with his arsenal of commands. Ummm… Usually people commands the Arsenal I guess but what the heck…

Anyway, command line and shell scripting were his topics. He ordered each of us to go and sit in front of a system and he started his session. Starting from the very basic of changing directories and creating folders (recursively and not), he took us to tee even! Not tee as in “tee hee” but tee as in the command used to “read from standard input and write to standard output and files”. Changing the permissions, ownerships (leaving poor Kiran both ‘ownerless’ and ‘permissionless’ over a few files!), the representations of ownerships and all were covered. He more or less taught us the heads and tails of more, less, head and tail. He he… Sorry bro,just couldn’t resist writing that sentence and nope! He exactly taught us, along with examples, what all those four commands meant. He wound up his session with the hierarchical structure of the Linux file system at about 12:oo.

However, we were blessed with a senior pass out from MES itself by the name of Haris (Not me!) and he came forward to share with us his experiences in real life about using GNU/Linux. From how he knew Ubuntu to be just a software to remove viruses to how he actually started using Linux to live. It was pretty enlightening know that all of us had much to hope for.

At about 12.15, we stopped for lunch. However, none of us were ready to give up on foss even during Lunch and I was pretty much amazed at the Discussion Sadiq and Ershad had over their lunch. While I’m one who walks around using free software/open source software (Please note that I’m writing both here as Sadiq is going to be reading this), I’ve never dug deep into the roots of its philosophies. But Sadiq had and frankly, he has done an amazing job at it. He exactly knew what he was talking about while supporting Stallman. He wouldn’t settle, no matter what, for using just ‘Linux’ over ‘GNU/Linux’. The discussion heated up the curries and rice on the table which ended in finally Ershad admitting that Sadiq was right. My stomach was too full by then I guess! Ha ha…

We prayed and got back to the labs at about 1.30 and it was my session then. But I let Ershad handle the introduction to my session and sat back while he nicely demonstrated how apt-get, synaptic and all worked along with how software installation in Linux (No! GNU/Linux) was different from that of Windows. He concluded his session at about 2:00pm.

Then I came forward and I guess no one had any clue that I was scared out of my wits! It was the first time I was taking a technical session and suddenly I felt that I was going to mess it up completely. I really felt to howl and shout out aloud, beat a few times on my chest (Like King-Kong) and cool off my tension. But fearing that would further scare all those present there (I was scared enough for all of them), I pulled myself together and started my session.

I’m not writing down my entire session here because that might remind me of more than I want to remember. He he.. My session was on “installing from source” and I had taken the tuxmath game (http://tux4kids.alioth.debian.org/tuxmath/index.php) as an example. Everything seemed to go well with everyone encountering errors while running their configure scripts and them slowly solving it when all of a sudden came the worst nightmare of every developers – The Horrendous Dependency problems! (reminds me of how Labeebka raised one hand and shouted “Jai Ubuntu!”) No one could install softwares using apt-get because of “Unmet dependencies”, “broken packages” and what not! The lab was infected with confusion and the threatening dependencies popping up everywhere! Sajith sir, Nakul, Ershad, Sadiq and me where on full swing trying to solve these but as much as we tried to solve things, we began to realize that that much things were screwed up.

However, while all of this was going on, the group of Shamsudheen sir (I hope that is what his name is!) and the sir from the mech dept. (can’t remember his name but I think it is Ayush) got the source installation correct and boy was it a weight off my heart to see the game up and running on their system. I had no idea the game required “Teacher’s privileges” to be installed. Lol! After this happening, unfortunately for our efforts, the internet connection was down and out for the day at 3:00pm and we could not proceed with fixing the Debian system there. Sadiq managed to copy the required library files from the computer in which the installation worked into one of the computers among the girl’s batches and the game worked there too. I concluded my session there telling them the rest of the steps in the installation process and here I forgot to mention an important point. I can only hope the ones who attended will be reading this.

NOTE: While installing from source, the first thing you should do is not run ./configure, but to see whether there is a README or INSTALL file within that folder. This is because ./configure, make and make install are the steps used for softwares that are developed using the GNU make philosophy. But there are many other softwares that will have to be built in a different manner and the instructions for these will be contained in the README or INSTALL file.

Here let me mention Sajith sir. An awesome person who is ready to help when and where help is needed without invitation. He knows how everything works and has a solution for any problem that happens in that lab even if he has to sit and hack at it for long hours. If it weren’t for him, Mine and Nakul’s session wouldn’t have imparted as much as it had imparted. From what I have heard from the students there at MES, he is a teacher under whom the students are proud of having learned! But alas, he is leaving MES to pursue his M. Tech in the coming June. That will be a great loss for them as well as for us as he is the backbone of such events being conducted there. A kernel lover at heart, he aims at making a serious contribution before he returns back to his profession again. Wishing him all success!

Coming back to the event, after I clumsily concluded my session at about 3:00, Sajith sir came forward with a beautiful explanation of what Makefiles are and how they worked. Once his small session was over, our “guest of the day” reached the venue. Mr. Labeeb Mattra and man, did he have the cutest smile among all! He had this childish face with a geeky spectacle and a whole lot of Debian and FOSS philosophy oozing out of him.

His session was on the Debian philosophy, how it came to be and why it was so. He started at about 3:30 and took us through the romantic world of Debra and Ian (Deb-ian), told us why we needed to support the existence of Debian in our society even if we didn’t use it, how the elections were held at Debian, its philosophy and finally stressing upon FreedomBox and how our personal information was valuable to us. He concluded at about 5:00 and we were on our way home without further delay.

And by the way, all of us “session takers” got Debian medals. Hope someone puts up the pics as well as the list of attendees somewhere.

Day 1 comes to an end.

Day 2 – Debian Packaging

This day was Praveen Ettan’s. However, he let us know he’ll join us only by 10.30am or so and told us to get started on discussion. The internet was down at the morning and Sajith sir was running after it and finally it got fixed. Thank God!

We got started on discussions at about 10:00 with Labeebka chairing it. There was just one topic of discussion and that was why we considered our personal information to be valuable. We traveled through the secretariats of various Governments as well many NGOs and other institutions and saw how it might pose a potential threat to our privacy as well as us being tracked at each and every moment of our life. By the time we had reached this conclusion, Praveen ettan entered the scene and Labeebka handed over the session to him.

Praveen ettan was introduced to us by certain wise and composed person whom I could not get to know and the introduction made us all gape at the great man standing in front of us! I was really jealous of him. Not because of his knowledge or achievements but because of his goatee which was one of my wishes to have before I left college! He he!

Anyway, he started off the session by reading out to us a certain message (or entry by himself) from his phone which inspired all of us to share what we knew with others as well as to write blogs and discuss our experiences of attending the event on the mailing lists. Thereafter he proceeded by asking us what we knew from the previous day’s session and got us to answer a few questions regarding how Debian worked.

He then went on to why packaging was done and how it was done. The theory behind packaging, you could say. A software would get released by someone and its first packaging would happen either if a Debian Developer out of his own interest took the software and packaged it or if someone put forth a request to have that software to be available on Debian. Usually, the package then would go into the “unstable” stage where a priority will be set for it to be Low, Critical or Security. These will stay in the unstable state for 10, 5 and 2 days respectively and then will be moved to the testing stage provided all its dependencies have their bugs fixed and are already present in the testing stage.

There is also an experimental stage where the softwares that are sure to contain a lot of bugs and that crash often are kept. However, on passing continuous tests, these will be added to the unstable state as well.

Now, the testing stage ‘freezes’ when all the softwares that the Debian community decided at their last stable release, would be there in their next stable release, are there in the testing stage. Once freezed, no packages will be automatically added to the testing stage and if you are able to fix bugs from the unstable stage, you have to manually add it to the testing stage. Once the freeze has all the ‘decided-upon’ softwares, the stable version is released and the testing stage unfreezes.

There is something called the ‘backports’ here too which either contains newer versions of softwares that are already in the stable release or softwares that were out after the last stable release. So by manually adding the backports repo, we can install those too.

Praveen ettan made us explain and repeat this session ourselves and finally it was time to go for lunch. Just before leaving the lab, Riyas, a second year fossie (hey, cute term isn’t it?) at mes, jumped up and caught me. Apparently he had not gave up on compiling tuxmath from source and he had almost finished running the configure script correctly. We spent a while together and he did an excellent job of compiling and running the game! Now that is one lad with the proper enthusiasm and potential.

We had a hearty lunch (for which the mes fsug group paid the bills) and returned back to the labs after praying at about 1:30pm.

The hands on session was started and we guided through by Praveen ettan along the steps for packaging a certain Ruby library called mixlib-log using the gem2deb tool. However, gem2deb was not within the Debian repo and we had to install it from source. We did that, made our first package of mixlib-log and then he tells us to fill out the various informations in the files present within the debian/ directory by referring to the New maintainer’s guide!

We were to run lintian on the .changes file and see the errors and warning there and resolve them one by one. We did it and finally had a package ready but alas, it was just an example and not something to be uploaded. Ah, suddenly I remember how Praveen ettan explained asking for sponsors in order to upload a package and also how the “web of trust” was formed between the various Debian Developers using the PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) mechanism.

The session had no formal ending but all of us sat back for a while with him assigning a gem to each of us. Many among us have already requested to work on a bug and let’s hope this is the start and growth of a new Debian community.

Before ending my entry, there is something noteworthy that happened. Although what I am about to say will make more sense to my classmates at college, I’ll just put it down for the sake of it. Guys, I didn’t even yawn during sessions of entire two days! My friends at college can see how amazing this is considering my unmatched skill of sleeping right under the teacher’s noses by sitting in the first bench!

Expressing my joy of having two of my Juniors from NSS, Ashiq and Ranjith having attended the event, here is to the future where I hope gatherings of these nature will be plenty.

Cheers!

A 'psycho' path.

On the trail I blaze, there is light at the end!

Personalities

A sunny Saturday at BeaglesLoft.

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My beginning and journey so far with Eventifier

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A short review on “Aadu Jeevidham” – A Malayalam Novel

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Jitendra Vyas and The Bangalore Front End Developers

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Being a part of the Mozilla community.

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A year at Bangalore, a year with HasGeek.

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The Fifth Elephant – Bonds made.

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The rising sunsets.

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Learned Web2.0 the hard way.

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A few writers, a few snacks and a lot of Gyan.

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Perseverance, sacrifice and friendship.

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Is execution important than vision?

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We need good teachers.

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I’m not a FOSS fan boy.

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DebianUtsavam 2012 – Medal of Honor!

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