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The Fifth Elephant 2025 (w/ Travelopia)

In the picture (from left to right): Senthil, Abhishek, yours truly & Pavan. I’ve written about all of them in my previous post.

I remember being involved in organising The Fifth Elephant conference about a decade back. I knew nothing about it apart from the conference being very popular and the word “Big Data” that was being used around it.

Fast forward to now and it was just last week that I attended it for the first time – and what a time to be attending it!

Of course, the major theme was around AI. However, that wasn’t what drew me into it. If you followed my last post, then you know I am no more doing web backend. Data Engineering is my bread and butter.

Half way through the second year now, I feel like I am back in my first programming job – Building a website using Django at Eventifier – pretty clueless about a lot still, but in awe of the bits and pieces that are starting to fall in place. Smiling at myself seeing a log being printed, being able to understand certain words that never made sense to me before, knowing it is okay to not know a certain thing, and starting to wake up looking forward to the next piece.

Attending the conference just opened up doors that I didn’t know existed.

Conversations:

  • “And you know it only when there is no data”
    • That short laugh with Anay Nayak talking about data quality at the BoF, and how sometimes the metrics themselves are misleading only to be figured out at the end when all the data goes dry.
  • “I told you this is * not * the board room!”
    • That effort at convincing the “very reliable” Payal (forgive me!) about a discrepancy within the schedule and the conversation that followed.
  • “Aren’t you the company that has a Private jet?”
    • I was very surprised when Srujan asked me that as soon as he heard I was working at Travelopia. I guess my eyes and smile got so wide that even before I asked he explained to me how he used to work in the travel industry earlier and had talks with TCS World Travel before.
  • “Get Claude Code Max & feel the difference!”
    • Multiple conversations with SVS around hiring, upskilling and of course, his heart felt request to get the Max plan for Claude Code and to never look back 😀
  • “Loooooooooooooooooooong time!”
    • Leena – A lovely unexpected catch up with her after almost a decade. Exchanging pleasantries & life updates.
    • Anenth – A lovely expected catch up with him almost after a decade. Good old days of working at the bakery, jokes around the helpless hackathoners around if he was participating.
    • Kiran Gangadharan – whom I was just able to meet only for a second since he was running for his talk. Need to remember and catch him next time at Bangalore.
  • “Long live Vizchitra”
    • Amit – Feedback about Vizchitra and wishing well for its future
  • “Leadership & Software Engineering in AI Era”
    • Discussions around the BoF Vedang hosted as well as thoughts around leadership training and work involved. Oh, and the tea as well 🙂

All the other hallway tracks including but not limited to the chats with Ashwin, Kiran & Zainab.

Notes:

  1. Srikanth’s insightful experiment of building an “AI developer” using Vertex + Gemini keeping track of metrics, inspecting the repo and automating PRs with fixes
    • Grafana’s LOKI as an event store keeping number of discrete events to be less so that queries are simpler
    • How it took 4 weeks of a developer’s observation to get it to an acceptable flow with a feedback loop in place
  2. Data Quality
    • Pydantic, PyDQ
    • Handling failures:
      • Block pipeline (not recommended since it reduces volume of data)
      • Quarantine -> Datadog can be used?
      • Tracking (Alert fatigue with them reds and greens coming so much that as long as some green is seen, you chill) – SO GLAD THAT IT ISN’T JUST ME! 😀
    • Volume check is another metric to be used
    • “Relative Rate of Change” (in context of that laugh mentioned above)
    • Custom Quality Checks:
      • Anomaly detection
      • “Reduced % over a week”?
    • System Wide Checks (Focusing on multiple datasets at a time instead of just one):
    • Prevent bad data at entry points
    • Prioritise critical data paths
    • Monitor trends across joined results of datasets
    • Airflow sensor (TBE – To Be Explored)
    • The DataOps discipline!
    • The trick of defining Data Quality budget
    • Don’t take up all DQ checks for your boundaries yourself – let 3rd parties do their part themselves (Hubspot!??)
    • Observability: Starting from being reactive -> proactive is fine
    • Re-ingesting data is fine
    • What is a Data Catalogue?
    • Metaplane (TBE)
    • Using emails for alerts might help better than Slack messages
    • Root Cause Analysis:
      • Can it be solved as a tech problem or as a process problem?
  3. BoFs
    • And yet it moves: data quality and observability | A Birds of Feather session
      • I’ve already covered the Data Quality related points above that were discussed in this BoF
    • Software development in the age of AI | Birds of Feather session
      • https://x.com/vedang/status/1946551972401999983
      • We listed down a bunch of AI tools that folks used (or at least tried once)
      • The discussions finally more or less came down to Cursor & Claude Code
      • Few folks did demos of their workflows
      • One interesting approach was how one person treated Claude as a “new Engineer learning the ropes” by having basic sessions with it. Each time you notice it makes a mistake, you manually tell it what the correction is, and ask it to go and create files in a directory that describes both what the mistake is and its correction was. After 3 or 4 such sessions, it ends up creating a pretty decent bank of specific “mistake – fix” instances that you “taught” so that the next time something similar comes up, it can go look things up there and figure it out itself.

The final piece for me were the lightning talks since I had to head out a little early for catching my train back home thanks to Bangalore traffic.

There were talks around Data Visualisation, Doc-Monitor (https://sahaj.ai/mcp-and-doc-monitor-transform-external-services-integration/), image generation & Vizchitra. Two of them that stood out were:

  • Learning Vs Education:
    The talk wasn’t exactly about it, but the person explained “learning” as an “innate tendency” of human being whereas “education” these days have become something that is being “pushed down” into students.
    He asked about the difference last time when you had a mentor / good-teacher showed you the “next step” or “removed a blocker” understanding your capabilities and your proficiency (helped you learn). As opposed to someone just simply giving you information (Education).
    His idea was to build a platform that uses AI to be that mentor for people.
  • AI Engineering
    This one was by SVS. A new “role” that has come into existence – vibe code to the death! Ahem, no. The basic idea being proficient in juggling AI tools to get stuff done.

All this was only made better by having my colleagues around. Discussing the talks attended, to attend, general networking tips and making good use of the sponsorship stalls! The jam packed schedule and our talk priorities only gave us little time to interact between ourselves though.

Epilogue

Before any of us made the decision to even attend the conference, I remember thinking once, twice, thrice, deciding not to bring it up in our standup…. Voices held me down.

“You did post about it once in the channel. It is not as if it is your duty to get them there, is it?”
“Nothing’s going to happen if you don’t do it. Why simply embarrass yourself? It is not as if they are interested right?”
“Come on Haris, just relax. It’ll pass. Don’t get into yet another management memo conversation”

I was bloody restless. Why would I not try my best? Worst case I might be misunderstood, but I wouldn’t have to live with the guilt of having not given my best shot, of having missed an opportunity that life brought my way.

I brought it up on the standup. And dropped the following text on Slack. Our manager asked who all wanted to attend, 5 of us raised hands (one of them couldn’t come due to health) and the company agreed to sponsor all of us!

The Slack text:


Here's the schedule of the conference: https://hasgeek.com/fifthelephant/2025/schedule

Feel free to look through the Data Engineering track (you can attend other tracks too :smile: ) 

- Ticket price:

The ticket prices are there at the top of the message and if a bunch of us are interested, we can get discounts as far as I had a word with the organising team.

- A "membership" benefit I feel

As I mentioned, they host short events throughout the year during weekends / evenings with "visiting geeks" or other such initiatives and they fall under this "membership ticket" along with the conference. (https://hasgeek.com/One2N/bof-with-swanand-and-svs/ was one such event that I attended with a different membership & I can vouch for the experience + takeaways)

- Workshops:

Most of the workshops are sold out since we are so close to the dates - however, they are live streamed for the conference ticket holders.

If we can choose a couple of us for attending a few interested ones online, I feel that it'll be worthwhile and presentable later on during our dev huddles.

- Quality:

One specific thing that comes up about conferences are the quality of the talks and the "hidden agenda". The AWS event we attended last year / 2023 was definitely to promote AWS - not to promote Engineering.

While I can personally vouch about the agenda being for the love of Engineering since my first job was at this organisation organising these conferences, you can see that they have a transparent talk selection process with community voting and public discussion: https://hasgeek.com/fifthelephant/2025/sub

- Significance:

* Team building

As I mentioned on the call, there is a very special "team building" that happens when engineers get together. Specifically on engineering problems. We love yelling at each other on bad variable names, unconventional folder structures, the unpinned requirements, and last but the best -  legacy code.

Isaac's team hackathon last year, the AWS F1 race competition, the exposure to databricks (and evaluating its usefulness for our engineering specific problems as a team), etc are examples.

As far as my experience in Travelopia goes, we've never shied away from investing in team building activities and getting team members together. With the importance that the data team and its engineering has currently at Travelopia, I feel this will be an investment that will greatly pay off in the long run.

* Finding answers and new perspectives

We can prepare the kind of challenges we have, questions we want to ask etc and take them there, find the randomest Joe at the water cooler, and start getting answers :stuck_out_tongue:

* Attendance:

But yes, it boils down to folks being interested to attend. That's really on us as individuals. @di-devs Maybe respond on this thread with a :hand::skin-tone-3: emoji if you'd love to attend (not considering the ticket price as the blocker).

I personally have my train tickets booked, but need to see if my health allows me to get on it Thursday night :slightly_smiling_face: I understand that it might be a bit too late for non-bangalore folks to plan the trip, hence raise hands accordingly.

Cheers!

Feel free to hit me up with questions.

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C̶o̶m̶p̶l̶e̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ Surviving a year at Travelopia – From Startups to Corporate

(NOTE: This was written back in Oct 2024! A lot has happened since then – something I’ll probably write about sometime later)

A UK based organisation, a Slack channel with British folks around, we use Python, and I had just been introduced. I couldn’t resist.

However, that was the beginning of my realization that things were going to be different this time around.

No one seemed to have got the joke.

I was embarrassed beyond words then. I was gracefully advised about how that specific Slack channel was used for important announcements and success stories only. I sat in front of my screen with a very weird feeling. The “first impression is the best impression” was lurking around somewhere in my head poking me and making me imagine how the entire year is going to be from that moment onwards. In retrospect, that imagination wasn’t completely wrong.

The saving grace was Luke Reader. I breathed a sigh of relief and I regained my composure once he replied talking about the health of his Parrot. I had an exchange with him and he knew exactly what he was doing with his reply. He left the organisation recently and I’ll be forever in his debt. I couldn’t thank him enough.

Thus started my journey.

Getting the Job

  • Leaving Able:

I had left Able on the 31st of May 2023 after an exact 3 year stint. Those 3 years were the most challenging & humbling time of my life. More from a personal perspective than a career one. Now that I think about it, the WordPress editor screwing me out of the blog post I had composed as a reflection of the work & life during that time – sitting at a stretch for 3 days nonetheless – was for the best. I was brought in as a Lead Python developer who took up Ruby during the final year because of the circumstances dictating it. If it weren’t for both Arpan & Madhu on the career side of things, I don’t want to imagine how my life would’ve turned out to be.

While thinking about my next adventure, in a moment of coincidence, I heard about Travelopia both from my brother as well as Vamsee. Having worked as Web Backend Engineer, the JD didn’t seem to fit.

  • Seeking (and the failed interviews):

I reached out to a few folks amidst which I decided to apply for a few interviews directly as well. I had never given an “official” interview before and a part of me wanted to see what would happen there. Long story short, I didn’t clear any of them.

I’ll probably write about my thoughts around it in a later blog post, but the tension I had was unreal. I had to sell myself – my experience, my principles, my worth – in the span of roughly an hour where I was trying to solve a problem for the sake of solving the problem.

Outside of that, I had conversations with a few out of which we decided to mutually part ways except for 2.

In the midst of all of this, as much as I felt to not be a perfect fit, Vamsee had convinced me to quit judging myself too much and just get on with the programme. Hence the conversations with Travelopia had started.

  • The talks, the offer letter, and the postponing

There were a few rounds of conversations with multiple people. It was a roller coaster then itself and my lack of experience dealing with larger companies and their processes really was exposed. “Salary slips” was something completely new to me. That should be probably convey the idea enough and how patient the HR folks had to be with me. I was frustrated with the time the process took that I finally lost my cool – something that I learnt to be never a good thing – to which I apologised for.

I flew to Bangalore on a Friday to meet with both Venky and Sree. We had a nice chat sitting on the rooftop terrace. I declined to have the office tea wherein Venky convinced me to open up to new experiences. I obliged and I enjoyed the tea. Him recommending “Catcher in the Rye” was the highlight of the meeting (of course, apart from presenting me with a t-shirt after our chat, making their intent explicit).

There were quite a few other gems hidden within that conversation too – thoughts & insights into being a “programmer” as opposed to being a “python programmer”. How the titles of “junior” / “senior” when it comes to “Engineers solving a problem” have brought about an unnecessary bias in terms of decision making. A few examples that Sree mentioned in terms of noticing the scope of certain projects and how he had to make hard choices around them, etc. In short, I walked away a smarter man.

They sent me the offer letter with the date of joining as 28th of August. An hour before receiving the offer letter on 16th of August, I tweaked my ankle and got a bone fracture just under my left leg’s little toe. I communicated, they understood and the date was moved to September 11th.

The Job

The formal title was “Tech Lead – Data Engineering”. As I mentioned earlier, I felt the JD didn’t fit being a web backend engineer my entire career. It was only when I sat back and thought about it that I realised there was quite a bit of overlap. While the backend of a particular website and its functionality was my “speciality”, almost all (actually, all) of the jobs involved building integrations, ensuring integrity, cleanup, collating info from various source, transformation, schedulers, etc.

Once I looked it from that perspective, the tension vanished. Technically it was the same job. The only difference I could see was scale as well as the breadth of AWS stack being used. That was just about picking up a new technology to get the job done. I had done that before. I had my intuition to guide me. I was sure to stumble, slip, crawl, fall & fail.. and fall. I knew I would be frustrated, confused, struggling…

However, one thing that remained consistent about me since I heard it from Kiran (my first boss) for the first time was… I’d get sh** done.

The Bias

I wish I didn’t have this part. However, such is life.

  • “Office Space”

The image of a large organisation played out in my head as the “Office Space” movie. It was my go to movie to relax. The “people skills” part along with the one where they destroy the printer are gold. Actually, the entire movie is. I’ve never had any of the experiences depicted in the movie and hence didn’t take any of it seriously.

The problem was this thought lingering in my head about how “large organisations” could be like that. I was instantly proven wrong when I had my chat with Rajesh – someone whom I’ll refer to for the rest of my life as my first officially titled “engineering manager”.

A nice human being who listens to you and points you to the places you need to know about for getting your stuff. He never asked me “what’s happening?”. (you’ll know if you watch the movie)

  • Visibility of work

Another bias was about the visibility of work. This wasn’t from the movie, but from peers. In all my previous organisations, due to the size, my work and decisions were instantly visible as well as impactful – regardless of whether they were good or bad. The feedback loop was immediate, real and strong. Forcing you to learn, improvise and adapt quick. Assuming you fall into that category of people who take pride in their craft instead of just doing a job, there’s a certain level of Engineering maturity that comes with it when you see the business depends on you directly. You are directly a part of the decisions being made and you can make an impact on the business.

This part is different in here. I am not one to question since I don’t have the experience of the folks within the organisation who have been running it successfully for such a long time. They structured it in such a way that Engineering & Business were one step apart without having a direct connection. As much as I feel I don’t operate my best in that setup, I “improvise, adapt & overcome” for learning from the new experience. I still seek the reasons trying to have a much better understanding of the overall picture, but I am not there yet.

The Team

The Data Engineering / Integration team – The DI Team, and we DI trying. We are a group function. Essentially meaning that our work spans across the entirety of the services / brands that make Travelopia.

Recently Sree talked about the history of the team and how it is special to the organisation and even more so, to him. Time makes stories and the flow is only evident in retrospect. We’ll probably cover that one in a separate post. I like our team, but the week spent together at Bangalore during September made me like ’em all even more.

In an alphabetically sorted order, following are the folks from our team (for a vague definition of it since I haven’t seen an ‘official’ version of it yet) and how I know them. Since the work and the responsibilities are so vast, I haven’t had the chance to spend a lot of time with a few of them. Hence, I reiterate that this is from my perspective alone as “the human beings I work with”. Read it with a smile and please take it on a lighter note.

Abhijit Sahani
We joined on the same day. September 11th. While I was at the Bangalore office, he was on screen joining remotely. Someone who is grounded in reality, unlike me (now that I mention it, I think most people do have a much better grasp of reality than me!). A calm and composed soul who is skilfully juggling his personal and professional life. The “grounded in reality” part has made me reach out to him more than a few times regarding different perspectives of organisational hierarchy and how things get done.

Abhishek Yadav
He is the first person in my life whom I interviewed and gave a thumbs up to. I still remember how Nizam and I were staring at the screen during his live coding session thinking “this guy has lost it and going in some completely different direction”. We were ready to cut him off when we noticed that he was reaching the solution in an entirely different manner. His resume fit, he was smart and the coding session really impressed us. Nizam and I were like, “how did he do that?” (Reminds me of Jackie Chan jumping off a landing with cables tied around him in Who Am I)

Ameen Ahsan
You can talk about anything around him. A jolly soul who is always up for a laugh. Curious and driven by nature as well as extremely good at tech, he has a lot of projects under him on which our organisation runs today and he keeps exploring the ways in which things can be made better. Just so that I am not put on the spot, he is a huge fan of poetry and believes it is about time that pip be retired.

Anshika Srivastava
When she sent out that invitation to join something called “Fun Friday” a couple of months back, all of us were like – “now what is this about!?”. Our scepticism was answered by an eye-watering-laughing pictionary playing online event on that Friday which not only did we enjoy, but also helped us bond even better as a team since it brought out our inner humor sense and “picture identification skills”. One whom I work closely with in my recent project, her entry as a QA is what made all the difference in terms of the future of it.

Athul
If it weren’t for him patiently explaining the debugging process of certain failed systemd process sitting on a mature EC2 instance that was responsible for ensuring the output of an ML model was synced back one of its sources, I wouldn’t have had made it through the first few months of my job. An extremely smart yet quiet by nature person, he was someone about whom I had already heard a lot from my brother, but had the good fortune to experience first hand as well.

Devendra
One among my first two reportees. I had never done pair programming in my life and it was the norm of the company. He was the first person whom I did it with and found how useful it is in certain contexts. Very receptive and curious, he is as gentle and down to earth as a person can be. Our fates at Travelopia are intertwined since we both have been assigned to be the keepers of the Catalyst track. We trade Hollywood movie as well as cartoon recommendations quite often. Information security is his calling and his love for bikes is what will probably get him there. He he. (I could go on, but will save it for later).

Oh, and he is the one who introduced me to LLMs – “there’s this thing called ChatGPT”, he said.

Eldho
One of the senior folks on our team. It was only recently that I got a chance to work him hand in hand, and it was a pleasure! It is common knowledge across the company regarding how he is able to retain and recollect the smallest of details from oldest of projects. And hence, it is very nice to brainstorm with him because the discussion flows so effortlessly without having to search & reverify every little thing. He literally and figuratively knows what he is talking about, is a mentor to many and is our lead product owner (a title I’m still curious to learn more about), hence managing our daily standups as well.

Haris
“An un-self-managed, negative thinking angry young man with a blaming mentality who generally has a lack of trust and spreads toxicity and seeks attention”

Isaac Raja
There are a few people whom I’ve met who falls into the category of being a wise man comparable to a glass of water so full to the brim with knowledge that just by standing close to the glass, you’ll get the water on you. And this is not “gyaan” or “advice”. Just pure, unadulterated knowledge. My first impression of him was as of a very serious, quiet guy who doesn’t waste time indulging in senseless banter. Someone whom you should * only * interact with for that exact thing you need and then steer clear of.

Boy oh boy, was I wrong! Not just wrong, but completely wrong. Not only does he enjoy a good laugh, he is a master at finding excuses for it too! A fellow good at heart, extremely helpful and someone with a myriad of interests outside of tech as well. As much as an introvert he is, it was a true moment of true leadership (and an inspiration for me) when he put forward the idea of the mini hackathon (Using local LLMs to answer questions about our documentation). Everyone * wanted * to follow him.

Nizam Mohamed
Coming from the web app backend monoliths world, I’ve had my frustrations more than a few times with all the microservice architecture going on here and to know that this guy wrote the first AWS Lambda within our org only makes me hate him even more! He he…
One among the early employees of the team, someone with a good sense of the tech he works with, and a very soft spoken friendly persona. Literally a neighbor, I was fortunate to meet his family recently when they were coming over to spend an evening at Karma Road.

Pankaj Bhatt
One among the freshers, someone who loves learning and pushing his own limits. A jolly guy who I remember desperately tried to get us to paintball during our team outing. A humble fellow who taught me about the knap sack problem, I’m sure I’ll have more to write about him over the coming months and years.

Pavan
One among my first two reportees. A well rounded engineer with a bright future. Someone whom I enjoyed working with a lot. Curious about his machine, passionate about his work, the only time he’ll get angry is if you don’t hit the cork after he shouts “yours” during a badminton game. A good company to have in any gathering, I hope the work we’ve both put into the project together over the last year will soon start to pay dividends. (Much like Devendra, I could keep going, but will save it for later)

Pradeep Bhat
One of the first few folks I met from the team, and I am still thankful to him for sharing one half of the roti during my first lunch with them. I believe his official title is “Project Manager” (another title much like ‘product owner’ that I am curious about). He has been one of the people whom I’ve depended on to get to know more about the business and how things work. Someone who keeps track of the projects of the data engineering team, its resource and time allocation, he is a pro badminton player and a nice person to pick a chat with.

Rajesh Iyer
The OG of the data engineering team – as Sree puts it. Our Engineering Manager as well as a father figure to many. As I mentioned earlier, I had my initial conversation with him with “Bill Lumbergh” in mind and within the first few seconds of the conversation, I felt ashamed of myself for having had that image in my head at all. Someone who is looking forward to the next stage of his life – to make a difference in the world rather than Github PRs. I was lucky to have this overlap of my time with him where he told me his story and how it is a career choice, but an important one, to maintain your hands on curiosity on tech as and when you go up the corporate ladder.

Reshma
An ace QA, she was away for a huge chunk of the last year, busy welcoming her bundle of joy to this world. It has only been through the daily standups that I know she is someone whom quite a few projects of the team depends on to ensure its quality. I’m sure our paths will cross soon & I look forward to me rising to the fight when she challenges the work that I do.

Senthil
One of the senior folks along with Eldho who has seen the evolution of our team first hand. An extremely soft spoken person whom I haven’t had the chance to interact much with over the days until now. I’m sure it is going to be just a matter of time before our paths cross and hence will leave this part as it is for now.

Sreehari
The chill dude. Any and every interaction that I can think of his, he has that vibe about him. Getting his “good game” remark for a badminton game during our September ’24 team retreat was a huge confidence booster for me personally. I was playing after 15 years, and my confidence going into the game was literally 0.

As far as my understanding goes, there’s isn’t an exact “so many members for this team” kind of a rule. There are quite a few people we consistently engage with for different projects at one point or another – Dan, Steve, Shilpi, Jaysheel, Roshna, Harish, etc.

However, I wouldn’t feel like I did it justice unless I wrote about 3 more people.

Sreenath
Whenever I try to come up with a description of him in any conversation (including now), I always talk about how he was the only person who got my 6 year old comfortable enough to talk during the time I took her to visit the office. That reflects the way his conversations are and hence why I felt it was important to mention it. My conversations with him revolve around the lines of what it means to be an Engineer and a Tech lead. Someone who convinced me of the “boy scout rule” from his personal experience even outside of tech, I look forward to the time when I’m able to collaborate with him directly on a project.

Venky
A “high energy person” in his own words that sometimes his energy is so high that you’re left with no choice but to tune your energy down so as to not disrupt the energy equilibrium of the universe!

I already mentioned about the tea and “catcher in the rye” earlier. A book that I immensely enjoyed. The “energy” part wasn’t a joke either. After the incident, I consistently have conversations with him. He asks these difficult questions, and slowly nudges me into practical ways to find answers for it. He has a way of leading a conversation and making sure it stays afloat with the subject of what it is about instead of unknowingly diverging away into tangents. I’ve already been able to not only apply the thoughts I’ve learnt from him, but also practically experience the difference it makes.

Sree
I’ve heard from more than a few people at the organisation that the attitude / culture of the team is a trickle down effect from him. I haven’t had the chance to spend too much time with him personally though. He has a good amount of history with both my brother and Vamsee – the two people whom which my referral came through. A religious person and someone who consistently tries to lead by example, he has quite a few stories to tell about Enchanting Travels becoming a part of Travelopia, about witnessing the growth of certain people through their career paths and about what it takes to keep an organisation running.

Experiences

  • No Coffee for you:

    Around the mid of November 2023, there were a bunch of folks from UK visiting the Bangalore office out which one of them was none other than our CTO – Mike Blakemore. For whatever reason, he had setup these 15 – 30 minute catchups with the “senior” employees and one among them was me. The poor guy was having a hard time with a nasty cold and a sore throat too I believe.

    By the time it was my slot, he came out and rushed past me apologising saying he wanted to get a coffee. I followed him thinking it’d be nice to chat there over coffee rather than in the cubicle. He put the cup under the coffee machine and clicked on whatever his choice was (sorry, not a coffee connoisseur here) and it went “pookhhhhh”. Tried again “pooookhhh”. It was empty.

    It was 6.30PM, it was getting dark and most of the people had left the building. Even though I saw Sree & Venky standing at the other end of the office, it felt weird to run up to them & interrupt saying “no coffee!” (now that I know them better, today I actually would do it). So I decided to go get Sreejith instead and took a few steps to head down the 2nd floor when Mike called me back and said its okay. He asked me about water and I pointed to the tap that all of us take water from.

    He put the glass under it and asked “will it be okay if I drink this?”
    My mind answered “How the heck should I know man!?”
    My mouth answered “Umm, yeah.. We all drink that….”

    He didn’t take that either and we ended up having our chat with the poor guy sneezing and coughing. Apparently he had a stomach upset before due to some similar experience and he was just trying to be careful. It was my 3rd month on the job, I was happy to get that time with the CTO and I blabbered away like an idiot. I remember him saying “you seem happy”.

  • Almost getting fired (and learning what “raised to the HR” means)

    Venky and I recently discussed about how the context of a moment past & the reasons of its being is never fully recreatable.

    That being said, as they say, “there are levels to this sh**”, and the levels are taken pretty seriously. A combination of my lack of understanding of that seriousness along with the effect of Chinese whisper led to this happening.

    While expressing my concern over a faulty metric I found that was being used to evaluate the effectiveness of one of the functions we had implemented, I was misunderstood and the decision was made to let me go. Before it was enforced, Venky decided to have a conversation with me. The “how I expressed my concern” was then identified to be the problem. Neither the “what” and nor the “why”. Now you know why the title says “survived”.

    It was personally even worse for me because I was expecting my thanks for having pinpointed the fault (something outside of my “employment responsibilities”) when Rajesh mentioned “raised to the HR” to me in a rather gloomy tone. I was not aware of that phrase. To be honest, I even thought “wow, even the HR wants to talk to me about my find?”. However, the tone suggested something else and a conversation with a friend of mine revealed to me what it actually meant.

    From experience, being fired for the right reasons is an experience that I value. It happened to me back in 2016, and I keep it close to my heart. As impractical as it sounds, it is so up there at the top of my concerns that it not only acts as an instantaneous personal SOS for the last 8 years, but also helps me hold true to the trust between myself and the organisation that I’ve made a professional commitment with.

    Venky generously offered me his time to help me with getting a better grasp of the “how” and we’ve been consistently chatting over the last few months.

  • Raising a concern (and a * huge * self reflection)

    During the initial months of a project we were working on, I raised quite strong concerns over mismanagement around it. My frustration at not being acknowledged came out very explicitly and I felt bad about the way I reacted to the situation.

    The “raised to the HR” incident happened after this, and hence I assume both was read together. However, I was conflicted trying to put things in perspective.

    It was during this time that I attended an event at Pune and it was one of the best decision I made in recent years:

    https://x.com/harisibrahimkv/status/1825928166365376714

    Siddharth offered me his time. During the initial call, I brought this up. He listened patiently and finally asked:

    “You’re still working there because of one person’s compassion. Where was that compassion of yours?”

    I was dumbfounded. The conversation carried on for a while where he narrated his experiences and certain unwritten rules about how to navigate situations such as these. How “feedback” isn’t what is important, but “helpful feedback” is. How “helpful feedback” isn’t just about the content, but the strategy of presentation as well.

    I spent a lot of early mornings by myself reflecting on this and I wrote kept on writing to introspect. There were two things I wanted to do:
    – Genuinely apologise. Not the “sorry” to calm things down. Not do the “bygones be bygones, let’s move over” thingie.
    – Ensure I never put anyone else ever in that spot.

    As I mentioned, Venky gave me his time generously during this phase. While the lesson I was learning along with the growth from this experience in the long run was important, as was the practical steps I could take to man up and face the situation. Long story short, I achieved the first and I could face the people involved with an open heart. I am prepared for the second.

    The funny thing was how I felt looking at this entire situation from the perspective of a third person – unnecessarily serious.

  • Events and retreats

    There were a bunch of events and retreats over the year ranging from outings, parties, gatherings at the office on special occasions, gatherings at the office during the times when people from the UK visits, etc. I had a good time at all of them that I attended. Here are bits and pieces from them:

    * The year end party:
    It was at a club in Indira Nagar. If memory serves me right, it was the first time I was at that sort of a bar. The woman at the entry gave me two small ticket like thingies and I wasn’t really sure what they were for. Well, until conversations started happening about whether I had my “shots” and if not, whether I could lend them my “tickets”. That’s when the power I had hit me. But before I could toy with it, Kirana caught me and confiscated those tickets of mine. Apparently it was to control the number of drinks people can buy from the bar. Nice.

    * The Onam Sadya:
    My first experience cutting up flowers to make the pookalam. Scissors, chopping boards, knifes and what not.

    * The September ’24 team meet:
    It was a lovely week. Everyone shared a lot of history about themselves and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed. It was a good choice for the company to have booked an Airbnb apartment as opposed to the usual individual hotel rooms. Gave us all enough common space to sit and chit chat.

    It gave me the opportunity to connect personally with a few of them as time allowed as well. That moment was a realisation for me.

    We did a team cooking event at Slurp Studios. It wasn’t really my first time cooking, but when you see the humor and fun of the team that you work with day in day out in a context other than tech, you feel touched. Suffice to say, we cut, we chopped, we knead, we heated, we fried, we joked, we laughed, we cooked and last but definitely not the least, we slurped! Yep, all of us ate what we cooked if you can believe that. He he…

    We had a badminton event. While it was a game, it was a highlight for me. Not in terms of wins or losses or performance, but at a very intricate personal level. Also, as I mentioned above, Sreehari’s “good game” made a * huge * impact. I laugh at how such a “small thing” viewed from the eyes of another person, can be a life changing event in someone else’s. Extremely grateful to everyone who played with me that day.

  • Someone has heard of Travelopia!

    Up until August ’24, whenever I mentioned I worked at “Travelopia”, it gave people the idea of a “ticket booking company” immediately. The conversation starts with “not like Cleartrip or Makemytrip…”. And then it hits the spot with “We have our own Jet“.

    1.
    The event at Pune which I mentioned earlier, led me to join a discord called “The Engineering Org” (TEO). Everyone who joins introduces themselves. After mine, a friend from back in my HasGeek days, whom I haven’t been in touch with for a long time, replied saying, obviously “long time”. We setup a call and had a chat.

    As I said, the notion of people not having heard about the companies I worked for was not new to me. However with Ashwin, when I mentioned Travelopia, he thought for a moment and said – “That UK based company, isn’t it? I know someone from there…”

    “Oh, first time someone has heard of it in my circle. Who is it?”, I asked.

    “Some Rajesh… Rajesh…”

    “Gosh! He knows my manager??”, I thought to myself.

    “Rajesh.. Thiagarajan. We worked together at RecruiterBox“

    2.
    I recently attended Rootconf. I was only too happy to meet one of my earliest programming mentors – Anand Chitipothu. We hugged and had a lot of catch up on, in the midst of which I mentioned where I work at.

    “Oh, you work with Sree? I did a Python training for them just a year or so back”

    I almost mentioned “Yep! He is one of my 5 bosses”, but restrained myself.

    Anand continued, “You know a fun fact? He hosted the 2nd Bangpypers meetup since it started”

    Again I chuckled to myself thinking about the irony of how I’ve been trying to get the org to host a Bangpypers meetup since the last 2 or 3 months.

    3.
    At the same event, we were having a BoF around “Use boring tech”. I met Neependra Khare there, who gives corporate trainings on Kubernetes. He was a nice person to chat with and again, when I mentioned where I work at, he mentioned, “Oh, you work with Vamsee”.

  • The #books channel coming to life
    On 23rd May ’24, I had finished rereading “Round the World in Eighty Days” after a long time. It was one of those hardcover ladybird classics which was one of the very first unabridged books that I had finished end to end during my childhood. One of the books that marked my coming of age. One of the books that you fall in love with the way it looks, the way it feels, the way it smells and finally the way it makes you feel with the story.

    Reading, stories and especially fiction, isn’t for everyone. No judgement there. People get drawn to different things. However, it is always nice to find peers. I spoke my mind about my wish, Sree replied saying to get it done and hence the #books channel on our Slack was born.

    Here’s the list that’s been discussed so far:

    Fiction
    * Round the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
    Science Fiction
    * Foundation’s Edge - Isaac Asimov Our Final Invention: Artificial
    * Intelligence and the End of the Human Era - Gary Dana & James Barrat
    * The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
    * Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow
    * Makers - Cory Doctorow
    * Walkaway - Cory Doctorow
    * Silo Trilogy - Hugh Howey
    * The 3 body problem trilogy - Cixin Liu
    Fantasy
    * The Wise Man’s Fear - Patrick Rothfuss
    Technical
    * The Phoenix Project: A Novel about It, Devops, and Helping Your Business Win - Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford
    Self Help
    * The Surrender Experiment (Lead Title): My Journey into Life's Perfection - Michael A. Singer
    * Be more pirate - Sam Conniff Allende
    * HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence (With Featured Article "What Makes a Leader?" by Daniel Goleman): HBR's 10 Must Reads Series - Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, Annie McKee, Sydney Finkelstein
    * Why Travel Matters - Craig Storti
    * Manage Your Mind: The Mental Fitness Guide - Gillian Butler
    Auto Biography
    * Limitless - Tim Peake
    * The Ride of a Lifetime - Robert Iger
    Gamers
    * Ready Player One - Ernest Cline
    * Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - Gabrielle Zevin
    True Crime
    * Dark Wire

Summary
– An extremely interesting year especially from the perspective of coming to a corporate from 9 years of working at startups
– Impressed by the default compassion & trust and the organisation has towards its employees. From the perspective of “human beings working at an org”. Reflects in terms of work hours, leave policies & benefits
– Yet to figure out the reasons behind a few of the “processes for the sake of processes” that are in place like “objective setting”.
– As I touched up on before, frustrated with the gap between “engineering” & “business”. Still trying to learn (and hence can’t judge) why that was made the norm.
– Enjoying pair programming to an extent, but still not convinced about how “that has to be the way”
– If you are at a point in your life where you want a “work life balance”, then an amazing place for it. (I differ in my outlook towards making ‘work life balance’ as ‘the * only * way to do it’)
– Having a separate work laptop has worked wonders for me. Especially having stopped listening to music while working.
– Happy with the pay, but extremely sad with the taxes (first time having that experience since I worked as a ‘consultant’ before and hence the realisation). Not something to do directly with the company, but just personally.
– Happy with the work challenges and extremely happy with the learnings so far. It was evident while talking with a few of my peers from the past.
– Happy about the final impact of my work being about “enabling travelling”.
– Toughening up to not let an employer emotionally break me.

Wrapping up
You learn by trying things. You learn even more by finishing ’em.

A year’s worth of experience is a lot to write, and I am keen on learning. For those few of you who know about this post coming, it’s a been a while since I started working on this. I recently saw someone making a bullet point list of things to do tomorrow and striking them off one by one. I am striking “finish the one year blog post” off today. I might come back with edits. Might.

I am by no means an introvert, but I have my moments when I disconnect. That being said, there are a LOT of people whom I had very nice chats with during the last year. And hence a lot of people to thank. I’ve started appreciating time and health like never before and hence thank you to all of you there who took even a minute of your time to have a chat. Especially Mehar, Kirana & Savithri having had the patience to answer my queries again and again and again…. and again.

Last but not the least… definitely not the least.. thank you Isaac and Pavan. Thank you for just mindlessly laughing with me on that Friday afternoon about every little random thing under God’s Green Earth. Ignoring work and ignoring everything else. Otherwise that would’ve been my last day at Travelopia.

by

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:

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

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

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

by

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!

by

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.

by

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!

 

by

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.