Flex Time

The last 3 to 4 weeks were terribly tiresome. The application that we were building was already running on a stiff deadline and we had entered into the meat of it at this point. It was thrilling to execute everything that was earlier planned. I kept foraging my desk draw for the invaluable information I had had hurriedly scribbled some weeks back. They help me to remind myself of what exactly was discussed. Somehow, no soft copy could do that for me.

Anyways, working late night continuously has helped me gain some decent level of fluency in coding with Flex. The Java Web Services were pretty straightforward.
Also, since I was at times given company by my colleague who is from Orissa, I have learnt how to swear in Orriya. I often swear at the Flex builder for being so shamelessly slow or at some of the insipid methods or definitions in ActionScript.

Somehow a few of the bigger challenges have been taken care of. There are a few more to go before we reach the comfort zone. Of course, when the testing phase is on it could all come down – but then that is a different story altogether.

Dhoni - Astonishing

Due to various reasons I was not following cricket so closely for the last 2 or 3 years. What I missed was the big wave of the IPL 2008 and the T20 World Cup which India had won.

Along with all that I had missed the growth of Mahendra Singh Dhoni to where he is right now. I wish to hear from some of my cricket fanatic friends on how Dhoni came up to be captain surpassing people like Dravid, Sehwag and Yuvraj.

Anyways as I try to catch up with more cricket now, I can easily tell that I am not surprised a bit about his batting abilities. His level of consistency really astonishes me. When you look at the scorecard, his scores would almost always be atleast in the decent 40's.

Somehow he strongly reminds me of Michael Bevan, former Australian batsman. It will always be a pleasure to watch the game of such class players.

What real experience gives you

A good friend of mine once told me something about work, something which I already believed in and I found it so nice to know that he shared the same opinion.

To quote him:

"I take up any task at work as if it was my first assignment. It makes me cautious and gets rid of any complacency. I get my confidence to grow as the work moves on"

I pretty much do the same. It helps me in a few things -

1. It gives me room to pay attention to detail

2. When I work with someone new, they immediately find it easy working with me.

3. Chances of failure would be minimal

This is what, I think, experience had really taught me.

Now, to explain why I am telling all this. It is because of this incident that happened at work all along last week. There was a key portion of our project which had both technical and functional challenges to tackle. The requirement was not clearly defined and the scope was too vague to say the least.

We had been discussing this over and over for the last 2 weeks, and had been merely recording our discussions and kept pushing it over to the next session as it was never really nearing completion.

This is the point when this person from another team was shifted to our project. Since all the other resources were tightly held up with tasks, we decided to assign this task to this new member of our team.

He was a confident person, but anyone could easily sense the air of pride around him. He asked a lot of questions, but nothing really related to the project. But that was totally fine, as long as the work gets done.

But what stumped all of us was the first discussion we had with him in which we tried to explain the task that we had just assigned to him. He never really seemed to listen to what we had to say and quickly jumped to provide the solution. He was clearly trying hard to impress, so we could forgive him for that. But it was his tone and attitude which was totally looking down upon us which pissed us off.

We decided to hang on with him for now on the hopes that he would settle down as he starts facing the wave from the top management. Sadly, that was all one could do even if you wanted to help him.

It happened exactly as we had expected - One tech discussion were he presented his approach and he was totally ripped apart. Now, he was ready for us to work with. He is not as unapproachable as he was before. I am glad that it all went fine.

Could it get any better?

In one of my earlier posts, there was this interesting comment from a friend of mine:

“.. it is not often that people write about how wonderful their days were..”

- which I think is perfectly true in most cases. So my dear friend here goes.

1. At work, we made a presentation of a small system (which we had been building in the last few weeks) to the Finance team and they were totally bowled over by the perfect way we had trapped the system requirement in our design. Yeah baby!
   
   
2. There was this other project which had to be designed based on the R&D done over the past few weeks. Working non-stop for 2 days at a stretch, I had proposed a design architecture factoring in all scenarios – and it got approved. Fist Bump!
   
   
3. Good riddance of the cold – I am now healthy as a horse. So is everyone at home.
   
   
4. All my iPod’s are fully charged, and I am listening to ‘em as I type this.
   
   
5. My phone line is restored, internet is back.
   
   
6. I caught up with some old friends online and also some people from my previous employment. It was so nice to see emails from all of them. Fills me with pleasant memories
   
   
7. My friend who was hurting from an accident is now quickly recovering.
   
   
8. I hired another guy to get my construction work at home and that will be taken care of.
   

Funny how things can take a turn around in just a few days.

Now I wonder – Could it get any better?...

My Newest Blog - http://dreamrecalls.blogspot.com/

I am a big time dreamer. Seriously…I feel like there is this guy inside me who meticulously weaves all these vivid illusions that feel so real and authentic.

If one could compile all the dreams I have had, we could make a hundred movies on almost all genres. More than just the number of dreams, it is the sense of exactness and the attention to detail given by this guy inside me.

I decided to write about it and went on to create a brand new blog devoting it entirely for some of the strangest, funniest, erotic, horrific and mostly nonsensical dreams I have had.

While setting I up I wanted to use a nice looking template. I had to spend quite some time to get that up and working. So much so that I think I should post a note on my technical blog about it.

But anyways, please do visit my new blog extension at:

http://dreamrecalls.blogspot.com/

Could it get any worse?

The last two weeks were probably the worst days I have had in a long time now. When things go down, they go down together.

1. At work, we lost a good opportunity which came our way, due to the incessant stupidity of a few managers. They never learn.
2. At home, the construction work that we had started a couple months back went on a standstill.
3. I caught up with a terrible cold and was sick all these days, giving company to the rest of the victims at home.
4. A friend of mine met with an accident and had bruised herself so badly. Another friend of mine (who owes me money) never returned my calls.
5. My phone line at home went bust and along with that went my internet too.
6. Back to work, I was asked to help another team with some R&D on a “product” they were building and things looked a little bit, or I should say pretty much hopeless. I need to wait and see how that comes along.

Burdened with all this and more, I woke up to this Saturday morning praying to see some change of luck. My prayers were answered with a power failure, goddamnit. I called up the service guys and find out that the power wouldn’t be restored until 5 in the evening. Load shedding – they call it. Yeah I heard them right.

Not having anything to do and not in a position to go out anywhere, I had to find myself something to keep me occupied. I sifted through the newspaper but could never really focus on any news. I found this Sudoku puzzle.

I have never tried one before, so I decided to give it a shot. I realized an hour later, how miserable I was. After spending all that time and thinking that I had solved almost 60% of the puzzle, I found I was wrong all the way through. I knew I had to backtrack but I did not know from what point I had to resume. I then noticed something – Below the puzzle there were these words: DIFFICULTY RATING and beside that were five stars, of which only one, was shaded. DAMN! That was one of the easiest puzzles, and I went through with it for so long, and was left with just a messy piece of paper, pencil markings all over, so brutally treated that it would tear the next time you write on.

I did not feel like eating at all. Anything I tried to eat, tasted so bitter. I would have listened to some music if only I had charged my iPod. I picked up a book to read which I had left unfinished for almost a year now. I had to read through some of the earlier pages to remind myself of the plot and to get re-introduced with the characters. The story could not get any more predictable; at one point I even felt that I could have done a better job. The story writer just was not capable of keeping secrets. She had littered clues all over the place like a stray dog.

I then remembered where I had bought this book. It was a roadside shop near Harvard Square. I should have left it were it belonged.

I was patiently waiting for the power to be restored, wondering if a day could get any worse than this. I hope not…

Opportunity Lost

I am typing this out of complete irritation on what happened over the last few days at work. A Singapore client, who had recently shifted away from us, came back with one last request for an urgent requirement. A website needed to be revamped, scheduled to be completed by July 2nd. Since the new support team based out of Beijing would need some time to ramp up, they emailed us with whatever requirement information they had.

The first email arrived on Thursday the 21st of this month. We promptly had a conference call to discuss the feasibility of the changes and to hash out our initial doubts. The call went well and we were informed about the rough timelines targeted. The stakeholder from the client side asked us to explore and provide options on different approaches to quickly get this website revamped.

Our Project manager promised to send the estimates either the same day or on Monday, the 25th. Within the next 4 hours, I went through the style guide, wire frame and specs that had been provided and came up with a reasonably fair estimate. Again, to explain the estimation techniques followed by people here I would need to dedicate an entire post here. Anyways, I was open for any change. The estimation went for a total of 11 revisions in the next two days. Every time they wanted me to revise, the request was to increase the man days. I am quoting my manager here - “Can you please make the coding and unit testing as 31 days instead of 22?”

This approach defeats the whole purpose of estimation. He never really tells me what he fears about the project when I ask him and now, I don’t even know what his real intention is – does he want to take up this project or not? I personally, would never even think of letting a project like this pass by, especially when there are over a dozen resources warming the bench already.

While things were at this state, next arrived the big blow. It was decided to get this reviewed by another project manager. Trust me this “other guy” is a real scumbag. The only credential he has to himself is that he was actually an employee of this client company in Singapore. As expected, he let his whims and fancies to cut loose and started babbling. He felt the already bloated estimate was too “optimistic” and was so confident that it can never be completed as per our estimate. Now that hurts. But what hurts more is the way the rest of the ass holes swayed their head in acceptance.

I usually reserve a separate worksheet for jotting down the assumptions and to point out the questions if any. It is a common practice followed in all estimations. He looked at that and said you may first have to clarify all these points before you can send the actual effort estimate. When informed that the estimate is already overdue, his reaction was fantastic. To quote him exactly – “So what? They sent the request last Thursday, right? You can even reply after this Thursday. Who cares? …”

Who cares??? I am like – “Goddamnit I care! … What has gone into him?” Does this dipshit not realize the phase we are going through? We could at least cut on some operational costs for the next couple months.

After almost a week since the initial request came, the only reply that went from our side was this –
“We have a few assumptions and questions. Please arrange for a conf call. We can then prepare the estimates.”

SAD! PATHETIC! – I felt like screaming.
It has been three days since and there has been no reply from her.

God, I miss my previous company in this aspect. Those guys were smart and encouraged me in that front. Not even in the faintest dreams can I see them letting this slip through. They would have devoured this opportunity.

Maybe I am wrong in understanding this whole situation. Maybe the client was testing the waters. Maybe all she wanted was an estimate to benchmark with. But STILL, there was at least some chance for us to get some billable work for a few weeks.

The point I would like to stress here is – WE NEVER EVEN TRIED. We missed this one right under our nose. And I hate it when I come to think that I could not do anything about it.