i, prash

On June 29th, 1998 I reported to Infosys Technologies in Bangalore’s Electronics City. It was the first day of my career as a Software Professional and nothing could have prepared me for the wild ride it’s been so far.

10 years, four employers, numerous clients, a software boom, a software bust, a little bit of Microsoft-hating, Java-loving, Microsoft-loving, Java-hating, Ruby-On-Rails-loving … if you think Software Engineering is just all about riding the next big wave (until the next big wave comes along), then you think right.

Meanwhile the more things change, the more they truly remain the same. My application server still spits out stack-traces expecting me to understand hundreds of lines of exceptions to figure out why it failed when it should have told me in plain English. Software still fails to work when you most expect it to (and worse, it sometimes works when you are confident it shouldn’t). Service-Oriented-Architecture, or SOA, is DOA. Amazon is still the only company that understands website-usability.

And, oh, real flesh-and-blood people are still needed to write software. Guess I’ll be shifting 0s and 1s around just a little while longer!

Blu, an Italian graffiti artist has created an amazing video of a series of murals he painted on building walls. A magnificent effort that simply left me speechless:

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
[Via KK]

Fortune Magazine’s May 12th issue features “The Best Advice I Ever Got” - nuggets of wisdom shared by select leaders of the industry. Among the many trite pieces of advice like “Be true to yourself” and “Do the right thing”, I think only one stood out:

Indra Nooyi recalls her father advising her to always “Assume Positive Intent“:

Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent. You will be amazed at how your whole approach to a person or problem becomes very different. When you assume negative intent, you’re angry. If you take away that anger and assume positive intent, you will be amazed. Your emotional quotient goes up because you are no longer almost random in your response.

While not every piece of advice in this article is earth-shattering, some have indeed dramatically changed the lives of the recipient. For example, Larry Page’s adviser at Stanford University told him to “pursue the study of the link-structure of the web” and look where it got him.

Which ones did you like?

“i, prash” is 3 years old today (2007, 2006, 2005) and while i would love to write more often here, I see that I still get about 20 odd visitors a day and this got me to thinking, “Who are these people?” and more importantly, “How did they find me?”.

Well here are a few searches that recently brought people to this site …

1. “Temple in SPB Colony“
2. “Translation of Ninaithu”
3. “pronounce Narayanan“

I don’t want to mess with this kind of success in drawing the masses to this site, so look forward to more inane, keyword-poor posts in the near future!

Oh, and a new experiment begins.

The best games have the simplest rules. There was Tetris, Pacman and now the game from hell that is certain to destroy any little productivity you have left for today: Spin The Black Circle
“Lead a ball trough a rotating maze full of deadly traps” - Ah the simplicity of it all!
This (Level 10) is where I am right now (but don’t even bother competing - I have decided to skip work today so I should be way ahead by the time you read this!):

Keep away if you value your time!
[Via Waxy]