My new found love!

No, it's not a person I have fallen in love with, but it's something that most people love, "Reading", to be more precise reading books. For people who don't know me well, reading books is something that didn't come to naturally nor did I love the idea of reading books, seeing those huge books, I used to wonder, how do these people read such huge books? I really felt those who read books were all Bozos, I was wrong, very very wrong! I had tried my hand in reading books, but I never really got into the habit of reading books regularly, until one fine day.

             I had a few landmark vouchers worth a grand and I couldn't buy any electronic goods with it, so I decided to splurge my vouchers on something that I had vowed never to buy, BOOKS! I always felt books were not something to invest on, you get e-books for free, right? So why buy books..
But then I had no choice that day, henceforth I made up my mind to get some books for myself.

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen

The above really applied to me till this day!

Me and a couple of other close friends hitch-hiked to Forum mall, where Landmark was located, the journey was memorable, my dad allowed me to use the car, I was on the wheel and all three of us had a laugh riot during the journey. We reached the place, parked the car in the lot and there again we attracted the attention of people around us, with our loud laughter.

We wandered around  the mall and finally headed to Landmark, I had drawn up a list of books to buy, without prior knowledge of how much it would cost me, but I decided to buy three books, the list being

1. "Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson". I idolise Steve Jobs, hence this was an obvious choice.

2. "Losing my Virginity", Autobiography of Richard Branson, someone who has really done wonders according to me.

3. This was undecided, I really didn't think that I would be able to buy another one..

When I was checking out books in the store, I couldn't find the books I was looking for, on enquiring, I found out that the book on "Richard Branson" was out of stock. So I had to look for another book. My friend suggested me to buy two books, which happened to be " I did it my way", a book on Amir Khan and another book called "Dongri to Dubai", a book on the mumbai underworld.

I took them all home and the book "Steve Jobs", my favourite was a huge book, over 800 pages. I stared at the book for sometime, puzzled about its mamoth size and doubting my ability to complete the book. After a while I said "Screw it, let's read it". I started off, the honeymoon period of a couple of days was over, yet my determination to read the book continued. Infact I loved the book so much, that I skipped my daily routine of turning on the comp for a couple of days, I was engrossed in the book, plugging in my earphones and songs playing in the background, the eyes were just focussed on the book. I was able to beautifully visualise every line I read, missing no lines, but enjoying each line. It was an amazing experience. I could literally see Steve Jobs in front of me.
The love had happened and there was no turning back, I finally fell in love with amazing world of books. There was no turning back and the love grew stronger with time. As told in the movie "Jab tak hai Jaan" ( I am not an SRK fan at all and I strongly disliked the movie too ), "har Ishq qa waqt hota hai" (every love has a right moment) and my time to love books finally arrived. 

FOSS, How it changed my life??

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FOSS stands for Free and Open Source Software

It's been about a year and a half since CONF.KDE,IN happened, people who were part of it would certainly know, how successful it was. Conf Kde was where my journey into Free and Open Source Softwate truly began. Helping organising the conference was a great satisfaction and an amazing learning curve to me. Meeting some amazing people who are really inspirational and friendly. I took back a lot of things from the conference.

If anyone of you have seen or heard “Harsha Bhogle's” talk at IIM-A, he speaks about the need for godfathers, role models in a particular field. He says because of the absence of such a god-fatherly figure in his field, he looked upto the cameramen who did a flawless job while capturing various cricket matches, he was in awe of the scorers and statisticians who had numbers of batsmaen and bowlers at the back of their hand, they were his role models and godfathers. This happened to me too.

In my life, in the things that interested me, there weren't many people whom I could idolize or look upto, I was constantly searching for people whom I could look upto for inspiration and guidance. While all this was running inside my head, one part of my mind told me to look at people in this amazing FOSS community. People who were highly passionate about the work they did, people who lived and breathed Free software. It was amazing how people in this community bonded with each other over codes, programming stalwarts spoke and encouraged budding geeks and coders. After witnessing this, I realised that these were my “Godfathers”.

During the Conf.KDE.IN in March 2011, I was lucky to meet and work with a few of the amazing FOSS guys, a few names here, Shantanu Tushar, Pradeepto, Sinny, Sudhendu, Madhusudan (he happens to be my bro's bestie ), Aditya Kavoor and so many other people. They were such awesome people, I was in awe of them. Working for the conference alongside them, I learnt a lot of things, especially the need to totally devote youreself to the thing you love to do, eat sleep and breathe it, only then will you be able to reach great heights in your field of interest. While working alongside them, I could see their love, devotion and passion for what they did. They took a lot of pride in what they did. Never were they tired of it. I was an outsider there, with no programming background at all, they made me feel at home, treating me as part of one big and happy family, listening to what I had to stay, guiding me and helping me at the work I was assigned to do and most of all motivating me at times. There is a Sanskrit saying which tell us, “knowledge which is not shared is always a waste”, people here are always ready to share!

It's through experiences like these, that we discover something new about ourself, something that could help shape our careers or lives.

While campaigning for this conference, my job was to go to various colleges and talk to students and convince them that this conference was amazing and by attending this conference, there would be a lot of value addition. I had about 5 colleges to campaign. Initially I was skeptical, but these folks convinced me and filled me up with confidence. I started the campaigning job with my college, went to various classes with a poster in hand spoke to hundreds of students on how this conference could change their lives. Some were courteous to listen to me and some weren't, but I kept my head high and did my job with a lot of pride and passion, which of course I had learnt from these FOSS folks. Fortunately my campaigning cameo paid off and as a result, no of people attending the conference shot up. While I was campaigning, I realised, that I enjoyed promoting/marketing it and to an extent was good at it too. This helped me make a very good choice in life, the choice was to take up marketing as part of my profession. Judging whether I was really good at it or this was just my self-pride was not very hard to figure out. Successful and knowledgeable people told me that I was indeed good at it ( They were not telling me just to make me feel good ), their decision was backed by some keen observations and good critical judgment. This made me feel good about myself and help me chalk out a path for my career. Today I work part time for a startup called Tailspin, where I get to do what I am passionate about and what I love to do. If I had not been part of FOSS, I would never have been able to discover what I loved. This is one of the greatest things that FOSS has given me and I will always be grateful for that.

The positives I derived don't end here. I made great friends, people with whom I went to movies, had dinner and shared a laugh with. Apart from a lot of value addition to my career, I made some great friends.

“FOSS did change my life”

This is Vattam signing off, until next time, goodbye and sayonara!

How one man's cleverneess, made lives of VTU Students Stress Free!

For those of you who have done their Engineering under VTU, you all know the fact that the most horrific thing about this university is viewing the results. We all have to sit in front of the computer and log on to the website and enter out University Seat Number and keep pressing the “F5” button to know whether our results are out. To describe the whole experience, it's like a coma patient who could die anytime. One guy from BMS college of engineering, ended all our woes and found an awesome solution. Here's how he did it. Let's refer him by the name “Mr Geek”.

During his third year of Engineering, Mr Geek fed up of the result woes, decided to write a piece of code which would check the result page and refresh it by itself and notify him when the results are out. It was a simple thing but it had a clear cut sign of ingenuity. He was a hostelite and this news about his masterful invention spread like wild fire in the hostel. During the time of the result, “Mr Geek's” room would be flooded with other students waiting to find out their results.

Everytime, the results were out, people would flood “Mr Geek's” hostel room and his phone would be buzzing every second with calls and texts from everyone. This was literally a pain in the a**, so he decided to take it to the next level and making this idea into a full fledged website which would help people in reducing the anxiety and also relieve him from dealing with a flooded room :P. He came up with this site, http://vtu.shaan7.info/, where you click on the link, enter your University Seat number and your mail id, you get your results as soon as the results are out directly to your mail id. It worked great!

During the time of my results, I was not in station, but I had access to the internet via my smartphone. I was on my way back to Bangalore, me and my friends had been to coorg. While we were returning back, everyone around were hooked onto their phones, constantly checking if the results were out or not. I was a little nervous too. But, luckily thanks to “Mr Geek”, I had subscribed to the above mentioned link and I knew that as soon the result would be out, I would get a mail. The digital watch indicated it was 7 PM and we were almost nearing bangalore, I got a beep on my phone and I checked out what it was. The phone told me I had received a mail, I opened the mail there were the whole list of marks, the class I had obtained. I was happy to see the results and I was happy to know that “Mr Geek's” inventions worked flawlessly, I shouted to my friends, “Guys Results are out!”, they all started checking out the website, which would take an eternity to load, while I sat there and enjoyed the music that played on my headphones. Mr Geek was the hero of the day for me, he made my life more Liveable and Enjoyable and most of all “anxiety free”. I went home and forwarded the mail to Mr Geek and as a mark of thanking him, liked his page,

and shared it on my wall,

If you are interested in taking a look at how to do it, check out the link

https://github.com/shaan7/vturesults

Mr Geek is my long time KDE friend, Shantanu Tushar, his blog roll

http://www.shantanutushar.com/.

So, the next time you want view your results stress free, you all know what to do, just register at the linkhttp://vtu.shaan7.info/ and stay stress free during results and of course do like its page on FB,

https://www.facebook.com/vturesultsnotify

Thanks Shantanu, we owe you!