Category: Personal

Life

Life is going so fast. It feels like there are so many things to do: Project priorities, study, learning, career, etc,. But when you stop, think and close your eyes, give yourself a break to think just about yourself, your inner happiness, the real life, emotions, something strangely hits you and you begin to wonder if you are missing so much in this busy life. And then….. all you want to do is simply sit on a rooftop with someone at 2 AM, talk endlessly, and just look at the sky, not worrying about anything that’s going on in your life.

“It started with a friend request”

A few weeks ago, I finished reading a book – “It started with a friend request” by Sudeep Nagarkar. Before purchasing this book, I had read its summary and reviews on amazon.in. I thought it would be little similar to my life. But well, it was totally different :). However, I ended up enjoying this book. It was the first time when I picked up a love story to read. Mostly, I read biographies, technical and management books.

Though this book was a love story, I (pretty much me here) liked the “corporate life” part in this book. I enjoyed reading the chapter “Corporate Atyachaar” – what an amazing chapter really! Here goes a brief insight of this chapter:

…The lady manager had to report to the head of the department. When she entered his cabin, he asked her, “Are you free tonight”? She immediately smiled and said yes. The next moment, that rascal gave her a hundred sheets to type out.”

… Before Leaving, I would like to tell you about the circle of life. Many of you might be engineers or MBA graduates but in your practical life, the sooner you understand the difference between your college and office life, the better it will be for you. The sooner you adapt to the changes, the faster you’ll excel in life. In college, we had different professors assigned for different subjects, but here we have only one task and only one manager. Your task is to improve your performance. In college, you bunked your lectures and spent money whereas here if you bunk, you lose money. In college, you were at least aware about your exam dates, but here can anyone tell clearly about the audit dates?

If you score less marks in an examination but still manage to clear it, you need not to be answerable to anyone. But here if you score less, which means if your performance goes down, then you are answerable to all your higher authorities. Why? Because in college you paid the fees and here, you are getting paid for your work. The most important difference is that during your college days your girlfriend was proud about your clothes but now she would only feel proud if you are paid heavy salaries. Thus my dear, you better adapt yourself accordingly. You should always remember “To improve is to change but to be perfect is to change often”.

And yeah, the author really tried to add “extra” romance in his book. He beautifully expressed love between Alessha and Akash. Overall, it was a nice reading.

Sudeep Nagarkar’s writing was quite simple, an easy reading book. Well, his writing has left me inspired me to write my own book I just need to work on my vocabulary and grammar.

Web Development (The Learning Days)

In my last post, I shared my school days’ moments with you. Continuing from there, I’ll share my next step in life i.e. career in web development.

After my high school got over, I had two months of holidays because generally colleges starts in mid of June (and all my all exams were over by April). So I started going to my uncle’s office. Zanetine was started by my uncle, Gurinder Singh, which later went on to collaborate with Navdeep Singh. I joined Zanetine as a junior team member, and now we were a team of three members.

I didn’t really have any knowledge about web development stuff when I joined Zanetine. I was just eager to learn programming and I was so much addicted to computers. At that time, I used to have a computer with 128 MB RAM, 1200 MHz processor and ~40 GB HDD.

I still remember my first day at Zanetine. My uncle didn’t teach me HTML tags, CSS, etc. He rather taught me about standards, semantics, quality, and web accessibility. I think I can’t will never be able to forget that 45 minutes session with my uncle. I have really learnt a lot from him.

So it was going great. I used to spend most of my time reading eBooks and working on small tasks. At that time, AJAX, Web 2.0, and even IE7 were new things I remember I once got a very exciting assignment from my uncle – It was “Designing and Developing a Webpage for CSSZengarden”.

Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, I used to learn photoshop from online tutorials (PSD Tuts). Every Saturday was reserved for learning designing while other days were for development. During those days, I used to think that I design quite cool stuff, but now when I look at them, they look so funny. At that time I used to think, I designed very cool stuff, but those look funny now.

And about CSSZengarden, I must say this that assignment assignement has really taught me a semantic way of writing html, browser compatibility issues, and standards, etc. I remember at that time I once developed a webpage there, which was supported in IE5.5 as well. Alas, CSSZengarden was not accepting entries any more then. So it turned out to be more of a was just a practice exercise.

I, thereafter, joined TSGGS Khalsa College and got admission into Bachelors of Computer Applications. Well, our universities really have really very old syllabus, and our education system is not very good. Students run for grades and positions, but they don’t have practical knowledge. I hardly worried about marks, position, or grades. I just cared about practical knowledge, skills & programming. Hence, I ended up spending spent most of my time at Zanetine office.

I didn’t spend much time at college as much as I would spend spent at Zanetine office. Awesome days!!

At Zanetine, I joined as a junior team member. And slowly I started developing nice skills in HTML, CSS, JS, etc., and started working on live projects. I remember, the day when I got my first live project and communicated with a client. I would get got nightmare of complaints/issue raised by my client. lol. I believe I was doing things in a correct way (fixing ugly html code in wysiwyg editors), but the client would want wanted things to be done in really quick. And this  was the thing that eventually taught So this thing taught me about the deadlines, the communication with clients, and the main thing “A client is always right”.

School Days

I was thinking of to share my life experiences with you. So today I am sharing something from my school days.

I really enjoyed my school days. I completed my matriculation from DAV School and secondary education from Town Hall. I took physics, mathematics, chemistry and computer science as my major subjects. I really loved (and still love) mathematics though I wasnt very good at it. I really loved computer science and physics. I always hated Organic Chemistry ugh. I used to attend online video lectures from MIT OCW, IIT, Yale Univeristy etc. Really awesome time.

In school time I made really great friends and still we are best friends. I must mention Vishal, Mandeep, Karan Hitesh and Ranjit are really awesome mates. Vishal and I used to study together and develop small programs in BASIC. We really enjoyed solving those small mathematics problems using BASIC. 🙂

In my secondary level education, I didnt really have much time to write programs because I was quite busy with Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry. But yeah I loved C language and used to write programs in C.

After my school I wanted to pursue B.Tech (Engineering in Computer Science). But due to some financial issues I didnt opt for engineering course (I think it was a good choice 😀 ). After my school I joined my uncle’s company, Zanetine. There I started learning Web Development stuff. I’ll write about it in my next post. Stay tuned !!!