After well over a year

Its been well over a year. and my blog has remained more or less dormant. at various points of time i had been saying that it was because 1. i dont find blogging interesting anymore. 2. i am in an eternal block and 3. points 1 & 2 rephrased in manners that i myself cannot fathom. Anyways there was always an underlying point 0. I did not have broadband internet. But now things have changed. I bleddy have a connection finally. Eeeeha!! i can finally type my mind out and hit the 'publish this' button and feel good about ranting out all the things that are in my mind. I have finally come to the real world again as one of my tech savvy ubber geek friends put it. And what a sigh of relief it is!! feels good. Extremely good. And guess what chaos budha is celebrating its fourth birthday. its been one roller coaster of a four years. and its taught me a lot of lessons. its taught me about expressing myself, voicing my opinion by typing it out, and finally taught me how not to make a fool of myself by using that one amazing tool created for people like me - the spell check. Heres to more of such bitching / ranting / general gyan that the illusive / ellusive readers of mine enjoy. Blogging shall never die. Indians can after all never express thier opinions in less than 140 chars. Happy Diwali everyone and Happy B'day chaos budha. Break a leg. Have fun. Eat a lot of sweets, pollute the air with the firecrackers and then go into copenhagen with remorse. Amen.

Chaos Budha Is Alive

And will be here very soon. Mind it.

Dont Die For Your Customer..... Kill for him if required.

A good person doing sales will do anything for his customer, would even die for him. But a smart one, would ideally not be generous enough to sacrifice himself, he would rather kill for him. That way he saves his life as well as keeps his client happy. However stupid it might sound, i believe in this. You will only be knowing too well if you have been doing enterprise sales that, the customer requirements in most of the cases are varied, diverse and would initially make it look as if you might have to change your entire product code base. For those who freshly entered the domain of enterprise sales, the temptation to go ahead perform this rather suicidal move to change the product, in dire need to satisfy and gain at least one customer would sound lucrative. At times the move might have won them the customers confidence and at times it might have broken the the entire product. In either ways the move leads only to a loss loss situation. if it was the former case it would lead to a situation in which the product would have attained a highly customized state and would require several weeks if not months of roll back in order to get back to a generic state with which you could approach the next customer. If it was the latter then well, you did not even manage to get that one customer and because of the amount of work you already put in to customize it and then the amount of work required to roll back, what you essentially did is dig a long pit in which you voluntarily jumped and buried yourself. So do i mean to say that we should never think about customization to client requirements? Nope, no customization, means we will not get even potential clients. Customization to client requirements is essential. After all, the guy will only be interested in a product that solves his problem. Recently i attended a conference in which the speaker came up with an interesting point. i think that answers this dilemma. Know when to say "no". When ever you go in for a pitch always have a list of things in your mind that you will never accept to. If you are a die hard sales guy then get this input from your tech team. Make an effort to know when a particular customization / feature request would throw your product in the doldrums. Productizing is a complex subject altogether. Do not complicate things further by accepting unreasonable things that will throw your product into a turmoil. In other words do not martyr yourself and your company in order to win a client. Now if you are really smart then try to find the root issue the client is trying to solve by requesting such an unreasonable feature. Then try to find a workaround for this unreasonable request, that will not affect your core product drastically and that will at the same time solve the clients problems. In other words look at plugins, connectors, integrators, extension packs and if possible a child product / parent wrapper product that will address the situation aptly and elegantly. If you have a product whose primary and only scope is to sends emails to individuals, and a client wants to send bulk emails through it, then don't bother to touch your base product. Write a plugin wrapper that will do bulk emails. Most of the time when we start on a product we have a clear vision on what common minimum denominator it tries to address. The trick is to remember this common denominator when ever we go to a client. A Smart sales person will do a Steve jobs act. He will preach to the client what they really require, this will definitely be addressed by the common denominator(If it does not then you have an incomplete product.) Then he will sell the sizzler in the form of extensions / plugins that will not affect the integrity of the base product but then , will solve the clients requirements. I see this as the only sane and scalable way in which we can sell to clients having varied requirements, and at the same time maintain a complete base product that is stable and unbiased to any particular client's special needs.

Back from an amazing vacation

Am back from the vacation which i was soo looking forward to, and it did help definitely. Went there with three objectives: to see the monsoon clouds sweeping in, to grab a photo of a nilgiri thar and a malabar hornbill. On the second day i managed to catch a photo of a Nilgiri Thar, roaming wild, in a place and time least expected. I quickly managed to get hold of my camera and grab a photo of it.(will post the photo here soon) wonderful. We had been just a little late. We could not see the clouds sweep into the valley. But we managed to take photos of the clouds showering a thick almost completely opaque screen of rain, that completely covered the lush green mountains. As far as the hornbill is concerned. curses! i do not have a nice camera that can do a good zoom. i was positive that i spotted a hornbill, but my camera with its 3x zoom could only max zoom it from a spec to the size of a bee. to the natural eye it was quite clear, but the camera at max zoom could not compromise the shake. wish i had an SLR. in fact my dad and i have been planning for one for a long time now its about time that we indulged in one. A picture tour will soon be put up havent got the time to do it yet. And those who followed me in twitter @kausikram you would have seen the number of times i kept mentioning that the road was fabulous. in fact fabulous is an understatement. you have to be there and drive to actually discern what i am talking about here. next time you are anywhere near munnar or thekady take the road that links them both. munnar, thekady, travel india

Back To where it all starts

I am back. or rather i will be , in a few days time. i am taking a vacation, a much needed one at that, in which i hope to hit the restart button. I badly wanted to get away from the routine, wanted to break it for a while, clean up my mind and the restart with a new vigor. There are many things that i hope to do and there are many new plans in mind. Am thinking about a completely different marketing/branding strategy about which i am already excited. Am thinking about a complete personal makeover about which i am, if not entirely, at least guardedly excited. But all these cannot happen right away, there must be a break. Sadly real life is not kaizen enough. A jump is mandatory, a drastic change is required, only then will things get better. One more change that i promised myself is to keep updating this blog as regularly as possible. This blog has been instrumental in a lot of positive things that have happened to me and leaving it to rot away into a dilapidated state is grossly unfair. So here is to new beginnings!

Random Ramblings #(lost count)

Blogging is not the in thing any longer. i hate to admit it, but its not giving me the high that it usually used to. i am in probably the longest ever block that a blogger could possibly fall into and the fact that i STILL do not have a broadband connection at home is not helping me a wee bit. There are so many things that i want to write about, but i simply do not find the urge to open my system type it down and post it. Its surprising how over the past three years i have matured from an amateur blogger, writing on controversial topics for the shear pleasure of starting a comments war, to what i am today: a seldom blogging, if so, less than 100 words entry writing blogger. from a compulsive blogger to a person compelling himself to write because he does not want to break the chain by not posting for this month. Time which used to be a plenty, few years ago has become so dear. and the entire creativity that used to exist, has now given way to a deep sense of logic. i am turning laconic by the day and find the 140 characters that twitter offers me more than enough to express my thoughts. In fact i am seriously thinking of displaying my twitter feed in my blog. The past few months have had a great impact on me. It has helped resolve a lot; i mean A LOT of my confusions and has positively shown me a way. the early twenty crisis i guess is solved for me and i haven't been more resolute than ever on what i want to do / be in the future. I am blessed with an amazing job and an equally amazing boss, and not a single day in these past months have i ever resented on my decision to not join TCS. Had the chance of meeting my jigree dhost gumbal again and this time after coffee when each one of us lifted our wallets i could see a certain amount of pride in everyone of us there. it was our money. money that we earned! the transition from the college going kid to the young adult is complete, i guess. Among the things that have changed is not only the monetary freedom, but the amount of responsibility that has crept into each one of us. The happy-go-luck college days are long gone and probably will never come back. but we are not complaining. We like the new roles we have dawned, we have transcended into it with an elegance that is surprising even to us. My faith in democracy is slowly going down. i would prefer a real life B.D.F.L to take charge of India. Am hooked to abba more than ever. i would die to hear them sing Fernanado and Super Trouper. I competely forgot all the rock / metal music i used to hear. I cant remember more than four lines of metallica "turn the page". Enigma comes a close second but i am absolutely hooked to Abba. I want to listen to chandrakatha's theme music now. that tunes is sitting in my head and i cant find a link to it anywhere.

Agile Chennai : and we are back

Sliver Stripe Software Sponsored the first agile chennai meet for the year and man! was it a hit. I was told that Venkat Subramanium was a good speaker, after the two hour speech that kept everyone captivated, i should say the word "good" is a gross understatement. He is probably one of the greatest speakers of agile development. And it was amazing that we started the agile Chennai initiative with his talk. Venkat, Sid and Me at the end of the session. Venkat stressed on the need for having local user groups, for agile practitioners to help each other out. Silver Stripe the company and its employees personally will do all they can to support such a community. we already have had some positive external support as well. Syed Bhai , who is also a certified scrum master himself, has been all enthusiastic and has helped us from day one. And so have Balaji of Spritle and the entire ThoughtWorks Chennai gang. Hats off to you guys. And yes finally if you are agile and are from chennai then do make it a point to track chennaiagile.pbwiki.com for all things agile happening in our city. you can find the slides from the session here.