Yesterday, it was my Parallel & Distributed Systems exam. The last of the 4 subjects for this semester, which itself was last of the 8 semester we have in an Engineering degree course. Which is to say that Engineering is finally over. I am pretty dense about most things outside of computers, but even for someone like me, realization of the fact that a very cheerful phase of my life has now come to an end, it was a bit difficult to take in.

I remember the first day of my engineering, the same way I remember the first day of my junior college. Both my junior college and degree college were far away from home (60kms each side), and I selected them purposely. I liked cities from a very tender age, and selecting a college in a city quenched that thirst for me. Cities are quite fascinating, especially due to the fact that I come from a sub-suburban town that closed its shops by 8 at night. On my first day, I was clueless, just like others. I didn’t know that in each semester we were going to have different subjects. Like most others, I had not one friend. I looked up my name on a board and went to the classroom it mentioned. I made my first friend in the Chemistry lab on the 11th floor, and that guy stayed my best friend throughout college, which is nice. Made quite a few friends in Engineering, as opposed to junior college, which is a huge improvement in my social skills.

Love for technology

I choose computer engineering (after realizing that computer science is not an option for the academically dull kids), and I got the college seat in the third and final round of admissions. If that wouldn’t have happened, I had planned for BSc, because I wanted to study Physics as well. During admissions, I knew computers was my first preference. I had already been into computers from 2-3 years then. Didn’t know how to write any code as such, but I did have a good idea of what I’m getting myself into, given my interests in Netsec from sometime then. I knew stuff back then, and I remember the cyber wars time. I wanted to be more than a guy who used exploits and php shells, I wanted to be the one writing them (Arjun, thank you for inspiring). I was so crazy about cybersec back then, that I managed to get promoted with grace marks in 11th standard.

One of the most interesting difference between junior college and engineering was that in junior college, people (except Kunal, who liked tech) around me thought I was crazy, because talking about webservers, exploits and sql injection was something that would turn me on. On the other hand, things were different in Engineering. I had a friend or two who used to understand what I’m up to, were equally fanatics about something in computers, and shared the same passion for programming and solving problems. Suddenly, I wasn’t weird. Thanks to landing in the right place, where I think I belonged.

I got into blogging just the day after my last HSC exam if I remember well. The original plan was to make money, but the end result was that it taught me a lot about tech in general. It taught me things related to web hosting, numerous CMSs that I used back then, I played with my first VPS around this time. And to match the OS on the VPS, I started using CentOS on my PC too. It was then I learnt how multiple sites get hosted from a single IP address. How SEO is done and how affiliate marketing hows. None of that actually made me any money, but the foundation it gave me was later used when I later got into web development. It is a great feeling when you’re writing PHP code and then suddenly you exclaim, “Oh, so this is how SQL injection actually works. Cool!”. Although nothing can beat the feeling of writing AJAX for the first time to retrieve data from a remote REST endpoint. I was so excited, I even called my mom to show it to her. “Arre waah, chaan! (Oh wow, nice)” is all she said. Never mind.

I got into competitive programming in my first year. We were taught C, and I and my friend had just discovered Hacker Earth back then through our seniors. Not much later, I realized that I can save myself a lot of efforts if I knew how to code a second language. Thus came Python. I did some competitive coding with it, but my interest quickly shifted to learning Django, which was this cool thing that looked like a CMS but wasn’t a CMS. People called it a “framework”. Now what on earth was that? And what is this MVC thing? Can’t we all stick to simpler things like writing SQL queries in PHP files and echoing HTML though them? Why need all this complexity.

But wrong I was all this time. Models had to be separated from views and then you can focus more on what mattered, and less on struggling with the structure of your own code. During my time with C and Python, I wrote a some comparison articles because it was fascinating to me how different both these technologies were.

Then I fell in love PHP, and then C++ which was when I tried getting back to competitive programming. I had given Debian Wheezy a try then. Soon I read about the launch of Jessie. I came across this meet-up announcement about Jessie’s launch party. I attended it, which was the first meet-up that I had attended. Although I went there purely for the Debian launch party and getting my hands on the ISO, the outcome was that I got to hear people talk about various other things, real web development being one of them, and it was amazing.

In 3rd year, we had web technologies as a subject. It was when I got to learn Javascript properly. I knew it from as long as I had used the Internet, but never really understood it, or the power it had. I learned it in depth, and found a new love. I used Js to write most of my projects, and I really owe a lot of my current skills to that little decision of not just learning Js, but understanding it under the hood.

Towards the second half of the 3rd year, I got involved with Project Lumos, another life changing experience for me. Then things got pretty busy, and final year came and went without much happening from a technological learnings point of view.

Travel

I traveled a lot more than what I was known for before engineering. I watched movies in theaters, went to good restaurants, had fun with nice people who actually cared about me. I even went on my first trip with friends out of state, which was in Uttarakhand. I have learned tonnes of social skills through some of these people around me, and during my time in Delhi, I learned how much do these social skills and people skills matter. In fact, your technical skills sometimes come second to these people skills. “In a way, life is what but the relationships you build along the way”, a person I respect a lot said once.

Misc

Apart from that, I got to speak a lot in front of people, in class, during Project Lumos meetings, in the committee that I was a part of, etc. Since I never spoke publicly, I had a fear of doing it. I got over it during engineering, which is a great thing. Expressing your thoughts in clear words in a skill very few actually have, and while I’m not there yet, I’ve made a start towards it. I learned to stay organized, use notes, reminders and other stuff. I have tried to actively help my friends and classmates with their stuff. Helping others have given me great deal of satisfaction, and while it may not translate to anything, it surely helped me get my own foundations and concepts right, which is a byproduct of teaching.

Most people and their opinion don’t matter. I realized that there’s a very little group of people around you whom you should never let down. Don’t waste time impressing the rest. I learnt I’m missing on some good experiences by always caring about what people might think. Once I let go of it, life was even more colorful.

A great deal of all of this people skills have come from the book by Dale Carnegie, How to win friends and influence people. A no BS book that I would totally recommend to each and every person reading this, irrespective of your field of work, given all of us share the same Human abstract class.

What I could’ve done better

Now that I know what mattered more than most other things, I think if I were to take up admission in engineering again, there are a few things I would do differently. I think a lot of unnecessary emphasis is given to academic excellence when actually, it was the least that mattered. I think I’ve spent a lot of time studying for exams when I could’ve studied to gain actual practical knowledge by building projects. I mean, reading from those question papers, studying answers from the point of view of scoring marks is time that went down the drain. Optimizing your time best to get the essence of the subject, some practical exposure as well as a score just enough to keep you going, that is what I would do the next time.

I would talk to more people, send more emails. I had always been hesitant to talk to people from startups and organizations that I loved. I felt I was under-qualified for most of the things people do in tech. Although, not properly qualified either, but if you just assume that and don’t reach out to people, you’ll never move to the next level. For starters, suppose you learnt Python this semester, and you are confident enough to work on a project. Start contacting people and ask them if you have a way to contribute to their project. That way, you can get a part time role over the semester vacation at a good place, and get to do things professionally.

Make open source contributions. If you don’t feel like working as an intern, contribute to open source. I’m amazed at how much I overestimated open source and thought that getting into it is too big a deal. No it isn’t. If you know what you’re doing, just pick up a tool that you use (say Chromium), look into their bug trackers and write a patch for a bug that you can understand and solve. Then compare it to the accepted patch. When I did it, I was surprised to find that the solution that I wrote (which I thought was ‘unprofessional, inefficient and too simple’) was exactly what the solution which was accepted was. The message here is, you’re not as stupid as you might think, and the people who build all the amazing stuff that you can’t live without a single day were not any smarter than you are. Know basic Javascript, Python or C++? Any one? Great, you can officially ‘author’ some part of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Know how to write a language fluently? You can write documentation for them. It’s that easy.

Make connections. Connections are just people you know, whom you can call up and ask for a favor. Your friend is your hangouts connection. Similarly, get to know people in various walks of life, in different fields. It is a win win in most cases for you and your connection. Share with them any opportunity that you find useful, and they would do the same. Plus, it is almost always the case that they know more about something than you do, and can guide you on that. They can validate your skills both professionally and personally. Connections are also useful when you want to make new connections. Some of your connections would be a lot ahead of you in professional life. They might know more about most things than you. Have them as mentors. You’ll avoid some common mistakes and save time if you have a good mentor.

Eat healthy and workout regularly. I’ve realized it a little late, but you only have one body that you have to live with for the next 40, 50, 60 or 70 years. And it isn’t indestructible. There are some irreversible changes taking place while you’re sitting there reading this. Your spine takes a lot of beating when you sit, and if you’re a computer person who sits most of the day in front of his or her PC, then the spine cries. Make sure you have a right posture when working. I know people who use a Rs. 70,000 laptop but use a crappy chair as it ‘doesn’t matter’. It does, so let’s stop taking our bodies for granted. Eat less sugary food and workout regularly, if not daily. If nothing, go for a 5km walk everyday. You’ll feel much better when you come back to work. We programmers are very keen to watch log files, warning and error messages. But we often ignore the warning messages our body tries to give us, and by the time you encounter your first error, it is irreversible. Don’t let that happen.

Drink plenty of water. I know, very trivial. But surprising how many of my fellow engineers and programmers forget to drink water when they’re working on some interesting problem. Sure, work hard, but keep a water bottle close to you and have a sip every now and then. It will benefit in ways you can’t even imagine. Make it a habit. I have done it, and it really helps keep you hydrated and fresh.

Learn to judge people. Not everyone who might ask you for a favor might actually deserve it. During our projects, I have helped all kinds of people. Later when I used to think, not all of them were into learning how to do things. Most of them just wanted me to get their work done for them. People will befriend you when they see a merit in it, that’s just life. Don’t be ignorant of it. If you still choose to help, cheers!

Finally

I hope some of you will find something to learn from my experiences. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve learnt from some. There’s still a lot to learn, so many amazing people to meet and places to explore. One life, too short and too long the way you see it. I’ve been privileged and fortunate enough to have so many positive experiences during my time in engineering. As an engineer, I feel the learning phase of my life would never end, but this particular one, of formal education, has ended here, at least for now. Life would turn off the ‘easy’ level switch for me, and that’s scary enough. But at the same time, new opportunities, freedom to take major decisions and new responsibilities will become part of my life in this new phase. It should be pretty interesting.

So this little thread to the 18 years of education my parents gave me, the people I met and became friends with and to all the amazing experiences, learnings and setbacks, that molded me into the person I am today. Thank you for reading.

Aah. Ranting is never fun, but right now I’m so very upset with BSNL [bsnl.in or bsnl.co.in, not sure which one is it that they take seriously, but my guess is neither] that I’ll do it anyway.

Background: I live in the rural parts of Thane in Maharashtra, and as a result, Internet connectivity is a nightmare. There aren’t many private service providers here, and although wireless is fine, it is too much for me to afford. Plus, there aren’t many providers that have plans in the order of hundreds of gigabytes, so 3G is a no no. Back in 2010, my Dad got us a broadband connection from BSNL. It was a 2Mb/s connection with 1GB of data transfer limit per month. The quality of the connection was crap, and frequent disconnections were part of my life, but having been promoted from the 2G connection that I had before this, it felt okay.

Today, I’m using an expensive 2Mb/s connection with unlimited data cap. The good thing about BSNL, unlike some of the private connection providers, is that it doesn’t disconnect when there is a power outage, which happens all the time here during monsoon, thanks to the phone lines they use which are powered at source and run underground. Unfortunately, that is where the good things (thing, technically. Singular) about BSNL end.

<rant>

BSNL Broadband To start with the broadband criticism, the connection is flaky. How flaky, you might ask. It takes me 2-3 tries before I manage to ‘successfully’ downloading a mere 50MB file, that flaky. That has turned me towards torrents of files as small as 30MB, as then I don’t have to care about the disconnections. Once every month, the Internet connection totally dies, and so does the landline, and the DSL line keeps blinking endlessly, which is when I have to go to their office, register a complaint and the next day they send a ‘technician’ who replaces a few cables, ‘charges’ me a 100 bucks and boom, I am blessed with Internet for 30 more days. For this pathetic service, I pay around Rs. 1400 a month, plus the ‘technician charges’ (or kharcha pani, if you like it desi).

And their office. It is a spot on example of a ‘Government office’. Sluggish staff, who when confronted would act as deaf for the first time, then a nod or if you’re lucky ‘hmm’ the next, at which point any self respecting person would back off and go home angrily, swearing at his own misfortune, but if you manage to gather the courage to ask an elaborate question next, get ready for some random bashing on why it isn’t their job to listen to your problems and why you should have probably never asked the question in the first place. The area around their office feels more hostile than an enemy state.

Have you ever been to a sweet shop and saw the Rasgullas and Gulab Jamuns floating in thick sugary syrup there? That is exactly how these employees look like, wanting to carry on floating in that thick protective fluid of a Government job, forever.

BSNL 3G

It was a few months back that I got so fed up with their broadband services that I decided to go for their 3G services. Immediately you can sense that I’m not a smart guy. I know, right? I bought a dongle worth some Rs. 1600, got a BSNL SIM card and recharged it for the Rs. 1099 unlimited plan. Smart. I would admit, it worked well when it did, but then, that was the problem, it hardly ever did. Call it greed, but I thought, anyway I’m paying a lot on the Broadband, so why not invest the same for a much faster connection. Great plan, or so I thought. It was again, a nightmare. I’ll explain why.

So firstly, the BSNL 3G network had some kind of a personality. It used to disappear randomly, and you would start thinking of all the things you did recently that might have caused it to stall. A 3G dongle with 3G data plan and full network strength, still no data transfer. Why? Then, after having restarted the dongle for 10+ times, resetting it 2 times, trying 5 different places in the house and even the building terrace, and finally driving 8 kilometers to BSNL’s office and trying it under their building to see if it works there, you decide to give up and ask for help.

And I did. Into their office I sprang. I stood in front of the inquiry counter, but not very surprisingly, I wasn’t asked if I wanted any help. Probably they think people visit their sacred office when they lack entertainment in life. Helplessly, I told the guy that my mobile Internet isn’t connecting in spite of having credit and data balance. Guess what he replied. He said ‘What office is this?’. I replied, with a bit of a smile on my face now, ‘BSNL’. He annoyingly corrected, ‘No. It is BSNL landline and broadband. If you have mobile problems, call the customer care’. Of course, I should have known that. They just sell SIM cards in that large 3 storey building, not support or any of those non trivial tasks.

So I went home, with much anger. My work had stopped, my 3 days were wasted, some Rs. 3000 spent on something I would’ve never needed if the broadband had worked well, and now I am completely helpless, I thought. But wait. There is someone who always cares for you when you’re lost, someone who will solve all your technical problems like a friend and follow up to ask if everything was okay. Yes, I’m talking about customer care. So Google’d and I found out their number. Called them up, and they did pick up my call. Yaay.

So I told him my problem, and he confidently replied ‘Sir, we’re having some problem in our network from the last 2 days. It should be working in a few hours. If not, please call back’. I felt relieved. Not only did this guy knew what was wrong, but he even said ‘Have a great day thank you for calling BSNL customer care’ at the end of the call. Dayam!

So waiting for a few hours, and a few more, and a day more. Finally, since it didn’t work out well, called them up again. This time, same confident tone, the lady said ‘Sir your device isn’t configured to use our services’ and instructed me to re-insert the SIM card, manually configure the access point and call back if I had any problem. Hmm, so this was the issue. Did the job, waited for a few hours, but nothing.

Called them up again that evening, a guy picks up. Explained him the problem, and he replied ‘Sir, your one month Internet pack has expired. Please recharge and it should be working’. Okay, sounds fair, but wait a second. ‘Hello there, my SIM card is 6 days old. How can a 28 day recharge expire in 5 days?!’. The call drops, probably intentionally.

Called them up again immediately. Somebody picks up. Told them the problem, ‘Sir we are having a network outage. Please try again in a few hours’. Okay, now I think I can play this game. Just to confirm my doubt, I called them up again within a few minutes, and the reply, unsurprisingly, was to ‘re-insert the SIM, manually configure the Internet settings and try again’. The best part was they were asking me to call back in case that didn’t solve my problem.

Now that was funny, annoying, shameful and depressing at the same time. I could’ve kept doing it all night, but unlike them, I had some real work to do. It is really an interesting strategy, if you think about it. Explaining the problem takes 3 minutes, and they give the solution in 20 seconds and ask you to call again if that doesn’t solve your problem. Which you will, and after a while, you’re doing it all over again. Great way to get work off your chest, right?

BSNL Hungama Scam

So one day, my dad receives a call. It was from some Hungama.com call center asking his email address. Not knowing what’s going on, and thinking it was from BSNL (at least that is what they told my dad), my dad gave it, and the next month we find 3 new services that ‘we subscribed to’ in our BSNL bill. They were some ‘Movie on demand’, ‘Games on demand’ and ‘Movies on demand’, the total for which Rs. 450 were charged and added to the final bill, along with landline and broadband. I was surprised, and so was my Dad.

Googled and immediately concluded that a lot of people had fallen prey to this scam. Got their number, called them up and asked them to drop the services. The guy agreed. Next month, the charges recurred. This was simply unacceptable. But who could you complain to? Service center? No it isn’t their job. Call center? They would cut your call half way through the conversation. Wrote an angry email to their customer care address.

Hello,

Please unsubscribe my BSNL telephone number ***-****** from the scam that I was, against my intentions, made to subscribe to. I’m being charged some 444 odd rupees for some crappy services that I, honestly, wouldn’t even care to read the names of.

I was earlier told that I’ve been unsubscribed only to find out the charges still recurring. Maybe your incompetent call center folks aren’t that quick with their actions.

Waiting for a confirmation from your side.

Thank you,
Abhishek

And they did unsubscribe me, immediately. Wasn’t that easy?

The BSNL office doesn’t have ADSL modems of their own, but ‘recommend’ buying it from a local store. They also ‘recommend’ calling the same guy in case anyone has any technical difficulties with the Broadband. Turns out, their ‘technicians’ are only good enough for replacing telephone cables.

</rant>

So maybe some of you can relate to this. Maybe some of you had similar experience in some other (Government?) sector offices. I really have given up on BSNL. I see them injecting ads into HTML of the pages I visit, ugly banner ads that come up telling me about the amazing unlimited 3G plans they have, unlimited broadband ‘for as low as Rs. 249 which let’s you download 300GB a month’. They lie pretty well, don’t they. So people reading this, if you have an option, stay away from BSNL. If not, stay strong. And in case anybody from BSNL reads this, man I had so much hopes from ‘our own Indian’ telecom company. I wish you guys were sincere, for there was a time I used to argue with friends on why BSNL was superior, although it wasn’t sincere even then. Hope you enjoyed the post. Feel free to leave a comment below to counter my views or in case you had better or even worse experiences. Thank you for reading.

By the way, just when I was proof reading the article, this popped up!

Back when I was in my first and second year of engineering, I was very optimistic about my future. I liked the idea of starting my own venture, and I really believed that by the end of my graduation, I’ll have something that would sustain me without having to look for a job elsewhere. Believe it or not, I really tried to make that happen. Two tech blogs, numerous startup ideas, bug bounty dreams and a lot of side projects, all for various reasons, but a common denominator was to become self sustained.

But again, that was what I had envisioned. Of course, it didn’t work out as planned. There wasn’t sufficient maturity in me then, and if only everything was that easy, isn’t it? By the first half of third year, I knew things were not going to change. It takes a great deal of talent to create something amazing at such an early stage. I didn’t have it. Suddenly, the belief I had in myself, my hard work and my skills fell apart. I was no longer confident about my future, and I feared failing way too much to be comfortable with that fact. I was vulnerable then.

To add to the agony, people around me were planning things. They were joining GRE and TOEFL classes to get into a great foreign university. They were doing everything that would get them a certificate, and validate their skills in front of someone; Java, Android and what not. I didn’t have a single certificate for any extra curricular. I remember thinking, How am I going to prove to somebody that I know something about anything. I just can’t.. The deterioration of thoughts accelerated even further when people started to ask each other what are they doing after graduation. Job? Masters? I thought they were too few options to be given to just about anybody regarding a career path. Why was no one talking about starting something after college, or maybe preparing to work at some dream company, or perusing research in the field of their liking, or working as a freelancer for whatever intrigues them. Am I missing something obvious here?

The What are your plans after college? questions started hitting me as well. I had to take a decision from the two options that were presented to me. Job or masters. I feared a job, and took masters. M. Tech. from some IIT would look cool, I thought. Started researching about GATE examination, and decided to go for it.

I told my decision to a few friends, and immediately realized that M. Tech. wasn’t the masters everyone was talking about. At least most of them. This masters is M.S. and it is done by going to the United States and studying there. Masters in India is not cool. It is just like Bachelors, in a specialized field. I don’t have a great opinion about the bachelors study in India, and if masters was going to be like that, I am better off not doing it.

So I decided to go for masters. I knew it was going to be very expensive, but quickly learned finance is available. Okay, so if we stretch a bit, I might get into a college in the US, do my masters, work part time to finance my day-to-day expenses, get into a good company, work for a year or two to repay the loan, and then, life is sorted. A better lifestyle, more exposure to good startups and companies, a good salary and everything I would ever ask for. I would be able to give a better lifestyle to my family, fulfill their dreams and more. Now that’s called a plan. More than anything, it felt safe. Plus all the other smart people are doing it so cannot go wrong with this.

By the end of July, I was totally sure about masters. Abhishek and Dhananjay were going to leave for it soon, and I was thinking about the schedule for my GRE and TOEFL. I had convinced mom and dad, and they even had started to talk about the great things I would see and feel a year from now. I would be the first person from my family to fly abroad for higher education. Or fly abroad. Or fly, for that matter. I really liked that feeling. All sunshine and rainbow.

Later in August this year, I spoke with my mentor about this grand plan of mine. I knew for sure he’d be excited. He was not. He started questioning my decision, and I think he realized that me going to the US was more like the only option I saw, rather than a solid goal in itself. We spoke for sometime, and the more I spoke to him, the more I realized that the other over ambitious plans of mine were not at all over ambitious. They were just as possible as the other safe options, only I’ll have to work a little harder to get to them. The extraordinary people I look up to and admire are just ordinary people who did something extraordinary. And given that you only get one shot at life, let’s aim for something similar, something full of uncertainties, something that is fun and something that I actually want to be doing! That was all the motivation I needed to pursue my heart. That conversation opened me up to the numerous possible career options I had as an engineer.

I created a decision matrix to evaluate my options and find out the best one for me. It gave me my end goal. Now I was free to peruse it the way I wanted. It definitely saved me a lot of time and money. But most importantly it gave me back what all of us are taught during our childhoods. The you can do anything if you try spirit. I am glad I took everything I came across with an open mind. I tried my options, and chose what was best for me. Thinking over it again, I think there is risk involved in everything. The safe path was never safe. The current path is full of risks as well. But it is just a matter of what risks I am more comfortable with.

Finally, a great learning experience. Now the question I ask myself, will I ever consider a masters, again? I remember talking to Sukhpreet about the same. He’s the guy you want to bet on, who knows how to get work done and deliver. He had told me there’s an inner calling that helps you to take decisions. Masters is one such decision. He never had that calling. He has learned all that he needed while working. I haven’t had that calling yet. If ever I do, then yes, why not. Until then, I’ll be sticking to self learning, a deeper version of it. Let’s see how it goes! Thank you for reading.

First of all, wishing all you fellow Indians a very happy 70th Independence Day. This day is very dear to the hearts of us Indians, and although I enjoy watching the Republic Day parade more, I certainly enjoy seeing the beautiful tricolors all around the place.

I was asked to compile a list of all the differences between working on a project in a startup and doing the same in college. Of course, we have projects every semester the way (some) startups have products, and we are made to follow some guidelines while developing these projects (like planning, documentation and testing methodologies), but there are some subtle differences. Here is a paste of all the points I wrote at that time. I thought it would make for a useful read for some of you. It is about an organization, addressed to a real person and talks about some other people too, if you were wondering about the names involved, and trimmed to only the parts that matter here.

Differences between college and startup projects

• The most important factor for me were the stakes involved. In college, making a mistake or leaving some edge cases incomplete were quite acceptable since we were the users of the product. Here at Fourthlion, since a lot of people are involved in making a project happen, plus the people we pitch the product to are some high level state officials, the margin of error tolerated is reduced. That actually brings out the best in you, since you have to push your limits in order to accomplish the new quality standards that you never knew existed.
• The second factor is deadlines. There are deadlines in college projects, but the deadlines aren’t connected to further set of events. Here at Fourthlion, me completing a project on, say Monday is directly linked with the product getting pitched on Tuesday, and that sense of responsibility makes you want to meet those deadlines to avoid wasting other people’s time.
• Then there are people around you. They know how to make things work. For example, Sukhpreet. I learnt what it is like to be organized, from him. He writes down each and everything in his diary or in a spreadsheet. I bought a diary just to get that habit, and it is already helping. I saw what serious documentation looked like when working on the first project, made by him. I understood how important initial user feedbacks are, which I had never taken ever in my life till now. These are the things Fourthlion taught me even though I had never planned to learn them. This is what I feel is the effect of working with great people. You try to copy them, and acquire their good habits.
• You get to know how much can be accomplished in a day. In college, if someone asks me how much time will it take to complete this product, I’d say I don’t know. Because there are a lot of different things that a student does apart from the project. Here, I have a fairly good estimate on what I can do in the 8-10 hours of work everyday, and hence I can give you a good estimate of how much time the project/component should take based past estimates.
• There’s a good deal of pressure working here that I never felt in college. A reason for that could be there’s real people’s real money and time involved. The pressure actually feels bad at first, but just looking a week back, I hardly think I would’ve been able to accomplish whatever I did, if there was no pressure involved.
• At this startup, the users are real people who just want a beautiful working product and don’t really care about the cutting edge tech stack I use, which wasn’t the case until now. That has given me a new way to think about the code I write, the more user oriented way. And since I am the only person editing and adding code, I feel much connected to the project than otherwise would have, which is not necessarily a good thing in the real world with multiple developers collaborating.
• About DoNew, I’d honestly admit that I didn’t really see the point of sending updates on what I do, initially. But I like to take leaps of faith when the people involved know much more about how things work than I do. Now when I think, I feel like the updates were more for myself than they were for you and others. I feel I have started to keep a track of my own progress through the updates, which has formed a habit. Just to give you an idea, after writing the update to you, I write myself a personal update in a diary, with things I did wrong and things I can improve upon. It has made a great deal of difference to me personally. And I don’t think I will ever break this habit of tracking my own progress and shortcomings.
• When I was skeptic about whether I would be able to handle the real world development here at Fourthlion back when I was in Mumbai, you told me to try, build, make mistakes and to believe that you can. That ‘believing that you can’ has been an important part. For example, when I heard about integrating Asana and building a project on top of it that people can use, I was a bit scared. But I made my mind to keep working as much as I could with all dedication and not really worry about the end result. And now, slowly but steadily, it is taking shape of a practical app, which I am really proud of!
• Lastly, the importance of having a mentor. I didn’t understand it before when I read about people having mentor. I don’t need to say much about this one now!

As always, thank you for reading!