Learning after turning 30+ some lessons & life forward.

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I celebrated my 30 birthday last month & yes, I am three decades old now.

Few of the lessons were learnt willingly but most of them forcefully imposed/taught the hard way.

 

  1.  Family comes first
  2. Avoiding alcohol can do magic to your health
  3. Run & exercise regularly for better physical and mental health
  4. Keep your heart open.Let love seek you instead of running after it
  5. Distinguish between great mentors and teachers. keep  upgrading yourself time to time
  6. Be very careful of what you read and what you learn out of that. And needless to say, the source.
  7. A daily to-do list to be practiced on a hard form. Once a task is accomplished, strike it off the list.
  8. Being empathetic to others for your mind and heart to be at peace.
  9. Most of the things around us are temporary including current state of mind, the weather, our pains. Permanent decisions should not be made giving importance to temporary things.
  10. Pen down everyday about anything and everything. Mastering the art will take time but venting out thoughts on the paper brings sanity.
  11. Don’t be ashamed of taking feedback from those whom you respect for your own development.
  12. Life is no cake walk. Failures/Criticism/Happiness, all of them are a part and parcel of the deal called life, stay equanimous.
  13.  Rectify your eating habits to stay disease free.
  14. Watch and observe patiently at times. Fighting everything doesn’t help always.
  15. Learn one new activity/skill every month. It can be painting, dancing, or even a foreign language.
  16. Having a huge circle is great but make a  few friends who accept you the way you are.
  17. Happiness is a state of mind & requires thinking beyond materialistic world.

Some learnings to follow this year.

  1. 6-7 hours of daily sleep
  2. At least one day in a week without Internet
  3. Adding more salads & vegetables to daily meals
  4. Talk only when required
  5. Spending more time with self
  6. Finish watching every season of Star Trek
  7. Spending less time on social media & being careful of what to broadcast
  8. Getting into the habit of daily reading that we have been procrastinate.

 

This blog is inspired from  Madhav’s  post.

 

Random Thoughts: We have stopped being grateful

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We are living in a hyper-converged world, smart phones & social media taking more time than family/friends/nature/surrounding.

  1. We have enough to feed ourself unlike those laborers working in mine/rail/road constructions.
  2. We have enough to commute from one place to another in cab/car/taxi/auto unlike many others who still walk miles barefoot for work.
  3. We are free/independent to walk/eat/drink/talk/mingle the way we like unlike many other parts of the world.
  4. We have affordable medical care unlike many other part of the world, so we get sick, visit doctor, get medicine & come back.
  5. We were lucky unlike millions others whose parents were not rich enough to send kids to colleges/schools for Engineering/Medical/Science/Arts degree.

What has happened to us?

Most of us are turning into robots, turning into a angry box, frustrated, stressed & focusing about better future.

We have to live for now, feel every single moment of our life.

  1. When was the last time you spoke for over 20 minutes with your parents, considering they are not staying with you?
  2. When was the last time you took you siblings for lunch/dinner/coffee?
  3. When was the last time you told you wife/bf/gf like truly about how much they mean to you?
  4. Do you even remember the name of your gatekeeper who opens your colony gate and salutes saying namaste saheb or to the office boy who gets you tea?
  5. When was the last time you were out of internet for 24 hours because you wanted sometime with yourself or your family?
  6. When was the last time you slept without worrying about next month’s car/home EMI

Life is about living in present & feeling grateful with what you have currently not planning for uncertain future.

Surge pricing debate: Question nobody asks

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Surge pricing for taxi aggregators has been banned in Karnataka. While I have been reading the opinions of various people on different social media platforms on it, there are a few voices that are missing – taxi drivers. They’re the ones who really suffer from this ordeal, especially drivers who have bought cars on loan and work 14 to 15 hours continuously to complete enough trips to get a bonus.

It was in the news that in Bangalore  Uber and Ola cars were seized. Even the government of Maharashtra is thinking of coming up with legislature to ban surge pricing on  taxi aggregators.

In Delhi as well surge pricing is banned, many vehicles were seized. As a result if you are booking Uber/Ola from Noida or Gurgaon asking to travel to Delhi the drivers will ask you to cancel the trip. Mr Kejriwal said surge pricing equals “daylight robbery” and his government does not buy app based taxi aggregator arguments.

It’s not like surge pricing is new. It’s common practice and we have paid for it plenty of times before. Here are five examples.

 

  1. Happy Hour at your favorite pub: Why do they give you 1+1 beer during the afternoon? That is because they want to fill those tables and sell more. Remember, only drinks are free & hence restaurants makes enough from food to compensate on your beer/drinks offer.
  1. Airline reservation : Compare today’s fare to the fare next month. There will be a significant difference in price. Why do you book tickets in advance for your  destination? Is it because you’re getting a good deal from the airlines? The economic principle for supply and demand has existed for ages. We have paid premium fuel prices to black marketers selling fuel during strike. We have also paid 5-10 times more on onions a few years back because they were unavailable. Those who were not interested in paying the price for it ended up without having it in their plate.
  1. Your favorite band’s show :  Take example of any event you like, they have early bird tickets, almost half the price of the real ticket.
  1. Technology conferences : Tech big shots come here and talk about recent trends or make a product launch {Apple/Google events?}]  The early bird access you love? That’s surge pricing
  1. IRCTC Tatkal tickets:  Why are you paying almost double for booking same tickets 48 hours in advance and end up paying start to end destination fare?

These drivers are poor, which means that they don’t have a Twitter presence and are not competent enough to participate in hour long debates on various news channels [english/hindi/regional]. Is that why they are losing?

We should be changing the lives of these drivers instead of making them lose their incomes. Some may even be ridden with debt, because they took loans, migrated to Bangalore away from living with their families – and instead living inside their cars (true story).  

 

Instead of debating surge pricing, we should have been pondering over :-

  1. Why do car aggregators only pay 30-40% of the surge money they make to those poor drivers?
  2. What kind of health benefits are these drivers getting? Are taxi aggregators giving any health insurance?  
  3. How can we empower the families of these drivers so they can raise kids and family in better and more empowered ways?
  4. How can we stop local authorities,  police and administration from harassing them?

 

Random Thoughts: On reading Bhagwad Gita.

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I finally finised reading Bhagwad Gita,  a hindu holy book which is collection of over 700 verses. It’s a  discourse between Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra.  I would strongly recommend almost everyone to read it, it has nothing to do with your race/religion.  We all can relate to one or the other  discourse provided, I made small list of sentences/lines which had great impact on me.

  1. Our expectation is root cause of unhappiness.
  2. We have to maintain equanimity in almost every aspect of life & treat it equally so neither be too happy or too sad.
  3. Karma is what defines our caste not what we got at birth.
  4. Our mind is an asset and if we let Maya/Illusion control it, we are slave to materialistic aspect of life. This will make us unhappy.
  5. Our gunas  satva , rajas and tamas should not act on us & affect our happiness.
  6. Some task in our life are not done for a purpose to return outcome in our favor, we just have to do it.

The simple thought of reading Bhagwad Gita came to me from one of the tweets from @Arpit  [See his notes]

Notes from #Fosdem16

FOSDEM is the mecca for all the free software developers/hackers. No wonder the attendance in the event runs anywhere north of 7000+ developers coming from all corners of the world.

To attend FOSDEM this year is a dream come true for me. The event provides free demo booth to open source projects, also there is no entry fee to attend the conference [Yes, free to attend for everyone].

The two days spent in Brussels were exciting and nerve racking  at the same time. I got to meet old time open source contributors and friends.

Some take away from the event:  

  1. Open Source has emerged mainstream & is widely adopted as the way to develop quality software not just for hobbyists and hackers.
  2. There are numerous Open Source projects which has enterprise backing & are doing really well.
  3. This is the first event where I happen to  meet developers writing codes for over 30-35 years.
  4. It was the only event which I found had more developers than marketing folks.
  5. The amount of projects showcased on cloud technology & newer programming languages made me feel that we are going strong & following our open source roots.
  6. Organizers and volunteers of the event are self motivated & very passionate. They put up a great event and gets credit for putting together such nice event.

I spent most of my time in Golang dev room & met local Golang contributors from Europe. AB the chief architect of Minio project gave talks on why open core licensing sucks, Minio loves Go and Userspace Linux I/O towards petascale storage. The highlight was meeting two of our project contributors based in Europe.

Last not the least I happen to enjoy great belgian beers too.  🙂

Some photographs

Registration
Registration/Helpdesk 
Golang speakers dinner
Golang  dinner
me & fd0
me & fd0
AB with his talk
AB with his talk

Random Thoughts: Some life lessons.

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I am no billionaire philanthropist  or a startup guy who just made a big exit. The content of this post has more to do with my experience with life/people & surroundings over year of time.

These are some of the learnings:

1. Family should get all the attention.

2. Heath comes next

3. People will come & go in our life

4. You have to be honest with yourself

5. Its good to have one honest friend than bunch of  friends.

6. Learning does not require college degree it can come from everywhere

7. People will change over time.

8. You cannot be happy always, but you can try to maximize it with efforts.

9. Think before speaking in anger as its consequences can change your life.

10. Love comes from all corners, you have to keep eyes open to feel it.

11. Money come with stress/pain.

12. Your ego is what you own in reality.

13. Failure hurts, glorifying it does little help.

14. Successful people practice to perfection.

15. Working hard & smart both matters.

16. Empathy will make u more successful.

17. Worrying about future & screwing present will do more harm.

18. You have to clean your mess

19. Smile more, its free.

20. Slow down a bit in life it helps.

21. Go offline for one day in week.

22. Respect mother nature

23. Travel more, see the world.

24. Challenge yourself with some monthly goal can be hobby/learning/exercise.

25. Celebrate life, taking it too seriously will make you sad & stressed.

26. Eat healthy food [more fruits & vegetables], avoid junk and sodas.

27. Exercise regularly

28. Read regularly, it helps

29. Be grateful & respect everyone.

30. Anger, happiness, sadness are never permanent. It is part of life.

 

 

Some Apps/Hyperlocal service which I regularly/occasionally use.

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We are living in App driven economy from Match making to Cab to Pastry to Doctor all it needs is a mobile phone loaded with app.  You can get world news, podcast, jokes everything in this little supercomputer called smartphone.

I am part of this same world like you all & felt like sharing my favorite ones. I use Android hence adding app links in title.

Podcast Addict:  I am addicted to listening podcasts, podcast addict app on Android is one simple app for me.

Ola Cabs: I don’t have to say much about it, local commuting via a mobile app. I prefer taking Ola Auto & saves lot of my blood because autowalas go by meter.

Nafex : It took me less than 30 mins to get some Euro for my recent trip  & got great deal. They are aggregators of various forex agency in town.

Strike:  An app which runs inside google mail app & via email id tracks other social media connection. I use it regularly, it is still in early beta. [Disclaimer: Founders are good friend of mine.]

Reddit:  I get most of my news, crazy cat gifs from Reddit

Pocket: I get curated set of suggested stories & also save stories for future reading. Most of my Interesting Reads goes inside it.

Buffer: I don’t have any of the social media app on my mobile & Buffer is one app which gets me everything.

Dunzo: Its a concierge app available in Bangalore, India.  I get most of my little stuff including pastry & water delivered from them. [Disclaimer:  Founders are my close friends of mine]

Workflowy:  I don’t keep a note because i have got this simple app Workflowy, it solves my requirement.

I would love to know about your app kit, feel free to share the same if you like.

 

 

 

Random Thoughts: Food & Life

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I have been experimenting with what I have been eating for past 60 days.  I am adding  list of same & its outcome.

  1. Lots of fruits.
  2. Eggs in breakfast & sprouts in dinner.
  3. Heavy lunch rice/chapatti & some lentils.
  4. Beer 1.5 L/Week from one or the other microbrewery in bangalore.
  5. One death by chocolate from corner house weekly.
  6. A glass of green tea.
  7. A bottle of Red Wine/Month

The trick: I have turned into calorie manic & making sure i do not cross 1400 calorie a day so if am having beer that is my dinner or ice cream. I am using this app [Its not 100% accurate]

Walking & Exercise: I try to spend 2-3 km walk daily & 30-35 minutes cardio.

I got this Basis health tracker/watch to monitor my sleep patterns, steps I walked, heart rate.

Outcome:

  1. Lost 6 kg in 60 days.
  2. Getting much better sleep [ REM]
  3. More energetic & refreshed
  4. More happy & calm

PS: I am no health expert or dietician, I just wanted to hack my health & this is what i did. This worked for me, if you have similar story feel free to share. 🙂

My first 60 days at minio

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Most of my close friends know that I joined https://minio.io  couple of months back. As a developer evangelist, most of my time is spent getting application developers excited, evangelize Minio and also hack on Minio’s software stack (yes you heard it right!)

Minio stands for minimal cloud storage and derives from our belief in the philosophy minimalism.  “Minimalism is not a lack of something. It’s simply the perfect amount of something.” Nicholas Burroughs

Philosophy aside on the technical side –

Minio is an open source Cloud Storage server written in Golang, compatible with Amazon S3 and released under Apache 2.0 license.

I would like to share what has been my learning this far in this short duration:

  1. Got back to hardcore technology & spending good amount of time playing with newer technologies such as Cloud Storage, Micro Storage, Micro Services.
  2. Started using github almost daily.
  3. Writing bash scripts & hoping to convert them to python scripts later this year.
  4. Got into habit of waking up early, yes 9:00 am. (we have our daily round table)
  5. Contributing to stackoverflow, quora etc.
  6. Realized markdown is better than docbook. 😛
  7. Back on Ubuntu as my primary machine, did not enjoy Macbook for development/testing work.
  8. Getting mentored from every single member of the team about technology and life.

 

Minio is a Open Source project & contributions are welcome. We all hang out at Minio Gitter chat channel. My nick is @koolhead17, holler me!

2015 PASSED, 2016 WELCOME!!

Happy New Year to everyone to start with.

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Year 2015 been amazing in following ways :

  1. Joined minio.io as developer evangelist [blog will follow soon :)]
  2. Met long time friends Razique & Heiko  in person after interacting with them for over 4 years on IRC regarding  OpensStack project.
  3. Two of my junior buddies Prashant & Jithesh are doing awesome, they got new job/task and are just loving it.
  4. Got in touch with awesome folks from startup community via aroundstartups  interview podcast.
  5.  Finally get to meet few of my life mentors & talk to them in person.
  6. Lost few kilos & yes not drinking too much of beer these days.
  7. Traveled across 6-7 different indian states including Kerala for first time & international trip to Canada.
  8. Started blogging regularly & launched my podcast aroundstartups on india’s startup  ecosystem.  Thanks to my friends Prashant & Abhishek for helping me on this project.
  9.  Made some good friends & lost few.
  10. Started  entrepreneurship journey, failed miserably & learnt a lot.

What I learnt from 2015 :

  1. Time heals everything & you have to keep moving with life.
  2. Its good to have few close friends always around who are there to listen to you & help you when you screwup.
  3. Parents are getting older & they need more attention from me.
  4. Keep finding mentors, learn from them.
  5. Each one of us are awesome, great in our own way & we have so much to learn from each other.
  6. Empathy is biggest asset a human can have.
  7. Don’t do things or commit to projects you are not motivated about. This will save time and effort to you and others who are working 100% on the project.
  8. Listen more & then act.
  9. Its good to get disconnected from the world once in few days & spend time reading or wandering in nature.
  10. Stay away from toxic/negative people, they will only add negatively around.

Plan for 2016

  1. Stay  happy, motivated & continue on healthy life.
  2. Work on upgrading my bash scripting skills.
  3. Keep meeting people, making friends, learning from mentors & helping whoever i can with whatever way i could.
  4. Read more books.
  5. Organize myself in much better way.

I hope 2016 brings more happiness to everyone’s life!!  Stay blessed & have a good one.