Searching for some answers.

I have been asking a few questions to myself over the past few months:

1. Am I happy?

2. Am I enjoying my day job?

3. What’s wrong with me? If anything?

4. Where should I see myself 10 years down the line?

5. Is this how life goes on?

I am not sure if am the only one thinking so much about my life or everyone does the same.

It took me few months & yes I have yet not figured everything & don`t have answer of all these above questions.

But one thing I have realized to have meaning in your life you really need to have some elements.

Some of these are:

1. Friends : Its really important to have some friends in your life who know who you are and come what may, they are behind you to help you in every moment/minute of your life.

2. Mentors: You need to have mentors who are always there in your life guiding you. It’s like showing you the ladder but you need to take steps yourself.

3. Family: Your lucky if you have parents supporting you in every stage of your life & believing in you.

I am lucky to have them all.

PLUS

4. Mute the noise: People around you who are always pessimistic about everything. Stay away from them.

5. Forgiveness: I am still learning to get this art in me, it’s too difficult. I am happy am trying at least.

I would hope in coming month things will get more clear & I will find most of my answers. 😀

2013: Year just passed

[Warning: Not a tech blog]

I will keep it simple & try to summarize what all went to my life in 2013 in all fronts.

Personal: Made few friends & some walked away, part of life.

Trips: Traveled to cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Delhi, Chennai, Pune, Sf, Portland & Hong Kong for conference/presentations or meeting friends.

Food: Yes as usual tried all sorts of crazy food during my travel to these cities.

Professional : Joined SwiftStack as community engineer enjoying my job, a lot needs to be done.

Others: The year taught me a lot many things & especially the fact that nothing is permanent in our life & nothing should be taken for granted.

To those who don`t know i have joined SwiftStack as community/solutions engineer. Most of my time during this summit i spent meeting a lot many interesting people around our booth. I was more interested in whats HOT from OpenStack Swift front & Mario wrote a nice blog summarizing over all talks sessions related to Swift.

As usual i met all my old friends who i been helping all these while or vice versa. I also met guys whom i been following on twitter all this while. The other fun part of the booth crawl was book signing. My friend Kevin & Cody have written a nice book on overall OpenStack

We at SwiftStack booth had book signing by Joe Arnold our CEO book title Software defined storage with OpenStack Swift. We are still giving away free copy of the book as part of our community engagement initiative, you can get your own copy requesting here

Like always it was awesome event, thanks to OpenStack foundation for organizing it in Asia, i had only 6 hr flight 🙂

You can watch the Summit presentation videos here

OpenStack @OSIdays, India 2013

At OSI Days Bangalore, India we OpenStack India team organized a mini-conf. It was well accepted & we had many new faces participating as attendees as well as speakers. You can check the schedule of event here

Its great to see so many students and professional folks joining our event. Last but not least Q/A session was my favorite part.

Thanks to organizers of OSI Days for graciously granting us venue like they did last year.

OpenStack Day India, September 2013

I know am too late to write about it but its better to write about an event rather than not.

banner_osi_days_2013

Its been great year for OpenStack India community, we crossed over 1700 members & at same time during the event met a lot many startup folks. Some of them are simple system integrators and some are working as solution provider while others are involved in product testing. It should be noted that companies like HP, DELL, Cisco and other multinational already has big team working from beginning. I was fascinated to find that one of the biggest ISP provider in India Netmagic is already using Swift in production & soon moving compute to Nova.

Thanks to all our sponsors & OpenStack foundation for the support, you can read the whole event report here We as folks from OpenStack India team really worked hard to make this happen. 🙂

Technology as i see in 2014

1. Sql is not dead

Well i remember people calling SQL based databases historic or dead and what not. I don`t see it going anywhere. Oracle will keep minting $$ & on Open Source champions like MySql and Postgres will go along well in deployment with most web CMS & technology. Even the cloud computing like AWS has extended its support on Postgres

2. WebRTC is kicking butt

In case you have still not heard of WebRTC, you better start looking out for it. The project will change the way real time communication is taking place on web. The fun thing is giants like Cisco and Google are battling it out for theirs as default codec.

3. OpenStack will be Defacto cloud enabler

I don`t give much attention to analysts when they say OpenStack has no real deployments. I clearly seeing the project making great strides in many areas. The modularity of OpenStack allows its component integrated with multiple technology. Companies like Concur, MercadoLibre, Disney are using Swift [Object Storage component of OpenStack] in real production case. Yes these companies are using various other technology & some are not even using Cloud.

4. Azure & IBM will keep battling out with AWS

Azure & $MSFT will do great with cloud reason, they already have an ecosystem. ex- Office365. Microsoft will tweak there licensing cost to move all there traditional customers to cloud. Softlayer acquisition by IBM clearly shows the future of cloud in enterprise is AWESOME. Everyone is serious.

5. People will keep talking about Big Data and NoSql

And last not the least people are usual will keep talking about Big Data & NoSql, venture capitals will keep funding startups. In reality you cannot add big data in all the use cases, i would prefer R or Python Panda for doing same stuff on smaller level.

6. PaaS PaaS PaaS baby

Yes platform as a service will remain another dominating topic for CIO & to be discussed among social media circuit. OpenShift & Cloud foundry will keep making technology polished and awesome.

Happy 30th Birthday GNU!!

GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!” has turned 30 years. Thanks to Richard Stallman (RMS) for this wonderful initiative along with lot many volunteers . The best part is over 30 years the project has grown to new dimension. We are using it many times in our day to day life without even knowing about it.
Hardly anyone who is using computer has not used GNU powered software. You can see the list of softwares which falls under it here. I am one of the lucky guy who did video interview of RMS in 2009 during his visit to New Delhi but unfortunately the video is not with me anymore. 🙁
The project is base of one of the most successful enterprise like IBM/Red Hat/Google/yahoo. Not only this most of the powerful supercomputers make use of GNU powered free software. I don’t have an example or place where i can/could say Free Software is not used. Even the proprietary operating system like Mac makes use of it.
Last not the least the popular kernel makes use of GNU and together makes GNU/Linux. Some popular softwares which you must have used includes emacs, GIMP, wget, Sed and many more listed here

The project needs your help and you can do the same in many ways listed here
Also you can celebrate 30th GNU birthday in many ways listed here
Please spread the word about it in ways you can by writing blog, organizing the event listed above. The best part of being in community is we can help it grow in many different ways and contributing upstream code is not the only one way. 🙂

Open, (insert whatever here) when it comes to selling technology.

Off late everyone started loving the term OPEN & pushing/re-aligning/re-defining the product around it & it frustrates me. So whenever i hear some legacy hardware vendor or proprietary software vendor mentioning term OPEN i just feel like Mehh…

The real definition of OPEN is

Open Source

Open Design

Open Development

Open Community

Source: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Open

Please don`t build your community this way

I been seeing a new trend which is bad for any community.

Just added few points here

1. Doing senseless Press Release out of anything.

2. Instead of your product talking SHIT about opponents/competitors product

3. Creating fake twitter accounts for bitching [This one got deleted thankfully]

4. Last but not the least by making videos like these which is SAD & shows the poor taste. I am Indian & find it very depressing. [The original one was deleted ]

<Disclaimer: Posting this does not mean or seen as am attacking a particular enterprise, community or its affiliates.>

People(tech) would like to meet before i die

Linus Torvalds

The man who wrote Linux kernel & maintains the overall project. He is also behind a distributed version control and source code management (SCM) system. I know many people hate him because of his response to devs in kernel mailing list. He has his own unique way of addressing issue.

Eric S. Raymond

ESR is wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar and how to become a hacker, which changed my life & got me in the world of free software. I have contributed a chapter about same in open advice title “Life Changer Documentation”.

Steve Wozniak

The guy who invented apple1 & 2.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim is responsible for this blog/http/www. 🙂

Guido van Rossum

The man behind one of the most popluar programming language python

Jimmy Wales

Better known for wikipedia 🙂

Larry Page & Sergey Brin

For what they did to the web technology one after the other starting with the google search.

Elon Musk

For what he did to e-commerce with PayPal & now with Tesla.

Adrian Cockcroft

Adrian is the guy behind the tech/cloud stuff at Netflix. He is responsible for running one of the biggest service on cloud. We don`t have Netflix yet in India. I often address him as “Cloud Daddy” 🙂

Simone Brunozzi

Well Simon is one of the best guy in business. Anyone who wants to become an evangelist should for sure read his blog its absolutely brilliant. I follow/admire him for the passion & devotion in his work not for whom he works. 🙂

Sean Parker

I am not sure about the tech background of Sean but i admire him for what he has done in such a young age. Also not to forget the guy who got Facebook $$ intially for what it is now. He does everything in style not sure about his marriage ceremony though which created hell lot of controversy.

NOTE: I know i have some friends/people i follow on twitter must be knowing them. It be awesome if they will help me in meeting these folks. Also i will keep adding this list as time progresses or reducing/MET tag incase i meet any of the guys above. HELP ME

UPDATE: In Aug 2016, I got opportunity to join Adrian Cockcroft for lunch.

atul jha