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. 

Random Thoughts: On Depression

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Woke up & read this r/linux thread  where Ian Murdock [Debian Linux project founder] tweets are mentioned. Ian says he is committing suicide.  I will be more than happy if these tweets turn out to be hoax or coming from someone else who gained control of his Twitter account.

This incident got me thinking about one of the biggest issue we all have gone through in our life i.e depression.  We can easily track number of well known faces we have lost because of going in depression.

These are some advice I got when I was in depression, most of these worked:

  1. Don’t just stay alone, talk to parents/friends.
  2. This will pass, its just a phase
  3. Listen to some good music
  4. Exercise & meditate
  5. Avoid alcohol & eating junk
  6. Travel, connect, eat, meet, see newer part of this world.

How did you fight with your depression & came out from it?

Update : Ian Murdock is no more.

Random Thoughts: On-boarding new developers to open source projects. Then & Now.

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We are entering in 2016, my journey to open source started in 2004-05 when i attended one of the Linux User Group meetup in New Delhi, India. Those days we had to pay one$ for surfing internet for an hour, having a dial-up internet at home was considered luxury.

What was the scene those days?

  1. Linux user groups were more happening, we had demo days and most open source software developers were under single roof.
  2. We were more glued offline for beer/kebab/pizza and hangouts.
  3. To on-board new users to open source we were regularly conducting workshop across colleges and cities.
  4. We had mailing list, IRC, wiki [they still exists]

How are things now?

  1. Internet is everywhere & is part of our life.
  2. Mobile usage has exploded, information about everything is one tap away.
  3. Installing Linux & open source software has become much easier, internet & advanced GUI development gets credit.
  4. The whole open source ecosystem got divided into different camps & all started organizing/mentoring its own users/contributors.
  5. Web and social media platforms quora, stackoverflow along with free MOOC courses are loaded with all information.
  6. Online conferences like ubuntu developer summit summit and live streaming of conferences gave more wider audience.
  7. Github, Slack, Gitter are new cool among developers.

2016 & beyond new user on-boarding.

  1. We don’t have to spoon feed anymore, most of the information are available on the web. This generation is way smarter then us.
  2. We don’t have to go for extreme evangelism because web has enough information those who are interested will find a way.
  3. All we have to do is to mentor & help only if they need it.

 

PS: This is not a rant against all those who are still working on building a open source community in 2000 style, this is my thought & i might me wrong here. 

8 learnings from reading book title : The Phoenix Project

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Past 3 weeks I spent reading The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win [Amazon] I have to admit that i am not a usual reader hence finishing a book in 3 weeks time is a big achievement for me.

These are the 8 things I learnt reading this book:

  1. Trust is very important part in any organization.
  2. A process is what makes or breaks an organization.
  3. A leader for success of his organization needs to accept total responsibility.
  4. A successful leader finds smart subordinates/team leads to delegate entire operations.
  5. Ego, distrust  & pessimism among peers can bring down an enterprise
  6. Its not in age but flexibility or desire to adopt the changes which makes or breaks an organization.
  7. Learning can come from any corner, place, people or sphere all we need to do is to have our eye & heart open.
  8.   Empathy among peers & junior subordinates can do miracles in overall outcome.

If you have read the book, feel free to share your thoughts.

Random Thoughts: On Identity

When we were born we had no identity, we were just another creature on planet Earth.

Then came :

  1. Parents : religion, caste, surname
  2. Physical appearance: Looks, Color, Weight, Height
  3. Personal nature: Empathic, Rude, Jolly
  4. Job & Education: MIT/IIT/IIM/XLRI/MIT/Harvard
  5. Social Status: Bank balance, Car, House

You will be judged & reminded about your identity at all these 5 places the moment you will fail to deliver or try to go out of the league.

You have got 2 options

  1. Follow the norm, try carving out Identity for yourself at all those stages.
  2. Be a rebel & build your own identity like hackers, visionaries  & painters

What are your thoughts?

meggg

 

Random thoughts: On Romanticizing Failures

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People say success & failures are complementary. It is like two side of coin & both co-exist. Over last few years I have noticed in every spectrum people are celebrating failures be it cover page of famous magazine, online portal, help/advice avenues like Quora or social media portals like Twitter, Facebook, Medium or LinkedIn.

 I have nothing against them, these are my thoughts :

  1. Weather its absolute NO in love/relationship.
  2. Not clearing interview of your dream job
  3. Failing miserably after taking enormous amount of funding from external investors.
  4. Got backstabbed by best friend or business partner.

I have gone through some of these & all I can say is coping up with failures is not easy. It can hit you hard & at times it can cost your life.

I have learnt from my past & moved on. I am not going to write a best-selling book glorifying my failure because someone has done so, in the end it is a failure. I don’t need extended coverage defining my celebration but an extended coverage of how I fixed my failure, my only hope with this is that it will help others not take the same route.

What are your thoughts about failing?

Random Thoughts: Purpose of life.

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Few months back I celebrated 29 years of my existence. I have been thinking for sometime, what are we here for.  This is my list which I am always reminded to :

  1. Parents & Family: Everything I have right now is because of my parents & awesome family around.
  2. Friends: Its good to have few friends closer to you, they are the ones who will be there for you in every phase of life be it good or bad. So please choose your friends wisely.
  3. Helping everyone: I consider myself lucky to be the guy who is in position to help. This help can be  mentoring, motivating to providing monetary help to those who are in need of it.
  4. Society: Society is like movie script, it has well written protocol & one has to follow it. Society will always be on up as watchdog & pointing at our wrong doings. The question for me is how can i live in this world with society affecting least to my happiness.

Have you ever given thought on Purpose of  your life?

Random Thoughts: On OpenStack

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OpenStack is over 5 years old now.  I have seen the project from days when many pundits claimed its not needed or it is a dead project or what not. These are some of my thoughts about the overall project & where it i s headed.

Community: I think OpenStack is one of the biggest project so far written in python. The latest release has over 5000 developers. Every release has followed a cycle & delivered timely.

Marketing Hype: OpenStack no more enjoys the hype it used to years back, tech scene changes so rapidly. 

Foundation: I think forming OpenStack foundation was one of the best thing happened to the project. The folks are working really hard to push project forward in whatever best possible way they can.

Foundation Members: OpenStack has almost every enterprise backing, check this link if you don’t believe me .  All these organization wants to make money out of it & hence they all have aspirations. Most of them have full time employes hacking/contributing to upstream OpenStack code.

Definition of OpenStack: It has been over 5 years & we have not come to a conclusion what components must/must-not have to make the product “OpenStack Powered” I know Rob & others been working hard on this, not sure when will this be finally a reality.

VC’s putting $$$:  Vc’s believed in Openstack & startups building services around OpenStack ended up getting funded over a billion $. Source

Acquisitions & Closures: In this 5 years tenure we saw a lot of these smaller startups getting acquired by traditional vendors like Piston, CloudScaling, BlueBox.  At same time we heard about Nebula closing down & HP public cloud getting shut.

Job Market: OpenStack created a great job market & even 5 years down the line being an OpenStack developer can get you good $$. If you have contributed upstream then companies will be after you to hire.

The dream of Federated Cloud: I am still waiting to see if  I will even be able to share my workload simultaneously on Rackspace, IBM Cloud or others with single OpenStack dashboard. This dream which was sold to us, I don’t see happening at all.  After fighting with Simon all these years over API I have to agree having Amazon API support as native would have increased OpenStack’s adoption.

Too many install Options: I have to agree many ways to do the same thing can be confusing. Installing OpenStack is still hard and perhaps will always remain so. I won’t be surprised if someone writes a detailed thesis on the installation procedure & options [with comparison to all devOp tools] for OpenStack & upgrading OpenStack.

Pain of managing Install/API doc:  Every new release has 100+ new flags & coordinating with developers or upstream contributor is not an easy job.  Anne & team are doing excellent work. They will love to see your contribution & this is the best place if you want to get started with  contributing to OpenStack project.

PS: I was one of the core OpenStack documentation contributor &  still a community coordinator for OpenStack project in India.

Moving On, last day at The New Stack

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Leaving an organization is extremely difficult especially when  you have been part of it from day Zero[or before] or a 1st/2nd hire.  But as someone said every great thing comes with an expiry date hence here I am writing my post on my last day of work at The New Stack.

The Journey

I got to know Alex [Founder of The New Stack] via Krishnan   met in Portland during OSCON & got to know about this opportunity.  I was more than happy to take the task as my work included getting website developed with remote developers, find interesting authors/contributors & spread word about The New Stack, building an awesome community via social media, offline mediums, meetups.

Learning 

It was great almost 2 yrs journey with Alex & The New Stack team. The team has grown so does our visibility, people talk about us & quality of our published content.

  1. I got to meet so many amazing people & made few good friends.
  2. Great amount of  learning & mentoring from Alex[he will continue doing so 🙂 ] and rest of the team.
  3. Keeping nerves in place during situations like server downtimes or verbal  arguments with people loaded with Egos.
  4. Getting more work done with being  empathetic with co-workers
  5. I have my own podcast  channel now, credit goes to Alex for the pep talk. [Be humble, honest & let the people talk.]
  6. I feel being more confident, relaxed, happy about everything in Life

Personal Goal

I am an average writer so plan is to keep working on my writing skills & occasionally submit some contributors post for The New Stack[considering my writing skill qualifies :D]

Last Not The Least 

OpenStack project has been one common connection or reason I got this gig or met Alex & Krishnan. I am thankful to the folks for pulling up such a brilliant project & uniting so many like minded folks on planet.  I have not written about it in long a separate blog will be posted soon.

Nepal is suffering & you are all responsible

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Ordinary Nepali friends are in real pain & I have written about same before in my previous blog.

Who are the real culprits for current situation:

Nepali Politicians

Nepali politicians are thick skinned. They are part of every deal be it taking bribe from India or China for giving contracts or  channeling  money to personal pocket out of millions  received from world as aid in recent earthquake. Be it Oli, Prachanda or Madheshi all are same living in distant world. Why at very first place the constitution got passed with having severe discrepancies?

Why is ruling government not taking correct measures to restore peace in Tarai part, why are protesters getting shot on point blank? Can you all calm down, quit your ego & think for the  starving family out on remote hills or the poor farmers/laborers in Tarai. All these while you been appointing naxalites & murderers to top position, is this how you are aiming for progressive Nepal?

Indian Government 

I have high regards for prime minister Mr. Modi but what is this blockade going on? Why are our diplomates so useless & what has we got to do with Nepali constitution? Don’t we have enough problem in our own country which requires immediate attention? Nepal has moved on, stop being big brother to them, the new leaders think they are more happy keeping equidistant relationship b/w India & China. What is wrong with that?

Nepali Police

Stop treating protesters like dogs, they are as Nepali as you are. You have already killed 50+ so far, how many more is the target? Do let us know if there is a bounty/prize/medals Prachanda or Oli is giving you for the same or is it Chinese arms manufacturers?

Chinese Government

If  China thinks by they can get into minds/nerves of ordinary Nepalis & replace it India its not happening. India & Nepal has 100+ years of cultural bonding. China should come clean with its intention, we all know how much ruling politicians are aligned to them.

Nepali Journalist 

Well Nepali journalists are competing with Indian counterparts. I am yet to find a single journalist sitting in Kathmandu asking tough question from Oli on constitution amendments to killing of protesters to excessive force in Tarai. All this while they been governments cheerleader & throwing muds against India. My request to all of them is just grow up & think beyond being Anti-Indian or Anti-Madhesh. What have you done about human rights violation happening in Tarai?

Journalism is considered 3ed pillar of democracy  but all these days what you folks are doing is hate mongering, racist slur, spreading lies & propaganda. Can you all stop spreading lies & do fact checking before sharing it among your followers on social media & writing for you newspaper?

Nepali People 

Can we stop fighting with each other & discriminating on basis of origin Dhoti VS Pahadi

Ask tough questions from your government be it blockade or constitution or equal rights for women

Agitation will do no good & will harm overall country.

Everything has a price & India as well as China knows about it.

Stop wasting time on free NCELL plan fighting over unnecessary issues & burning blood on social media platforms.  Your government is not listening, next time go vote & select right candidate/ministers.

Also stop blaming India for all your problems we been your friends for century & helped you in all good/bad situations.

China can only compliment to an extent with resources [arms, petrol or bribing politicians], it cannot replace Indo-Nepali ties. Stop living in dreams & believing in what your media or politicians are saying.

My friend Binaya reminded me of John Lennon — Imagine, embedding the same here.