atul jha – Page 219

Why i love traveling & preferably alone

Why Alone?

When am alone its like am naked, out of comfortability zone. I have to do my own shit & its a fun/learning experience. It makes me more independent & extrovert in my day to day life.

Reasons why i love traveling?

Food

Chicken Changezi [Nov Vegetarian delight]

Chole Bhature [much liked North Indian cuisine]

I am a foodie & one main reason i travel is to go try out local cuisine. India is so big every 100-200 KM one will find different food habit like other parts of world.

People

I get to meet interesting people most of the time they are welcoming. At times some of them end up becoming friends for life. Talking to them gives you a feeling that we are facing same issues & we are striving for same i.e making our life better.

Peace

When am on road 90% times i prefer staying away from Internet & other connected devices. It brings much needed peace of mind. I get more time to think about myself & do some retrospection.

Religion/Tradition

Priests on way to offer prayer to Madurai Meenakshi temple.

I get to see a lot of interesting practices. The way people in particular region offer prayers, how they celebrate a particular festival & all.

Technology Evangelist Checklist

If you are a technology Evangelist i am sure you would be following this checklist :

Spreading word about project/technology by speaking engagement, social media outreach.
Acting as a mentor to n00bies who are keen to be part of your project/technology.
Working without pride but more love/respect/harmony & with goal to expand the community to its best.
Being passionate about project/technology as it will result in 100% efficiency.
Knowing well about your technology to answer question of an expert developer to a college student.
Goto guy incase of any argument among contributors on any specific issue.

What was i doing all this while?

Since i been asked again & again by lot many friends

Where the hell am i
What i been doing all this while

Simplest answer

I was traveling across India & these are the places i covered since new year.

Delhi (I was in Purani Delhi regularly for food)
Nagaland (north-east)
Mathura-Vrindavan-Gowardhan
Haridwar-Rishikesh
Bangalore
Hyderabad
Ramappa (Spent new year night in peace with cellphone switched off mode)
Jodhpur-Jaipur-Ajmer
Bihar (Went to my hometown after 3 years)
Mumbai (Yes, am back here till May i think)

I will blog about individual journey in separate blog one by one. [hopefully]

In simple terms am not dead yet, am alive & awesome.

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.

OpenStack Summit, Hong Kong

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. 🙂