Moving on…

Since I m long overdue for this blogpost, here are a few pictures to say it all……

Thanks a ton for the Maemo Community: The Puppy File Server won this gorgeous device in the Maemo Coding Competition 2012!

Got to have a really amazing conversations with really amazing people during the 3 days of interviews for Dream Industries in Moscow! I really wish them a very good luck with dreamindustriesunderattack.tumblr.com

It was really an exciting time for Luna: Apart from numerous improvements, Thanks to Michael Holub, Aditya Bhatt, Smit Shah, The upcoming VSXu 0.4 even got some OS X love!

2012 really was an year full of amazing conversations, really interesting ideas and interestingly interesting events for me….. since i might or might not ever talk about them again……. let me simply jot them down briefly:

a) Why the current state of Mobile Advertising is done horribly wrong… – a conversation that probably became one of the major reasons i quit my previous job:

b) How do we build an ideal music recommendation service: simply(and magically) suggest all the songs a user likes – then how would the user even know if he likes/dislikes a song? Adding a sense of progress/exploration?  A sense of flow? – a conversation that only lead to more questions…

c) Talked about even more interesting things I never thought I would even think about, with even more amazing people – which finally helped me choose the path i currently am on…

But as we all know, all talk, no work makes jack a dull boy. So

I’ve joined e-GITS as a Software Engineer.

4 weeks of unemployement

And its that time for a bit of looking back at things…

So the first week was a bit of cycling for pleasure and meeting up old friends I ve been wanting to meet for over a year…

And the next week I made the Puppy File Server and pushed it to the Nokia Store! (Visit the project page for more details)

And the Week After that I rewrote the forgotten VSXu-Tomahawk Integration to get it ready for primetime!

And then…. Experimented a little bit with meteorjs, half finished a surprise pet project with VSXu, Resurrected my good (9 year) old machine because my fav. 5 year old laptop decided to die (fried up motherboard because of overheating :/ ) and umm… thats mostly it i guess…

And Then a week of tooooooootal slacking off….. i cant even find how/where the time leaked away ………….  So i guess its time i  start looking for a job … so let me know if you know of any interesting opportunities for me

Why I quit my first job

At first glance, one might think https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092480 is what this blog post is about.

So let me dig into the issue a little bit. At work, we were given a ”Research problem”,”Open for anyone who wants to solve”, which was directly based on http://www.quora.com/Eric-M-Jackson/answers/Elon-Musk . I tried to solve the problem for about 10 days, during my personal time and work hours. During this time, I have come up with 2 wrong solutions and after staying up at work for *2 consecutive nights*, I have finally come up with another solution I found interesting and announced it, but at that point of time, no one even bothered to check it (it already took me 10 days to solve it and they have moved on). As I have worked on the problem for about 30-40 hours, especially during my personal time, and nobody at work even bothered to check it out (i still haven’t received any reply to the email I sent – but i don’t blame them), I wrote a little blog post about my interesting solution (in retrospect, it really isn’t a biggie – a high school student could have cracked it). A friend of  mine found the solution interesting and submitted it to hackernews (The title in hackernews is misleading  It was never about Ad click fraud, it was what my friend thought we did at work). The next day, I was made to take down the blog post. (Even though the post is not related to any of my company’s work, As I spent my office work hours to solve this, at this point of time, I do understand that they probably have the right to do this).

So after that incident, its aftermath and *a lot* of introspection, I realized that it is no longer practical for me to continue. Here are my reasons:

1) No personal growth: I know this sounds like it is straight off some std::ResignersHandbook. But bear with me:

“On an average day of 8 hours you don’t even work 2 hours………. The remaining 6 hours you keep working on whatever you want to…. but since you did that while you are on our payroll, we could even claim ownership of the foss code you wrote(for VSXu)… but we aren’t doing that as we are lenient”

Yes. It is a fact. For the past 6 months, The amount of work that is assigned/available to me was *worth* less than 2 hours a day.  The most technically challenging problem I have solved in the past 6 months, as part of my job, was a 14line recursive function. Technically, I haven’t learned much the last 6 months,  And the fact that I didn’t realize this until someone yelled at me is seriously disturbing. And the thought that someone else could claim my personal work just because I worked on it when I was at office is even more disturbing. (I know not everyone would consider this a valid point. But for someone working for a company that said “flexible work hours” – finish off your work whenever and wherever you want to, before the deadline, when hiring me, this is a really scary thing!). And NO! I seriously don’t consider tasks like “You MUST Rewrite half the server in Go lang by 6PM tomorrow. And then Erlang”, just for the sake of keeping me busy or keeping me interested in the job with some new tech as a bait, a good use of my time.

2) Lack of interest: Probably, You might already be thinking: If Your company didn’t give you enough work, You should have taken an initiative and come up with a proper technical roadmap. Yes, It is a small company: I could have done something about this myself. But, The fact that I haven’t done much about it (except for a few suggestions and trashed ideas) itself says it all. I am no longer motivated to work on the problem (of shoving random ads in some random user’s face) – no matter how much there is to learn in this field. At this point, I can honestly say that the product I am working on isn’t useful to me or most of the people who are using the product.  I am sick of the fact that I personally have to disable my ad block extension while testing my code. I am sick of the fact that I work on a product that mostly feels like spam to me and generates its revenue from accidental user clicks. (Yes, I honestly believe Mobile advertising is done horribly wrong – more on that and a possible solution/open question on some other blog post later on – if possible). So I really want to work on a product that I can brag about how useful and beautiful it is. And yes I think I enjoy more challenging tasks (I really can’t define what they are) than tasks like “Rename this parameter to that and test it for an hour”. I don’t care if a project I am working on is open source or closed source, as long as it is good and useful. I do want to work on/explore cool tech. But at the same time It is important for me to work on meaningful/useful problems. (Once again, I really don’t have any definitions out here)

3) I am tired and I feel burnt out: Yes I need a break. I feel stupid for burning myself out on such stupid and silly tasks, while coding for less less than 3 hours a day. May be I am expecting too much from myself, or maybe this was bound to happen to anyone in my position and schedule. So I might as well take a break. But at this point of time, I really can’t afford one. And even after the time off, I really don’t want to get back to the same mundane tasks again.

VSXu now available in the Ubuntu Software Center!!!

Yes! We finally made it to the Ubuntu Software Center!!!
Get it while it is hot!

So yes, The first thing you might notice is a 5$ price tag for an Open Source software, freely downloadable from github. And probably the proprietary License too. Before you get alarmed, let me assure you, everything about VSXu still remains the same.

Firstly,  We are only experimenting to see if people would actually pay for such a fine piece of software like VSXu. As this is just an experiment, and since we want to appreciate and thank the users who have actually paid for VSXu, we have enclosed a couple of extra visuals in this release, which are not part of the existing VSXu releases. Apart from that, i assure you everything else is the same as what you get in github.

Cheers,

inesh

P.S If you cannot pay for VSXu and still want the .debs for free, checkout VSXu Daily builds and VSXu Release builds .

P.P.S Also a Youtube channel with some beginner demos and documentation is on it’s way.

Thank you Udacity :)

A little makefile for our Node.js project……. just to sooth the soul…

Sooo…….. when i joined Chitika…. i had no experience in writing production code in an interpreted language…. And so whenever I had to make a commit, it was a nightmare to deploy it without testing it properly…

So we immediately had to switch to test driven development model…

And the one thing i really missed after the switch was a nice “compilation step” ….. SO , here is my attempt to fix that.

Cheers,
: Dinesh

Quick update on the last 8 months…

And After a loooooooong wait, finally have gotten my Shiny MOX

And also attended my graduation ceremony

And also i ve managed to put bits and pieces of OpenCV into VSXu (www.vsxu.com). If all goes well, we should soon have the really cool VSXu Augmented Reality Toolkit!
P.S 1) For those who dont know, VSXu is this super cool Visual Programming environment for computer graphics using OpenGL …
2) This is one more reason why I am excited about the Vision Class at coursera

And then I got myself a shiny bicycle

Finally managed to get bits and pieces of VSXu (www.vsxu.com) running in Tomahawk (www.tomahawk-player.org) – still a WIP though
(and NO, even though i ve hit a dead end with VSXu + Amarok because of Architectural issues, i havent given up on it yet.. If hopefully, i ll deliver it by the end of this summer )

And the superbunny won me the halloween doll making contest at Work

And then I ve joined Chitika’s Mobile Team at India….. so now I ve finally become a computer geek, by nature and profession

Because of some VISA issues, i couldnt attend the DS, but nevertheless I Worked for the DS TShirt design competition…. and…….. got stuck and carried away with the design at midway(read: college issues). So this is where i put a pause to it.. Any guesses what I had in my mind when desigining this??
Incase you didnt get it , here is the explanation : “The Area 51 is just a Decoy: Desktop Summit is where all the Awesome Out of Planet Technology is explored.” Alien because, for most of us KDE folks, the Gnome is still unknown and vice versa. And both KDE and GNOME is still an alien thing for the outsiders

A little hard disk crashed and it took away a lot of important data along with it.