These days my work mainly involves around government data (or the data that I assume govt should provide). You must have already seen the open data initiatives by both USA (Data.Gov) and UK(data.gov.uk) governments. I am not sure how good or the bad the data is but the initiative as such is a great move. For that matter it is not just countries but the cities like London have opened up their data. I think its high time for democracies like India to open up the data. Well at least the govt bodies of so called silicon valley of India, Bangalore’s BBMP or GOK to begin with.

Imagine raw data you will get to play around, its programmers heaven. Imagine the kind of mashups we can build with election results and geo data. As of today even though we have some kind of data on-line. Its very distributed, not open and of course not developer friendly.

What we need today is an open data initiative, where GOI and state/local govts can publish data in a developer friendly format. Even though I am not an expert, by developer friendly I mean, open standard, online, search-able, semantic data. Unfortunately in India it might take years for Govt to come up with such a plan. So as active citizens, how can we force the govt to that? or should it be taken up by an NGO or Society? or should we the citizens start a simple community project of collecting and publishing data?

Btw as an interim solution I am bookmarking all the Govt related data on delicious with #open-data-india. Feel free to tag/comment more about available data.

As promised I am starting the outfoscions series with Onze Technologies. With their first and primary product Latlong.in they are trying to decode the maps for the rest of us. Latlong tries to give you the information on the go, hence the best way is to deliver by SMS. But the biggest problem for delivering the route on the SMS is 160 character limit. Guys at Latlong came up with a plan of decoding the last ~5km route to destination. This is a brilliant idea considering most of the time users struggle in last five kilometers. Any detailed information from a known landmark in last five kilometers is the way we generally give directions to our friend. LatLong tries to do the same on sms.
You can start using by sending “help” to 90088 90088.
This Sunday I met them at their office. In fact I used their own service to reach their office. It was great fun talking to all the four (Sud, Rahul, Sairam and Pavaman) founders.
Here is an interview I did with them. I am not an interviewer as such. But I have tried to ask questions, which probably will help you know more about LatLong.in. Thank you Sud for taking time out.
Read the rest of this entry »

This is yet another long post. So give it time to load and take a big cup of coffee before start reading it. As most of you who follow me on twitter know that I am in Hyderabad. This Saturday me and my friend Achalesh decided to explore some parts of Hyderabad. We started with Golconda fort, it was great. In the evening we decided to visit old city for some chai.What else is better than char minar area for chai.

So we caught a shared auto and then bus to reach old city. As we started walking to wards char minar. We saw this beautiful structure unfolding.

It wasnt as big as I had thought. But never the less it was big and beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »

Wanted to write this post from yesterday night. But didnt know what to write.  26/11 was just one of those incidents which got world (media) attention but I see one such happening every day.  I go through various  emotions every time I read about such violence.

This post is not only for remembering 26/11 heroes but all those great souls which have fought against the violence from the beginning. I salute you all.

To all others

ಓಂ ಅಸತೋಮ ಸದ್ಗಮಯ,
ತಮಸೋಮಾ ಜ್ಯೋತಿರ್ಗಮಯ,
ಮೃತ್ಯೋರ್ಮಾ ಅಮೃತಂಗಮಯ
ಓಂ ಶಾಂತಿ, ಶಾಂತಿ ಶಾಂತಿಃ

om asathoma sadgamaya
tamasoma jyothirgamaya
mruthyorma amrutangamaya
om shanthi shanthi shanthi hi

Rough translation:
From false to truth
From darkness to light
From death to immortality
O kindly light..let there be peace

Recently I completed seven years in IT industry. My career started with Siemens and as of now I am working with Infy. Along with Infy and Siemens, my professional life has been greatly influenced by people whom I met at various events, online and open source communities. This is a small note where I want to share what I learnt in this seven years. There are many things to write about, I just wanted to use number seven.

1. You can’t learn programming in 7 years
   Yes, Plain and simple. Read Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig
2. Care about people than process
   Most of you would have heard “People are the center of every problem” quoted mainly by managers, HRs etc. But for me, People are the center of every solution. None of the **greatest** process can solve any problem with out right people. In fact all great projects/events in the history of the world are remembered, by remembering the people who were involved rather than process they followed. So give importance to people, break the process but don’t break a human.
3. Be the worst team member
   At the risk of sounding very controversial, Yes, you should be the worst team member in your team. I believe in learning from team members. You have better chance to learn when everybody is better than you. Where you can learn from every contact, every conversation and every minute. Its good to lead a team. You might get promoted if you lead a team. But you should realize that you are losing on learning. Its very important to be lead by a leader/thinker early in your career and also to work with a great team. Remember: Its good to lead but its best to be lead by a good leader. They also make you better future leaders.
4. Have personal projects
   Many would have written about it. If your employer supports your personal project then nothing like it. If not make sure to have some personal project. You can start from writing simple tools/scripting. Once you feel better try to contribute to a open source project. Later you can have your own big project. There is nothing like self learning, your personal projects will give you a chance to learn what you want. It also gives a chance to escape from **ordinary regular work**. Updated: You should read Scott Berkun’s post on 20% time.
5. Use tools or use Unix
   Few days back, my friend was wanted to know why I am not interested in solving sudoku. According to him, its the most famous games amongst geeks just like rubik’s cube. For me I want to solve the problem for ever (I know how stupid I sound). I would probably write a program to solve the sudoku/cube than solving it manual. Now coming back to the point, use tools at work. Even if it is a very boring manual work. Try to automate it, make it a programming problem. Learn different tools. (I met this guy who was working on excel sheet to make some reports. Now it sounded like a very boring stuff. But actually he could have programmed in vb script to completely automate the reporting. Now it sounds better right?) While learning tools..Learn the mother of all tools: Unix commands.
6. Attend conferences and meet people
   I cant stress enough on this. Every time I talk to somebody at office who comes for advice, this is what I give them. None of the communities in the world is as disjoint as Indian IT (developers) community. Please do go out, attend meets, conferences. You will learn as well as your professional circle gets bigger. Even volunteering at conferences like foss.in or barcamp will give you a great opportunity to learn.
7. You don’t have to learn to knot a tie
   You know what I mean. Sometimes you need to follow the rules but programmers have their own way of satisfying their own ego! No. I don’t know how to knot a tie and I am not willing to learn in near future.

I hope it helps to somebody at least.

Picture Credit: Wikipedia and FOSS.in