I remember reading this quote aloud in the school session, and it has forever stayed with me since then -: "Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." After my 2nd year in college, I did an internship with Innoraft, where I was introduced to the world of web development. I fell in love with it instantaneously, and in my heart I knew I could do this for a long time to come. The first work, I did involved building a personal website for myself. Originally, meant to be a simple blogging site, it evolved into something so much more. But before we get there, I need to talk to you about something else.

I am a passionate fantasy football player, and with the bunch of crazy but equally awesome online friends, we decided to start a new game, based on scores that were retrieved manually from the fantasy football site. We had over 150 registrants when we initially launched the game in Euro 2008, After each round, we had to manually go to each player’s link, fetch their score, and update the necessary google doc.

How about introducing a little technology and shaking things up? I couldn't afford a new host for this site, so on my personal site, I allocated a folder where I started my work on this. We moved to automated live score updates (fetching scores from an external site using data-scraping from the gaming site) within 2 weeks of my idea. Along with, I introduced a brilliant web interface to view the scores, and check how your rivals were doing. Till date, this has been one of my proudest moments as a web developer, as the joy that I brought to this community has been unmatched. The outburst of gratitude was so evident in my mails, and on the comment threads, and it makes me feel proud even now. This small innovation sprung a whole new set of competitions, and now we even have rivals hosting competitions. :-)

After college, I joined Flipkart and had a hell of a time there as a software developer. I primarily worked on ruby based frameworks -: padrino, and rails, but at the same time, I found myself wring some nifty shell scripts on the server which involved some old school regex’s to extract worst requests from the log files. I was also a part of creating an oncall-enabler, where we setup a debugging process for order tracking, which traced in what department the order was failing. But the best work I feel I did, was in creating an advanced search form, where we queried from a 350GB database, and configured a master-slave environment for the incoming queries. Flipkart was a great learning experience, but my dream was to have a start-up of my own. I moved to QED42 in the hope that it would hasten the process, only to realize that dreams can also change. I now feel like such an integral part of the establishment here, that at this point of time, I feel like I could see out my entire career here.

On the tech side, I want to now gradually move to becoming a full stack developer as I think a good developer should be familiar with the entire stack and should know how to make life easier for those around them. I am proud of the work I do, and strongly believe in ownership and quality deliverance. You may find me working on projects in my free time, because I love what I do so much that it just doesn't feel like work. Ask my clients :-)