WANTED: Long weekend

Finally the much awaited long weekend after the tensions of 3GToday started. Ideally I would like to have a peaceful weekend of not doing any hard-work, enjoy life and just laze around. Plans are for Sea-World on saturday, loaf around and grocery on Sunaday and take Monday entirely peacefully. Would like to play some tennis over the weekend (my first tennis in more tha 3 months). The hectic schedules of 3Gtoday started last december, right after my vacation and gradually ramped up to hectic frenzy that concluded this week with the site going live. Everyday was filled with calls, bug fixes and having to convince the client the reason why something was not do-able. But in all, a super learning and fun project it has been. But hey, I still would be cautious to ask for another one like this. At the end of this project my earnings are: pride of having helped some team members to improve, learnings of handling client and situations, learnings of portal and portlets (including JSF) and having fun in the face of tension. My weaknesses exposed (hey PM if you are reading this, you shouldn't be using it against me in my evaluation) are: lesser patience, losing sight of work priority to the ambitious heart of doing a lot of stuff and ability to multi-task among highly asking projects. But then overall, my balance sheet is still profitable and would like to invest the profits in the long weekend!!

A Toast to 3GToday Team

When I was complaining about work, it was the 3GToday website that I was working on. Looking at the site, its hard to judge the complexityin the technology, architecture and effort behind it. Hats off to all my team members who have been working hard (day and night) to get this up and running. Vinay (our project manager), Lakshmi (who has unfortunately for us has moved on), Aruna, Ramesh, Niladri, Kannan, Ananth, Vinod, Jyoti Ranjan, Pankaj, Sunil, Harisha, Saritha, Saravana Kumar, Mullai and Shyamala (analyst and test lead) form the successful team of which I was a part. This may not have be the best project ever, but given the experiences of people, complexity of technology and the fact that most of them were new, it has been a project of which I am really proud. We also went through a lot of effort in the end, but I must say it was worth it. Though there are senior members in the management who have no regards for the effort of the team members and think a congratulations mail is a formality that everyone has to pass through, I cannot let be stopped from rejoicing. For many of us, even our families had to put up with the erratic schedules. But after everything is said and done, this has been a success story in the organization.
Coming to part of management, if upper middle management is not going to be people oriented, their survival will only lead to the demise of the organization. Today we recieved a mail from one member who thinks a person totally unrelated to our project is the one to be attributed to the success. And this was after he had challenged the teams technical capability and finally mentioned that the delivery was a 'fluke' and only future would tell us how consistent we can be. And none of the members were attributed to the success and all it indicated was the formality of the event of being congratulated. Extremely irritating and left a dirty taste in mouth. For sure this person will never earn my respect even if he does the 'bestest' act in the world. And it also indicates to me the fact that if such members form the part of our top brass, I amy not survive long.
Anyways, I would like to personally thank every member in my team and hope that as we build the site further and fix any bugs that still exist, we'll only taste success. Thanks everyone.

Rewarding Work Life

Life would be less complicated if poeple completed their immediate tasks at hand before doing a role-play for someone else. And to add more to that, if they would care to use their brains once in a while. I can better relate to people if they don't understand rather than when they talk about things which they have no clue about but are not willing to accept their lack of knowledge!!! And to be in a Fortune 500 company and to deal with such creatures, RIDICULOUS!!!!!!
But being in a client servicing organization, I'm forced to put up with all this and its supposed to be a part of life. And not to mention, have to take it with a smile and say "thank you for all the hard work". And at the end the company rewards these brainless nit-wits while all I get to hear is "good work". And does my organization know what we go through in execution? Sure. But will they do something about it? Nothing other than give the sales guy his cut of the revenue!!! Strange cycle for me to think that the work I'm doing is a great learning experience and rewarding, when infact your promotions are held up (when it should be prompt if they think I deserve it), your non-work life is as screwed up as it can be and let's not go to monetary aspects of it. As for my ambitions in life, I don't think that this life time is even close to achieving half of what I want (and trust me when I say that I'm not ambitious). My well-wishers think that I'm in the wrong organization for achieving my targets and keep flooding me with opportunities they think is beneficial. But for the most of it, I am not confident of what I'm capable of since it is an unknown to me (and not to others). So I'm hoping to build my confidence and strengths in the organization that first recruited me out of grad school and among folks whom I trust. Not a bad thing I suppose, except that I seem to be running out of time. I am very confused as well as frightened. But where most people look at me for whatever little I achieve, I take the pleasure of success in every small problem I over come while for the big ones, I seem to be loosing out.

Proxy me please!!

Finally a solution to reduce the load on the server - put a proxy caching server in front of it. After days of struggle and long hours at work, my determined boss finally got the proxy caching to work. Well lot of short-cuts and forbidden paths undertaken, but the we fnially got the performance imporvement we wnated on a non-clustered environment. To put it simply, we put a proxy server in front of our web server & application server so that all the users get the content that is cached (it is updated periodically) in the proxy server instead of requesting our servers who serve real-time information. Please note - a way to relieve stress. So, can I put a proxy in front of me at work so that all static and monotonous requests can eb served by the proxy while I am enjoying my life?? This whole week I've not spent any quality time with my wife and she's already mad with me for making her run through everyhting from grocery shopping to birthday parties.
But the best part is I still manage to amaze myself most of the times (if you guys did not get me - modesty is not my virtue). I have managed to work on everyone elses modules when I had not written any myself in offshore. And I'm no geek in java!! And all this after members in my team said - "there is no way you'll make changes in the code since you did not write any". I think there is someone out there who definitely looks out for me and I'm very grateful to that 'someone'. Me looking forward to lot more fun in the coming weeks and put all this behind me.

Has time moved?

I've been in the US for over 3 months now. I'm still doing the implementation of the site. Though it is scheduled to go on for more phases, I've my doubts. I was to do requirements for another project, but this one closed me out (and my hopes of being an analyst). And the worst part, dealing with pathetic infrastructure guys who feel that the site going live may add burden to their already existing chores that they are determined to pull down the application for development issues. Haven't we moved onto the era where everyone was aligning their goals with teh organizational goals? or has time stopped for these people? I know there are tweaks possible in teh application developed and I do not claim perfection. But why does everyone else think they are perfect? Or do I have a kiddish attitude towards competitiveness? My life does only move in the negetive direction with the fact that I get lesser time and energy towards home. My career ambitions are more realistically seeming to move on a horizontal level. And on the monetary front, there is only movement backward (this one is for sure). Where is my motivation coming from? What is making me come to office at 8 AM and leave after 6:30 PM everyday if not later? Am I making a fool out of myself?
Anyways hopefully it gets cleared in the next few exercises and I'll be happy to come and work again. But really, now the site seems old to me, nothing exciting. Afterall I've been seeng it since last October!!