Shashi's Blog

Photos of Jyotsna

2005-09-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

As promised earlier, here are photos of my daughter.

Update (finally)

2005-05-25T04:14:00.000-07:00

I've been very busy on both work and personal ends. My wife gave birth to our first child - a cute little baby girl (I'll post her picture later, I promise). We've decided to name her Jyotsna, which means "moonlight". She's already lit up my world.

Work-wise, I'm in the US for a month, doing some requirement gathering and getting a design ready for the next set of changes required by SBC in @Road's GeoManager application.

That's it for now, stay tuned.

Busy

2005-05-03T00:14:00.000-07:00

Been busy last few weeks. I will update this blog when I can :(

Bitter lessons from experience

2005-04-01T23:55:00.000-08:00

Right now, I'm working on implementing security recommendations from the Open Web Application Security Project (or OWASP) Top Ten vulnerabilities list. While going through a lot of my old code I find myself thinking time and again - "What the hell was I thinking when I wrote this?"

This brings me to something that I've noticed often, especially recently. It takes 3 to 4 years of hardcore software coding experience to really get into the groove of stuff - you start to recognize common pitfalls and automatically start writing better code. Unfortunately, in most Indian software companies, by the time you get to this stage (and sometimes even sooner) you're at the stage in your carreer where you start managing people and stop writing code. So all the stuff you've learnt just gets wasted!

I wish there were a way to preserve this hard-earned experience and more than that I wish that software companies would realize this. It seems like they're still applying the lessons learned in the industrial era to what is clearly a post-industrial process.

Restarting my blog!

2005-02-24T19:53:00.000-08:00

I've finally decided to get this blog back up again. So what to write about? Today I'll just mention one of my pet peeves.

One of the things I find most puzzling about our society is how it seems to just completely ignore the very people who are most responsible for it's advancement. All of us are guilty of this - we treat every movie actor/actress or sports personality as an icon, or a hero (hell! even the guy who teaches cooking on TV is one). However, do you even know who invented the cell phone that you are using all the time? What about those responsible for the birth of the internet? Or the world wide web?

Recently, Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, the two people who came up with TCP/IP - the communication protocol used by most of the internet, were awarded the A. M. Turing Award for 2004.

Here's to a couple of real icons!