A nice pic :) Painted by a very good friend of mine. :)

One month since I’ve quit IBM.

1 month.. 30 days… 720 hrs…

So, how was the experience as an entrepreneur? How does it feel to work all on my own without a big fat cheque waiting for me on the 1st day of every month? This is my blog and this post is going to be all about me. This is the one place I get to pen down my thoughts. So, you are already warned. Boring content follows. :-)

How does it feel to work without a manager?
To tell the truth, it’s scary. Very scary. You don’t have anyone to assign you tasks. This is what my friends told me when I quit my job
"me: yes, that way, koyaboo will think that I'm the one who works hard and might give me good rating :P (evil)
N: lol wht rating??!now only you can rate yourself! thts soo cool!"
And it was at that moment than I realized that I have to rate myself and that’s no good. Even if I work for 24 hours a day, I’m going to rate myself as a lazy guy (because I know that’s what I’m). And that’s going to affect me in the long run.

How was it quitting IBM?
It was one the most difficult decision I’ve taken in my life. I know I can get a job any time I want, but I really loved the team I worked with. Made some very good friends and the whole team was fun loving. :-). They play pranks, steal others stuff and bug them till they threaten to complain to managers, play TT the whole day and call each others by nick names ( of course, I invented the names for everyone :D ). So it was really hard quitting now.. 6 months back, I would’ve been a happiest guy to jump out. :)

So, how many hours I code for interviewstreet everyday?
Hmm, I sleep for around 6 to 8 hours a day. I code for around 6 hours for interviewstreet, read new technology for around 6 hours and the remaining time just somehow vanishes. Maybe I should start time tracking now.

How does it feel to work without getting a salary every month?
Simply nothing. I’ve been working without a salary for more than 4 years in college and it feels great to work on things you like and learn something new every minute. :-)

The summary of the story

startupCount += 10;
mentorCount++;


Yes, MVP has announced their new batch of 10 startups. To make things more exciting, they have Indus Khaitan in the team.

Things you might know about indus.
1. Chief Technology Officer of SezWho, a Silicon Valley startup
2. 5 bare minimum things a web startup CTO MUST worry about, at bar camp.

Things you might not know about Indus,
1. Only CTO who can whistle in an open auditorium. http://entrypreneur.blogspot.com/2009/05/xtreme-starups-iim-bangalore.html
2. Had the guts to be an entrepreneur after losing his 8 years savings. :O.

And btw, the real heroes of the day, the 10 startups are.

1. Adscoot
2. EasySquareFeet
3 InterviewStreet
4. Naabo
5. Picsean
6. ReachTax
7. RetailVector
8. RobotsAlive
9. Scopial
10. VeriCAR

A picture is worth 1000 words. So this picture should tell you the real story :) Click on the picture for the bigger image :)

Yes, I’ve quit IBM and now the signature in my emails says

Harishankaran
Software Developer,
Interviewstreet.com

Now that I can post anything I want (not that IBM stopped me writing what I wanted to write :P), let me try to answer a few questions my friends asked, when I told them about my venture.

What triggered you guys [ working in big MNC's like IBM, Amazon ] to quit your job? What more do you ppl want? especially when you are just a 1 year old kid in the industry.

Well, whether you are a year old in the industry (or) 5 years (or) 10 years, if you do not have the passion towards your product, the ‘experience’ makes little sense. It does count to an extent, I agree, but the yardstick I would use to measure an entrepreneur will be his degree of commitment more than anything else! I personally feel, passion coupled with dedicated effort to your product can help you solve any problem that you encounter and that’s what most startups do!. I can’t speak for others but I guess their reason should be on similar lines. I want to learn everything. Probably I’m more ambitious here. Or maybe greedy. Or anything else you might like to call it. But at the end of the day, you have to accept this – you’ll learn lots and lots if you work in a startup and the amount one gets to learn if we start our own venture is awesome and that’s what I find attractive. :)

So does that mean you won’t be worried if you don’t make money of out of this?

Well, actually yes. I don’t think I’ll worry about that. But we are looking somewhere around a million dollars in a couple of years time! ;)

How long are you going to do this?

Three months back I had no idea that I’ll quit from IBM so soon. So, I’m not too sure I can even predict what I might do after three or six months.

Why does your email say “Software Developer” and not “CTO”?

Simple. That’s my job in Interviewstreet. I don’t have 100 people under me to tell them what to code or what should be the next product we release. I’m the designer, developer and tester here. And that’s why it says “Software Developer”

So what have you learnt in Interviewstreet till now?

Well, one thing I’ve learnt and am still learning is to make decisions on the product stack. From small to big decisions. And trust me, it is not so easy.
For example, should we use Git or CVS or SVN? IF Git, then why Git? The point to note there is that it doesn’t matter whether Git is the best SCM available out there. What matters is how much can it leverage your product. How much time will your team spend in learning it if they have to learn that?

Have all the decisions you have made have been perfect?

Of course no. But luckily, most of them worked out well. For example

Jquery or YUI javascript library or script.aculo.us? We use JQuery and we are totally happy about it.
Blueprint or YUI CSS or 960? We use Blueprint. Solves so many CSS troubles.
Git or CVS or SVN? Of course Git. Do I need to explain why?
Cake PHP or Zend or php without any MVC framework? This is where we went terribly wrong. None of us had used MVC frameworks before and we didn’t get the concepts right. We lost a couple of weeks trying to code with MVC model and finally decided to come back to simple PHP.
The important problem with these decisions are that they are costly. Any mistake you make in deciding the software stack is gonna hurt you real bad if it doesn’t suit you and you have to change it after a few months.

Now that you are working for your startup, will you be working 7 days a week? Or even worse, 8 days a week?

No. You have to understand one thing. A startup is not a short sprint, it is a marathon. You need to build an empire, which means you need to run for more than 10 years. And working 20 hours a day is not going to help that. What we have in mind is to work for 5 days a week, 1 day just to learn new technology/skills and a day off. Sounds perfect now, but the difficult part will be forcing ourselves not to work on the 7th day!

You sound like a geek/programmer to me, who likes only to code. Will you be able to manage marketing/business and every other non-technical stuff?

Didn’t I tell you? I want to learn EVERYTHING. I will make my own mistakes and learn from them.

I’m a full time web developer now. Million thanks to Firefox, web development is made much much easier. To make the web development process easier, there are many many extensions.

A few of them I use for my development,

1. Firebug
2. Web Developer
3. ColorZilla
4. MeasureIt
5. ViewSourceChart
6. FireCookie
7. YSlow
8. Delicious.
9. Twitterfox
10. CSS Viewer

One problem I face when I have to work in a new machine or a new user account is installing these extensions. Not that I face this problem everyday, but this is something which is very irritating. One simple solution will be to backup the extensions folder and protect it safely, so that I can use it on any machine I use. Finally, I wrote a simple shell script which does this job.

#!/bin/bash
declare -a EXT LINK

#Let us populate the extension and the link for the extension here

EXT[0]=”ColorZilla”
EXT[1]=”Firebug”
EXT[2]=”WebDeveloper”
EXT[3]=”MeasureIt”
EXT[4]=”ViewSourceChart”
EXT[5]=”CSSViewer”
EXT[6]=”FireCookie”
EXT[7]=”YSlow”
EXT[8]=”SenSEO”
EXT[9]=”Delicious”
EXT[10]=”Twitterfox”

LINK[0]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/271/addon-271-latest.xpi”
LINK[1]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/1843/addon-1843-latest.xpi”
LINK[2]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/60/addon-60-latest.xpi”
LINK[3]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/539/addon-539-latest.xpi”
LINK[4]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/655/addon-655-latest.xpi”
LINK[5]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/2104/addon-2104-latest.xpi”
LINK[6]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/6683/addon-6683-latest.xpi”
LINK[7]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/5369/addon-5369-latest.xpi”
LINK[8]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/file/57302/senseo-0.8.9-fx.xpi”
LINK[9]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/3615/addon-3615-latest.xpi”
LINK[10]=”https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/latest/5081/addon-5081-latest.xpi”

if [ ! -d "/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/" ]
then
    echo “Creating directory in tmp”
    mkdir -p “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/”
fi

i=0
count=${#EXT[@]}
while [ "$i" -lt "$count" ]
do
    echo “Installing ${EXT[i]}”
    filename=`echo ${LINK[i]} | awk -F “/” ‘{print $NF}’`;
    rm -rf “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp”
    mkdir -p “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp”
    
    if [ ! -f "/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/$filename" ]
    then
        echo “Downloading $filename”
        wget –quiet -O “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/$filename” ${LINK[i]}
    fi
    
    unzip -qq -d “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp” “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/$filename”
    fffolder=`cat “/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp/install.rdf” | grep “em:id” | head -n 1 | awk -F “>” ‘{print $2}’ | awk -F “<" '{print $1}'`

    if [ -z $fffolder ]
    then
        i=`echo $i+1 | bc`;    
        continue;
    fi
    
    for j in `ls -1 "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox"`
    do
        if [ -d "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j" ]
        then
            rm -rf "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j/extensions/$fffolder"    
            mkdir -p "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j/extensions/$fffolder"
            cp -r "/tmp/firefoxext-$USER/tmp/"* "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$j/extensions/$fffolder"
        fi
    done
    i=`echo $i+1 | bc`;
done

You can download the latest version of this script from here.

Logic : Download the xpi file. Unzip it. Copy it to extensions folder.

Disclaimer: Download and run the above script at your own risk. I have tested it with many cases. Worst case, this will remove all your extensions from all your profiles (OMG) (Happened to me once). Also, I would advice you not to run this script in windows. I haven’t tested it there.

A few days back, I got a mail from my friend, saying,

Subject: Versioning in Windows
Hi guys,

Thanks,

I replied to him about some windows software I found after some googling and also found out that there is a file system in Linux which can perform this. But changing the file system of a current system sounded “dangerous” to me. I didn’t explore much into it. I use gedit for almost all development in my machine and started wondering how hard or easy can it be to create a gedit plugin which can do this.

That resulted in the following plugin.

Installation instructions.

1. Download the latest plugin file from here.
2. Extract the files and copy the two files to ~/.gnome2/gedit/plugins
3. Open gedit and enable the plugin.
4. For the first time, configure the path where you need the backups to be stored.

TODO
1. This is a 2 hour hack. Gedit plugin’s coding convention standards (if there is anything) is not followed.
2. The time taken to save might increase if there are too many backup files. //TODO for next version.
3. A neat GUI to show the diff and all the saved versions in the backup folder.
4. An option to save diffs or the full text.
5. Format of the filename can be provided as an option to the user.

Hope you like the plugin. Please fill in your feedback as comments to this post.