So, some of the stuff I had in my list are.

1. Learn Hadoop.
2. Read a book every 2 days.
3. Learn a new programming language
4. Go to beach everyday and spend at least 30 mins there..

So, this is what I’m going to try for this month. Sleep properly for a month. I’ve neglected my bad sleeping habits for a very long time and it’s time I try to do something about it.

So, planning to go to bed by 1 AM and not wake up before 6AM.

Let us see how long I can manage this one…

Disclaimer :

1. I didn’t cook this.
2. This samba rice tastes like heaven!!!
3. According to the person who made this, I’ve have been friend with a great person, coz she can cook this.
4. This is called awesomeness ;)

We will begin the show with Brilliant Questions. There were way too many contenders for this category. It was very difficult to pick the best one. First, let’s take a look at the final 5 contenders who made it.

1. Abilash Prabhu - Why does Superman stop bullets with his chest, but ducks when you throw a revolver at him?
2. Dhruvkaran Meta - If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
3. Akshay Kumar - I was the best man at the wedding. If I'm the best man, why is she marrying him?
4. JV - Why do couples hold hands during their wedding? It’s a formality just like two boxers shaking hands before the fight begins!
5. Nitin Isloorkar - How do you see yourself five years down the line?" "If I had foresight, I wouldn't be here now, would I?

And the Best Brilliant Question Award goes to Dhruv for his electrons and morons question. What an idea sar ji! :)

Next, we move on to Frustration category. Status message is first the place where people vent out their frustrations and we got ample messages to justify that.

1. Nitin Isloorkar - After Monday and Tuesday even calendar says W T F
2. Krithika Ravichandran - labs are like black holes.. once in..you can never get out..
3. Lavanya Tejaswy - I want to see a ghost, real one!! *bored* with normal things.
4. Taggy - For want of a logo a night was lost. #photoshop

And the Best Frust status message goes to Krithika. It’s simple, but true. Happens to all of us all the time.

Next we have Funny Quotes status messages here.

1. Saurabh Gupta - Friendship b/w gals - A girl came home late, told dad she was at frnd's place.. Dad called 10 friends but all say she wasn't there... Friendship b/w boys - A boy didn't come home one night n told dad he was at frnd's flat... Dad called 10 of his frnds. 6 confirmed he had slept at their place... and 4 told he's still there.. ;)
2. Harishankaran - "I love Facebook. It's the only place I can talk to a wall and not look like an idiot"
3. PK- "Chuck Norris can parse HTML with regex"
4. Akshay Kumar - "Don't drink and drive. You might hit a bump and spill your drink."
5. Manish - 2b or not 2b is a decision you have to take when you enter 2nd grade

And the Best Funny Quote award goes to Akshay. The concern for the few drops of drink he might spill is mind blowing. :)

Next, we will pick the best Interesting Links. Here again, we got hundreds of nominations at the first step. After filtering and filtering, we got the final 4

1. Ajitha - Lol......U gota be Kidding me!!!!! http://www.tuktastic.com/index.htm
2. Arun - Please don't click on this link http://www.hurr-durr.com/
3. Interviewstreet - Resume vs CV - What's the difference? http://bit.ly/9gMRtP
4. Indus Khaitan - Who is an entrepreneur? http://www.slideshare.net/indus/disha-2010-presentation-on-entrepreneurship-indus-khaitan


And the award goes to Indus Khaitan. Excellent presentation with awesome images. Congrats :)

Next we will pick the best from Cricket. With an excellent 200 from Sachin, nothing else made to the top.

1. Abilash Prabhu - Reducing the number of atheists in India since 1989 - Sachin Tendulkar!
2. Swetha - Cricket. Sachin. Happiness. One guy- the ability to tug at the heartstrings of a billion. Divine!
3. Subbu - my only prospective achievement in life: when sachin scored a double century, i tweeted about it. #sachinisgod

And Abilash get’s the award. A fitting tribute to our little master blaster.

Now, we will pick the best from the Inspirational Quote

1. Sankara - To move quickly, go alone. To move far, go together." African Proverb
2. Poorna - Don't ever let somebody tell you... You can't do something. People can't do somethin' themselves, they wanna tell you you can't do it. If you want somethin', go get it. Period.
3. Sundarrajan : I look at my life as a seed investor.. I give seed capital for my interests.. knowing well that the odds are 1:10 for success.. but I am willing to do it.. coz.. that one in ten will become my passion

The best Inspirational Quote award goes to Poorna. I simply love that quote. In fact, I started storing status messages after I seeing that.

Finally, a few other special mentions in various other categories.

Movies
Madhu - I really don get y Mr.Cameroon waited so long.. I mean optical fibers were discovered a loooong time ago!!

Funny Quote
Lavanya Tejaswy - The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun. P. G. Wodehouse

Job Offers
Manas Garg - Want to work for MS? Ping me.

Punch Dialogue
Karnan - I am not HANDSOME guy, but i can give my HAND to SOME guy who needs my help - ABDUL KALAM.

Personal Damage
Ajitha - Hari and his friends = Losers!!!!!
Doniv - You are a goat, why are you a goat ? Because you shout maee...

Spider
Bodhayan - Spider Annual Report 2008-09.. :) :) http://bit.ly/aK2PWS

Want to add more? Add them in the comments here. :) Keep them coming.. :)

Disclaimer:
This is a personal post. It is all about me and what I did in the last 3 days. If you don’t know me at all, I strongly advise you to stop reading here and I apologize for taking your time. If you are geek like me and prefer to read a technical post, rather than this boring post, you checkout my post on chess interview questions.

I had a great weekend at bangalore and felt like blogging about it. I’ve also planned to write here at least once a week. So that too adds as a strong factor to write this post here. This post is much longer than I expected it to be. So please proceed when you are totally jobless.

The reason why I planned this trip is totally arbitrary. I just wanted to take a small break from work and meet my friends in Bangalore.

1. Latika (my IBM friend) always keeps us inviting to her place for meetup and we have loads of fun everytime we go there. Mortal Kombal, Raiden vs Bo Rai Cho, Dhani vs (Hari, Nandini, Latika, Shilpa), T20 match, “shopping” at lifestyle and lots more makes us go there again and again. Even if latika doesn’t invite us, we somehow make her do that :P (at the loss of some maaanam)

2. Lavanya bought a new scooty and she was too excited about it. Exctied about skidding in front of forum, caught by a policeman for wrong u turn and loads and loads of stories. This time she promised for a long ride when I come there (thank god she is one of the people who is ok with others riding her bike)

3. Been a long time since I’ve met manu, alagu, suren, sahil, anshu, ankit, preeti, balli, pk, donatello and others. These guys are the people I ping/bug for any technical/non-technical related queries. In fact, most of the important decisions we decide at interviewstreet, I brainstrom with these people and the outside perspective adds lots of value and even refines the way we think. These guys aren’t MBA marketing wiz but they are smart people and any decision or idea they suggest usually has a good logical reasoning behing it.

I got a mail saying there is bigthinkers talk series at leela palace. The bigthinkers talks are usually very good and the food they provide after the talk is YUMMY. :) So, I decided this is the only chance to go to Bangalore and I grabbed it :). And it so happens, the OCC meet is also on sunday.

Was a little skeptical about going to bangalore with no well planned schedule ahead. Usually when I go there, I will have a tight packed schedule with at least 3 meetings per day and squeeze in visiting friends in between these meetings. So, this time I thought I’ll have a peaceful time at bangalore with spending most of my time in my bed. Alas, it doesn’t happen that way when you have too many many good friends to meet and too little time.

Friday morning, I went to Vemana Institute of Technology to propose for a one day talk about interviewstreet and how to tackle interview and stuff. We had given the same talk at Karpaga Vinayagam College near Chennai the previous day and were thrilled about the response we got. But things didn’t move that fast here. Everyone from HOD to the lecturers seemed to be busy with their own work. Guess this will need another trip to get things moving faster. Keeping my fingers crossed on what they are going to respond today. I’ll be very glad if this doesn’t need one more trip.

I was out of Vemana by 2 and the bigthinkers at leela is from 3 to 5 PM. Unfortunately, some 5 to 6 people who promised they will come with me to Leela ditched me at the last moment. So, I was thinking whether to go all alone or bunk the event. Reaching leela 10 mins before the event, I was saw Nithya from Muziboo.com there. It was really a sweet surprise. Nitya and Prateek from Muziboo are really really sweet people who spent more than 2-3 hours with us last time discussing about interviewstreet, what we can do, why we should focus more on online marketing and many other things. I can never forget her jumping from her chair saying “we also did the same mistake.. You are exactly at the same position where we were 2 years back. Don’t do this“. It was almost like a mom trying to convice her kid that dogs are dangerous and they will bite you if you go near them. :) I was a little surprised to see her remember me and next 3 hours was discussion on muziboo, SEO, college visits and every single doubt I had in my mind at that time.

The talk by Rayleigh on the marketing reasearch was amazing. The number of factors he has considered so that external factors doesn’t affect his experiment is too good and made me think if I can do something on a smaller scale at interviewstreet.

After the talk, met friends of nitya and others who had come for that event. I realised that as an entrepreneur, you are never alone in any meetup. All you need is to say I’m X working for Y, exchange cards and talk to that person as if you know that person for months. It’s so simple.

Done with the networking at leela, met ankit, preeti and lavanya at pizza hut. Lavanya took the spotlight of the meetup with all the “extraordinary” things she has done. We can even call this as her “experiments”. To make a long story short, when you have lavi, it’s fun fun and fun. :)

Done with the dinner, planned for the next day. Me and lavi decided to got to nandi hills (thought this turned out to be a “well tried” attempt). With so many meetups and travel, I was dead tired when I reached home and was shocked to know that the SEO talk by Steve Wiideman is at 2.30AM. Played cricket with my friends for an hour, slept at 11.30 and got up by 2.25 to attend the SEO call (remember, this was supposed to be a break from work. sigghhh).

Done with the call and got interviewstreet reveiwed by him. Slept again at 3.30 and was woken up by lavi at 4 for the nandi hills trip. Thankfully, she suggested we cancel the trip, since none of knew the way to nandi hills and to make things worse, she didn’t even know how to come to my place. :D. Went back to sleep again and got up at 12 for lunch. This is one thing I love at bangalore. Getting up at 12 or 1 or 2 and skipping lunch after that. :D.

Reached latika’s place by 2 and we ordered pizza’s and started our mortal kombat game series. This time, we weren’t able to kick dani’s ass like how we did last time. But I was able to kill shilpa every single time:). Had lunch, played games again, met ankur, played games again and when I left from their place, it was 9.30 :O. Should thank latika for putting up with us all the time. Her place has become the standard place for our IBM gang to hang out whenever I come to bangalore. :).

Done with meeting and chatting with my IBM friends, met lavanya again since she lives in the same apartment. Went to corner house, but this time no DBC. :) Can’t afford to do the same mistake again. Was literally shocked when she told me she knew that I don’t booz. I’m still clueless what went wrong in my whole plan. Again, back to home by 11, this time watched IPL highlights with friends (thanks to youtube) and slept at around 12. Had OCC and few other meetups planned for the next day and had to sleep early for that (yes, 1 is early)

Got up at around 8 on sunday, and was ready to OCC by 9. Lavanya also wanted to come for this. So went with her to OCC and talk Sharad gave was excellent. Especially, the way he puts things forward is simply awesome. With 25 years experience, he is full of success and failure stories and each one of them was well put there. Done with the event, had lunch and met donatello, pk, balli and suren to discuss if we can use their codechecker at interviewstreet. The way they are developing the product right now is very exciting and I’m 99% sure interviewstreet will use their codechecker and am actually waiting for their first stable release, so that we can use it in our production servers. :) Have to test their current beta version.

Done with the long feature discussion and demo of his codechecker, interviewstreet’s admin interface, architecture design and everything, got a 15 mins to nap and again, had to meet the LRSL (Last row of Sun Lab) guys. Unfortunately, appaji, sahil and taggy couldn’t make for this event. I have no clue how the next 4 hours flew. We discussed linux, web, hacking, cracking, google, yahoo, fedora, ubuntu and what not. (everything you can expect from a lrsl guy).

With a full dinner done, I was in no mood to pack and leave bangalore. Came back home with anshu and had long and fruitful discussion with him on how we can make facebook, orkut and blog widgets for interviewstreet which can be fun and useful. This is one main reason why I discuss stuff with techies. They have a logic behind their decisions. Got many many useful ideas from anshu and reached home like at midnight 12.

Almost did everything I wanted to do in bangalore. Now blogging on my way to chennai. Back to interviewstreet, interviews, analytics, customer call, college visit, ROI, analytics analysis, project graph curve path, figure out the reason why numbers came down, check where to do speed/SEO optimizations, how to increase pageviews/vists, increase articles and prep-kits, remove bugs. Phew!!!. That’s the long list of tasks I do almost everyday :O… Can’t believe I was the carefree software engineer, WFH almost 3 days week in IBM.

Guess that’s about it. See ya next week. Bfn. :) Regards

Interviewstreet.com, the online platform to attend mock interviews from expert professionals and practice tests is shaping up very well. What I’ve learnt in the past 6 months is huge and impressive. I still have lots to learn and goals to reach. And I’m very sure I’ll reach it sooner.

Quick updates on what happened in the last 6 months (in no particular order)

1. Interviewstreet’s very first newsletter.

Don’t know why it took us 6 months to come up with a newsletter. Probably, we were waiting for the right time, design and content (also called as procrastinating). But from now on, you’ll get our newsletter on the first week of every month.

You can checkout our newsletter here. In this newsletter, you can check out what’s new in the job market, our special interview with kavya from microsoft, more updates from interviewstreet and a cool puzzle which has some exciting prizes to grab.

I should thank Geetanjali, Manas, Lavanya and Ajitha here. The time and effort they put in to make our newsletter better was priceless.

2. Articles.

Our articles section has grown by leaps and bounds. Many thanks to all the content writes who made this possible. The quality of the articles is wonderful. We are looking for more content writers who want to contribute for our articles section. If you are interested, contact me at hari at inteviewstreet.com

3. Online recruitment software

This is still under the hoods and we haven’t released for it public yet. But it’s always exciting to share a feature which is yet to be released. We have created an awesome tool to help you recruit “good” people. Don’t waste your time interviewing people who can’t even clear the first level.

Shared some of the screenshots here.. This is currently used by a few startups to make their hiring process efficient. Again, if you want to check it out, drop me a mail.

4. Topcoder

Finally managed to reach Div 1 in TC. It shouldn’t have taken this long. But better late than never. :)

5. Trips

Going to KVC college this wednesday for a one day session on how to crack interviews, algorithm puzzles. It’s going to be fun and it’s always exciting to meet new people. Going to bangalore to meet my friends this weekend. Kind of excited to meet everyone there. :)

6. Knowledge

In the last few months, I’ve worked on SEO, Smarty, Jetty, Solr, Site Speed Optimizations, JQuery, Selenium, Django and more stuff I can’t even remember now. As always, it feels awesome to learn something new. :)

THE END.

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. :-)

I’ve learnt lots and lots in this one year, both technically and non-technically. Nothing much more tell. Rather, I prefer not to say anything in my blog here. :)

Hi all,

Been a long time since I posted anything here. So many things have been happening around me and as usual, I was caught up with all _personal_ issues. :)

So here I’m. 4 in the morning. Typing whatever that comes to my mind. I’m not a great planner. Till now, I remember planning only about when to get up tomorrow morning. It usually is 8.15 if I have class at 8.30 or 9.00 if I have class at 9.20. And after joining my job, it is 8 if I have a meeting at 9. Or 11 if I have a meeting after lunch. So, what exactly I’m trying to say here is I’m planning something big here.

Hmmm, I’m going to plan what I want to do in the next 3 months. And yeah, it is not by coincidence that I choose 3 months. So here comes my plans or todo’s or whatever you may call them.

1. Finish InterviewStreet.
2. Watch all the movies under IMDb Top 250. Yes, all work and no fun makes everyone a dull boy. :)
3. Become Div 1 in Topcoder. This is here not because this is my ambition or anything. I don’t have any craze for blue. Nor I’m dying for a better topcoder rating. I hate waiting for the system results. I hate waiting and I want to move to Div 1 just for this reason.
4. Finish reading Lord of the Rings.
5. Skip lunch only twice a week and should NOT skip all three meals anytime. If you know me, then you must be knowing that there is no question about breakfast. :P
6. Finish OPCCalendar and make it real good.

Oh god, these look like my resolutions. But trust me, they aren’t.

A single chat changes your mood totally. Can’t tell anything more. And yeah…

CONGRATS. :) :) :)

I’m so so so so glad now. :-)

For the first time in my life, I want to remember this night forever. I think I’ll do. I feel like I can sleep after this. It is 4AM. And I have that smile in my face, which I lost long long back.

Working for Interviewstreet now. Whenever I think of doing something, some coding work which really means to me, only Interviewstreet comes to my mind. Not even topcoder. Guess this is something I want to do. And I will do it. :-)

And I know why. Not because I want to finish it for viv and taggy and walrus. Just that I like coding in php and I get some satisfaction out of it. Yes, now I understand. It can be called selfish :-)

Here I come IS :-) …

1. duck and the chick
2. ugly naked guy
3. double pizza
4. paleontologist
5. foozball
6. Days of our Lives
7. Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E
8. How you doin.
9. Turkey in thanksgiving dinner
10. ‘Shall we go get some coffee?’ ‘Sure. Where?’

Now that topcoder is a part and parcel of my life, I was wondering what are the topcoder matches which I can never forget. I can remember almost all the screw ups I did in the topcoder matches.

Like instead of calling memset function as “int a[10]; memset (a, 0, sizeof(a));”, calling it as “int a[10]; memset (a, 0, 10);”, because the example I tried it first was with chars and there is no need to add sizeof(int) or sizeof(float) factor doesn’t need to be added.
Like deleting a line of code while removing the debug statements.
Like trying a greedy when it was begging for a simple dp solution.

Anyway, when I look back, there are only 3 topcoder matches I can never ever forget. And strangely, I haven’t solved a single problem in all these three matches. All three matches were unique and strange in their own. :-)

First one happened an year back. I registered for this contest. Even got up early and went to play this match. Was in front of the contest applet the whole time and saw the contest timer tick second by second, but never opened a single problem. Strange. I never ever imagined I would do such a thing. Topcoder was something I really cared about (even though my rating is low at that time and even now), but doing something like that was unimaginable. It was fun to just sit in front of the computer when the contest goes on. People might call it madness, but I really really wish something like that happens again. :-). Anyway, this one was better compared to the other two, one of the reasons being my rating didn’t go down.

The second one happened in Hyderabad when I went to meet Manas before coming to Bangalore. We were at Hyderabad central around 30 minutes before the contest and the travel is surely more than 45 minutes. Now I’m clueless about how to mention the travel from Hyderabad central to Manas’s place, but to give you a rough picture, you can imagine the Roadrash game. Just that we didn’t fall or dash or crash. :D. Thought my 250 failed, I was happy even to play the match after shaken up so much. :D. Man, that was one the scariest rides I can ever remember.

The third one happened just a few days back in Bangalore. Again, I can never imagine doing something like this. Anyway, this is what exactly happened. :). There was a “party” in the next room I was coding. I did the 250. I wasn’t even sure about the 250. In fact, the way I coded it, I was too surprised to see it pass the test cases. Finally, I submitted my 250 and entered the party room. Danced a bit. Yes, this one wasn’t a stupid dance like my previous one. A real proper dance. :-). Then after 5 minutes, came back to the match and saw a probability problem. I called one of my friends from the party room who wasn’t “involved” in the party. He tried to solve it and then suggested me some solution. But I got this devil-may-care attitude from the rest of the people. My 500 didn’t even pass the test cases, but still I submitted it 1 minute before the contest got over. There was no need for me to check the solution. I knew it. Next day morning, I saw my 250 failed. Wasn’t least bothered about it. Played cards and went out to roam around. :D.

I never know which one is I’ll remember longest. Probably all three are too important to remember. :-) One crazy, next one scary and last one all about fun and madness. All three new for me :-)

Anyway, I hope I don’t have any more matches like these. I want my rating to increase and it will. Because now I don’t care about it. ;-)