Observer

"Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough."

[beingobserver]

Free as in ‘Freedom’, not as in ‘Free Beer’

It was a year-end party at my office. I had joined recently. The excitement was high and I was feeling ecstatic with new hopes of joining a new organization. The occasion also allowed me to make some connections at the new place. I was brimming with enthusiasm. The food was endless and the booze kept on flowing. The clock kept ticking along the night and the party continued. I woke the next morning at my room. Alone. I sat on the balcony and pondered the events. It was a deja vu of what happened at my previous company. The same incidents, the same flow of emotions and the same passage of time. I just entered another iteration in the loop, if I might phrase in programmer’s term. I never hit the ‘break’. But I desperately need one.

I live in a country where salaried jobs are always admired compared to the ones involving risks. But I hardly met anyone who was happy to her core without taking any risk in her life. Work to the Indian community is a place where they have to go every Monday, craving for the weekend for the entire week. They love to fill up their social media walls how they could range the mountains and sail the sea if they had not done engineering. I always felt otherwise. And I channelize all that energy that is there inside me to push toward my coveted goal.

https://www.toptal.com/app came as soothing breeze to my life, singing the hope for a life that I so very desire. The opportunity to work with world’s best engineers, for world’s best companies, on world’s best projects. I don’t know if there was anything more I could ask for. It may be tomorrow, or may be few months later, I see myself as one of world’s top 3%. Every night I sleep with that dream. Giving me the opportunity to break the social barrier of slavery and live my life with my own rules.

I don’t know if this post will get me through. But I am certain about one thing, I won’t rest till I get through. And that is a promise for me to myself.

Let peace be upon you, always.

Meghaditya

[beingobserver]

Last Day At Citrix

Today was my last day at Citrix. An eventful journey of three and a half years finally comes to an end. Amidst all the formalities to complete, people to meet, knowledge transferring sessions to be delivered, I never had the chance this week to reflect on the moment. So I thought about writing down what’s on my mind before signing off for the day.

It was July 9, 2012. I joined Citrix R&D India Pvt Ltd office at Bangalore. There were 4 other friends from my college who joined with me. Kanishka, Souvik, Rishabh and Priyadarshi. I still remember the first diary that I wrote on that day. I was assigned to Receiver and End User Services (REUS) group, reporting to Maharajan Arunachalam. On my offer letter it was mentioned that I’ll be reporting to Vani Sharma. I was very excited. Joining a company fresh out of college is a different experience altogether, we lose the innocence and excitement as we age. I cherish those early days, brimming with enthusiasm, filled with joy, hungry for challenges.

We started off with few introductory sessions about the company and what it does. Virtualization, Cloud, Mobility ... I was flooded with tech jargons. Every day I used to come back and read on the web about the terms learnt that day.

To engage the new joinees, Citrix organized a geek camp. During this geek camp I met few folks who remained friends even till today. I met Pradeep Gangishetty, P. Ravi Sagar, Monis Majeed, Anusha Bilgi, Harshal Gupta, Sumit Mishra and of course Rishabh Jain. Our mentor Nishant Jain was an amazing guy, one of the coolest and sharpest person I have seen in Citrix. We were the joint winner for the geek camp.

People say Bengalis form a group everywhere they went. So in Citrix also we had our own small Bengali group. Kaushik Bhattacharya was our leader, there were Subhajit Mandal (pursuing PhD in US now), Subhranshu Mandal (pursuing PhD at IITKgp), Angshuman Karmakar (PhD in Belgium), Soumyajitda, Soumajitda, Sayantan Mukherjee (PhD IISc), Prasenjit Karmakar (PhD IISc), Debopriyo Ghosh, Rajarshi Biswas and Souvik Mitra (now at Flipkart). I still miss the “adda” (bengali chitchat) we used to have at the terrace.

My first few months at Citrix mostly spent watching Citrix Synergy videos and reading about Citrix products (XenDesktop, XenApp, Netscaler). In Maha’s team along with me there were Himanshu, Jaydeep (Now at Ola), Ravinder, Ankit (Now at Ola) and Ketul (now at Housing). I interacted most with Ankit and Ketul. Ketul was a funny guy, he taught me different ways to extract money from Citrix. He openly claimed his morals were not that high and the only thing he cared about was money.

I got assigned some actual work when I moved to Suresh’s org from Vani’s. My current manager Vineet introduced me to my then manager Mohammad Yasir, who eventually proved to be one of the best teachers I ever had. In Yasir’s team, I met a lot of new people. Sagar Thirumala was my guide and colleague on the same project. I met Ashish Goyal, Krishna Kumar, Anand Kummur, Kiran Kumar, Rohan Kapoor, Yagnasri Alla, Vipin Aravind. Sagar became my best buddy in Citrix and he still continues to be so.

Me and Sagar started working on a project called WorxMail, an enterprise email application delivered as part of the Citrix XenMobile solutions suite. We took the android open source code for email, calendar and contacts and integrated that code to our need into a single application. During first few months of WorxMail, I worked with some of the sharpest people in Citrix. Sagar himself, Ashish, Vikas Nambiar (now he is in Citrix Ft Lauderdale office) and Arun Krishnan (now in Myntra). I learnt a hell lot of things about android and the overall SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) during the first release of WorxMail (”Ares”).

After Ares, the management focus shifted to WorxHome more. Zenprise got acquired in between and a lot of org change happened. I still remained reporting to Yasir. Yasir was busy during this time in WorxHome work along with Kiran, Rohan and Yagna, that he left the responsibility of WorxMail solely to me and Sagar. We worked a bunch of new features this time. Some of which still remain to be part of the WorxMail codebase. I worked on Rich Text Editor, Simplified Account Configuration, Fast join and dial in functionalities for WorxMail “Nike” release. Yasir was impressed with the pace of work and the authority I had over my components.

I remember one incident that happened just before Citrix Synergy in the year 2013. For Synergy we had show to show a custom launch screen UI for WorxMail. For some reason Sagar was unavailable at that time. Suresh Mathew John took a risk and asked me to work on that screen along with Nick Yeh, a new designer who also joined at that time. Me and Nick worked along and the final prototype was demoed live on synergy by Brad Pederson (Now at DocuSign), the then Citrix Chief Demo Officer. Suresh was more than impressed with this and he talked about this every time he to India after that.

Nike was a huge release for WorxMail. I had the pleasure of working with two product managers, Bharath Rangarajan and Chetan Jog, at that time. The fast join and dial in feature was the brainchild of Bharath and we designed it as an edge a competition called MobileDay. Bharath used fast join extensively and his feedback made the feature more user-friendly and more robust.

Following Nike, we had a smaller release called “Kratos”. I worked on a feature called MeetingResponse, which still remains one my favorite works on WorxMail. During this feature development, I grew strong bonds with the developers working iOS Calendar, Sandeep Agarwal and Anil Kumar Telaich. We spent a lot of time analyzing the exchange protocols, the google client code, the exchange server code. It was an amazing learning experience.

After “Kratos”, Yasir assigned me the responsibility of entire calendar codebase for WorxMail. Me and Sagar had to do complete UX overhaul of the app for WorxMail “Artemis” release. Yasir was initially sceptical with the volume of work that was there and the experience I had. But he trusted me. Artemis almost killed us. We faced a deluge of bugs. We made changes that we were not very sure of. But we had to make changes as early as possible. During this time we had a new member in our team, Ankit Goel. Ankit was new at that time, so me and Sagar were mostly at the fire-fighting end. We shipped Artemis successfully and it proved to be one of primary releases that gave XenMobile sales a great boost. WorxMail theme color became purple from blue officially.

Following Artemis I had several meetings with Yasir about the number of bugs we had in calendar and how we should tackle them. Yasir defended me always from the QA folks but he himself knew that the product was not stable and we couldn’t continue developing features on top of it. I proposed writing unit tests, that’s the only solution I could find. Yasir told me that it was not an easy task. In the past both Sagar and Vikas had tried to the same unsuccessfully. Yasir could not risk allocating developer time for an uncertain project. He asked me to integrated AOSP unit test code into our project and if I could do that he would push to allocate time for unit testing.

It was a challenging few weeks. But together me and Sagar were able to integrate about 600 AOSP tests to our main code. We researched extensively about code coverage and settled on Emma for WorxMail. We were ready to integrate the side-project into our build system. By the time we were working on this unit test project, our build team moved WorxMail build system from Ant to Gradle. We had to change also. So we moved to Jacoco from Emma for code coverage and that still remains to be the standard in WorxMail. We ended up with 25% method coverage after 4 months’ of effort. Yasir was ecstatic.

We released Perseus, Avatar and Beetlejuice successfully, by that time I had become much familiar with the WorxMail codebase. I asked Yasir for a more challenging project and Yasir gave one. S/Mime - Secure Mime protocol for mail. The project was being worked upon on iOS WorxMail for over a year by three developers - Udaya Kiran from Bangalore (who became 2nd best mentor after Yasir for me, I learnt a lot from Udaya in a very short span of time), Valentin Balaschenko and Christian Bau from UK security team. For android I had to port the iOS code in less than 3 months. So I was on it. By the time Sagar had moved to the Santa Clara office so I had to work on this completely on my own.

I worked very hard for those three months (April to June 2015). I had to understand Objective C to get iOS code, learn NDK to write native code for integrating OpenSSL with WorxMail java code. The challenges stretched my limits to extreme ends. I kept on working day in and day out without affirmative results. Just experimenting, playing with code. Then Yasir came to the rescue. He discovered the source code for the Google’s Conscrypt project which was doing similar things that we wanted to achieve. Me and Yasir integrated that source code in a week, my knowledge of JNI and iOS codebase and Yasir’s knowledge of design patterns came in handy. I went for a couple of weeks holiday and Yasir asked if I could complete the remaining from home. We declared S/Mime feature complete by the end of that two weeks.

Yasir declared that he was leaving Citrix. It was a heart-breaking news for me. I couldn’t imagine something like that even in my worst nightmare. I think that incident changed me a lot. It made me more strong and made more independent. His departure was a huge loss for the entire group but I admired his choice. Yasir will remain to be one of the best teachers I ever had, I am mentioning this twice here. But I am not shy of uttering that a thousand times, the best teacher ever.

After Yasir’s departure my role changed drastically within Citrix. I became the only person with more knowledge about the WorxMail code than everybody else. We had plenty of new members in the team by this time - Manbendra, Ravi, Vivek, Pranshul and Shivani. Even Vipin moved to WorxMail as the architect. I spent a lot time helping them understand the codebase and debug through the code. It presented me with a new kind of challenge. The challenge of leading the team technically. To me I did not fare well, may be I was not ready for this sudden change. May be I wanted to spend time on new challenges. So I decided to start fresh. 

I am leaving Citrix with ton of memories. I am keeping the good ones for inspiration and the bad ones for learning. The people I had interacted with in these three years shaped me as a better person, as a better developer. I embark on a new journey with a lot of love and respect for them in my heart.

Signing off, Meghaditya

[beingobserver]

The Unbearable Duality of Being

Life. It is more than just breathing in and breathing out. More than getting up in the morning, going to the office, having a drink with friends, spending times with loved ones. More than the sum of all the happiness or sadness it brings along. 

Life to me is a balance between two selves fighting for space within. Each correct in its own right, not allowing the other the smallest of the opportunities to triumph. Life to me is the outcome of resolved conflicts of my inner and outer selves. Sometimes the resolutions are perfect, pleasant to both the parties. At times it is bitter to one of them. But it has to go on. Life to me is an unbearable duality.

The outer self tags along the societal rules. It abides by all the basic human instincts. It loves greed, it hates misery, it craves another human being, it envies another human being, it fears death, it loves remembrance. I wear my outer self one good half of the day interacting with other outer selves of other human beings around me. Talking to masked unknown faces of familiar people, laughing at unwanted jokes, feeling sorry for issues we don’t care about. Its a feast for the outer self as it goes on. Trying to capture the entire mindspace. Following its regular evolutionary traits it wishes to eliminate competition.

The inner self is shy. But it is strong as a rock sitting in the middle of a fierce stream of water. The waves of existence lashes out at it, testing its perseverance. It sits there. Strong. Tight. Resilient. It starts its work in the loneliness. Asking questions about the actions taken in haste, during the periods of mad adrenaline rush. It sorts out of options, it trims the choices, it prepares me for the future. 

My outer self takes care of my present. My inner self prepares me for my future. My outer self uses the experience to take right decisions right now, My inner self builds wisdom to take right decisions tomorrow. My outer self feeds my body. My inner self feeds my soul.

At times I feel like two different persons sharing the same human body. Sounds like schizophrenia, isn’t it? But I doubt, is that really a medical condition or rather a human condition? Isn’t it natural to have this dual nature? I suppose it’s necessary to maintain the balance. The balance of the yin and the yang, the female and male principles of the universe. As a stardust, as a part of the universe, it seems very natural to me.

We create the differences. We love segregation. To make things simple enough for our cognition, sometimes we do away with the truth. May be we all share the eternal duality. We simply choose one. But we don’t stop there. We kill the other one. Not only the one inside us, but the one inside others. The regular evolutionary traits of competition.

I adore the duality within. Some quotation goes by ‘Life is riding a bicycle, to maintain balance you have keep moving’. I might be mixing words a bit in that quote but it goes something like that. It’s my quest to find that perfect balance. Amongst all those external and internal impulses and attractions, the only true meaning is to find the balance. It was for my forefathers, it will be for my for my successors. The eternal human quest. I strive for that.

[beingobserver]

Weekly Rants

Sincerely, for the past few weeks I had been asking myself - 

But enough of self-loathing which does not lead anywhere. I am planning to write down some rants that often occupy my head and then they go away when new ones come up. In the process, I lose some valuable learnings. Like how documenting my observations helped me create beingobserver.tumblr.com. This part of tumblr, I'll use to write my technology rants. 

I am very excited about it and lets see how it goes.

So far I am planning to write down at least 10 rants a week. If the rants are shorter, they will be clubbed together. If not I will break it up.

To my future self, good luck!

[beingobserver]

[beingobserver]

Casey joins the hollow sound of silent people walking down, The stairway to the subway in the shadows down below. Following their footsteps through the neon-darkened corridors, Of silent desperation, never speaking to a soul. The poison air he's breathing has the dirty smell of dying, 'Cos it's never seen the sunshine and it's never felt the rain. But Casey minds the arrows and ignores the fatal echoes, Of the clicking of the turnstiles and the rattle of his chains. "Oh," she said: "Casey, it's been so long since I've seen you. "Here," she said: "just a kiss to make a body smile. "See," she said: "I've put on new stockings just to please you. "Lord," she said. "Casey, can you only stay a while." Casey leaves the underground and stops inside The Golden Crown, For something wet to wipe away the chill that's on his bones. Seeing his reflection in the lives of all the lonely men, Who reach for anything they can to keep from going home. Standing in the corner, Casey drinks his pint of bitter, Never glancing in the mirror at the people passing by. Then he stumbles as he's leaving and he wonders if the reason, Is the beer that's in his belly or the tear that's in his eye. "Oh," she said: "I suppose you seldom think about me. "Now," she said: "now that you've a family of your own. "Still," she said: "It's so blessed good to feel your body. "Lord," she said: "Casey, it's a shame to be alone."

[beingobserver]

Preamble

Human beings are inherently attracted to simpler solutions. We have a brain that’s so complex that we are yet to figure out the details of its working. But whenever faced with a choice between a complex solution and a simpler one, we prefer to choose the latter. The argument goes as follows, a simpler logic is comprehensible by a large amount of people, thus it should be adapted and be used in practice. It works at times, well perhaps most of the times, but not all the time. This inherent attraction to simpler explanations causes generalizations to rise among the human populace. The outliers that do not fit those generalizations are considered as marginalized entities. They are picked by the societal bodies, one by one, to be pruned out of the branches. The conviction held by the greater segments of the race, prevails and crushes the odd voices.  This cycle of mass hegemony had been ruling the human conscience for ages. We had been satisfied by the beliefs held by the most. We had been satisfied with the answers backed by the most. We are doing good in that regard, if I can say so, putting aside the innumerable number of blunders of human history (world war, nuclear bombs, climate change, destruction of nature et al). However among this confident tramplings for centuries, we had been to our knees many times. We crawled in front of a representational structure in search for the almighty. We could never be sure of his existence. Neither could we claim the non-existence. This question had haunted us and is doing so till now. But in whatever form we had imagined him (the popular opinion says it is a ‘he’ not ‘she’, thus), he is benevolent. He forgives. For our sins, for our double standards, for our cruelty, for our greed, he forgives us. Well, we can’t be sure about that too, can we? What if we have disappointed it to so many levels that the option left to it is to eliminate us all. Our extinction, right at this moment, is the only available solution. What if it comes down on us, tonight? And if it does, how exactly would it be? How would we react to this attack on our ego? As the most intelligent species ever, to grace the face of this blue planet, would be able to survive the test of survival? Would we accept our fate or fight against it?    

[beingobserver]

Absence of fear

Inside my skin There is this space It twists and turns It bleeds and aches Inside my heart There's an empty room It's waiting for lightning It's waiting for you I am wanting and I am needing you To be here Inside the absence Of fear Muscle and sinew Velvet and stone This vessel is haunted It creaks and moans My bones call to you In a separate skin I'll make myself translucent To let you in I am wanting and I am needing you To be here Inside the absence Of fear There is the splendor of this Secret inside of me And it knows that you're no stranger You're my gravity My hands will adore you through all darkness And they will lay you out in moonlight And reinvent your name I am wanting and I am needing you To be here I need you near Inside the absence Of fear

[rollingstone]

Hear Blur’s majestic, doom-and-gloom new song “There Are Too Many of Us.”

[beingobserver]

Damon Albarn is one of the best musicians on earth now.

[beingobserver]

Re-shuffling my blogging identities

I started my blogging expedition about a year ago. Being an extremely introverted person, the need to document my thoughts came very naturally. But first I had to decide the platform which I would use for jotting down my mental rumblings.

I sifted through a bunch of options for that. The candidates were WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr and few others whose names I cannot recall. Tumblr became the eventual winner for a number of reasons. Tumblr as a platform puts an emphatic focus on visual design, on fonts and custom themes. I had been very aesthetically sensitive from my childhood, so tumblr became an obvious choice for me. Medium was also another personal favorite but the flexibility of organizing multiple blogging threads and the option of having custom domain names made Tumblr the final choice.

Few blogs I started along with their purposes are -

1. crusherforce.tumblr.com (now beinginvictus.tumblr.com) - A container for my favorite poems, videos, articles and all other arty stuff found on the internet.

2. beingobserver.tumblr.com - A collection of my poems.

3. anotherdroid.tumblr.com (now beingcodecrafter.tumblr.com) - A collection for my android and coding related rants.

4. beingwatcher.tumblr.com (now retired) - A collection for my reviews of classic vintage movies. (I ended up doing only one on Polanski's 'Rosemary's Baby')

5. beingreader.tumblr.com (now retired) - A collection for my reading experiences. (I used goodreads even after having this, so this was not much useful)

6. beingwordsmith.tumblr.com (now retired) - A collection for creating my own words found on the internet, that I don't know the meaning of. (seriously???)

As can be seen, it was a very childish and unorganized attempt to start maintaining so many thing together. And consequently the effort did not bear much fruit. So the need for the re-shuffling came very naturally.

The focus for my 3 blogs will be the following - 

1. beingobserver.tumblr.com - A personalized blog for everything not created by me.

2. beinginvictus.tumblr.com - A collection for everything non-technical created by me.

3. beingcodecrafter.tumblr.com - A collection for everything technical created by me.

Hopefully this time I will end up creating more valuable content on the web. 

Regards, Meghaditya   

[beingobserver]

'Our Valley' by Philip Levine

We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass, something massive, irrational, and so powerful even the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.

You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains have no word for ocean, but if you live here you begin to believe they know everything. They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine, a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls slowly between the pines and the wind dies to less than a whisper and you can barely catch your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.

You have to remember this isn’t your land. It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside and thought was yours. Remember the small boats that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men who carved a living from it only to find themselves carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home, so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust, wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.

[beingobserver]

The Angry River - The Hat (True Detective)

The emptiness that we confess In the dimmest hour of day In Automatown they make a sound Like the low sad moan of prey

The bitter taste the hidden face Of the lost forgotten child The darkest need the slowest speed The debt unreconciled

These photographs mean nothing To the poison that they take Before a moment's glory The light begins to fade

The awful cost of all we lost As we looked the other way We've paid the price of this cruel device Till we've nothing left to pay

The river goes where the current flows The light we must destroy Events conspire to set afire The methods we employ

These dead men walk on water Cold blood runs through their veins The angry river rises As we step into the rain

These photographs mean nothing To the poison that they take The angry river rises As we step into the rain

[beingobserver]

True Detective - Opening song (HD) (The Handsome Family - Far From Any Road)

From the dusty mesa her looming shadow grows Hidden in the branches of the poison creosote

She twines her spines up slowly towards the boiling sun, And when I touched her skin, my fingers ran with blood.

In the hushing dusk, under a swollen silver moon, I came walking with the wind to watch the cactus bloom.

A strange hunger haunted me; the looming shadows danced. I fell down to the thorny brush and felt a trembling hand.

When the last light warms the rocks and the rattlesnakes unfold, Mountain cats will come to drag away your bones.

And rise with me forever across the silent sand, And the stars will be your eyes and the wind will be my hands.

[beingobserver]

Feel Good Inc.

City's breaking down On a camel's back. They just have to go 'cause they don't know wack So all you fill the streets It's appealing to see You won't get out the county, 'cause you're bad and free You've got a new horizon It's ephemeral style. A melancholy town Where we never smile. And all I wanna hear Is the message beep. My dreams, they've got to Kiss me 'cause I don't get sleep, no Windmill, windmill for the land. Turned forever hand in hand Take it all in on your stride It is ticking, falling down Love forever love is free Let's turn forever you and me Windmill, windmill for the land Is everybody in? -Gorillaz

[beingobserver]

A Beautiful Poem by Maya Angelou

[beingobserver]

Memories made of Sand

The evening sun prepares to set

behind the endless stretch of water

The orangish aura expands along horizon

and creates around us a magical cover

But the sands from beach Still lingers with you

Like the memories of you Stays with me forever.

Meghaditya

[beingobserver]

Beyond

Dream, Beyond dreams, Beyond life 

you will find your song Before sound, to be found close your eyes And rise higher, still endless thrill

To the land of love, Beyond love Come alive, Angel eye Forever watching you and I You are the night, you are the ocean You are the light behind the cloud You are the end and the beginning A world where time is not allowed There's no such thing as competition To find our way we lose control Remember – love's our only mission This is the journey of the soul