Over the past few weeks a lot of things are happening in my life and i feel really guilty of not jotting them down in here. Its amazing how naturally things evolve and looking back you think everything happened so fast.

I was talking to my wife a couple of days back on how all things in my life fell in place naturally, like the neatly arranged dominos, and how much God is great that we can never have the faintest idea of what he thinks and what he has in store for us.

Myself and Rajesh always had the inner fire to do something big and our focus has always been a new “idea” - something which dazzles. And we were pretty sure that no idea falls from the roof. We have to be into a lot of ideas to have a new perspective to see ours. We always felt that it is always not about the money. And, I, for one reason felt that contributing to open source is “the idea” to have something meaningful in your life.

This blog is not about how things went on well and how we achieved the “idea” but how bad things could go and we still have our “dream of the youth” alive and active.

I left for Singapore and a couple of months later Rajesh got laid off from Merrill. Recession hit badly all over and the only thing i could think of is to pray that i retain my job. Simply because i dont want to depend on my parents when my kid is born. Rajesh got his engagement cancelled and was at home for 9 months. If i were him, with my family, i am not sure how my reaction would be. It could either be a “face what may come” or “hibernate for winter”.  Looking back at myself and my reaction to various “things” that happened in my life, I am sure i would have given the situation a cold shoulder. But then there is this new addition to the situation called family. Nevertheless, Rajesh’s situation really scared me a lot. He was unable to find a job despite being one hell of a developer. The calls are simply not coming his way, leave alone interviews.

Singapore is a good place to live but still this is not my home. I wanted to go back and i was unable to. That was when i told to myself that none of things that happened in my life is entirely shaped by me. And i am not going to whine anymore. I decided to take up technical reading more seriously and got the national library membership. Singapore’s NLB has a very limited collection of technical books and that motivated me even more. I resolved that i am going to finish off the entire IT section (except of course, those scary looking System 3 manuals)

I read the truly random books and some recommended ones. Among the many interesting books which gives that wonderful satisfaction at the last page, I had to meekly admit that once in a while, i had to return some books half way to pick another. One amongst the beautiful ones is “Dreaming in code” - the journey of Chandler and its team. It gave a lot of insight into how everybody starts small and everybody makes mistakes. But then, they all had a bigger dream and they were focussed. The grit and the patience of Mitch Kapor all through the project was beautiful. I am yet to see a truly impressive tool like Chandler. Even today, I composed a mail (outlook) to our corporate technical group appreciating their efforts on a recent technical event. I then mentioned in the mail that we should be meeting tomorrow to see what we can do next. Only then i realised i actually needed a meeting request. So, i copied all the contents, composed a new meeting request and pasted the contents and then started typing in the whole “To” list. In Chandler, it is just ONE FREAKING CLICK !!! Your mail is converted to a meeting request.

The “better programmer” link and “Dreaming in code” made me want to learn Python. Meanwhile, Rajesh started doing projects of his own. He fell in love with Rails and became a fan of Ruby. The speed of Python and the quantity of code needed to be written to do something useful was amazing. List comprehensions and slicing had me dumbstuck. After reading ”Learning in Python”, I wanted to write something USEFUL. Rajesh got through Tech Mahindra as a contractor and moved to Pune. He didnt have internet access in office. And that was the birth of Fetch2Me - the name fondly given by my wonderfully best friend “Mirth Machine” Gaurav. Fetch2Me was a simple screen scraping application and it had a simple raison d’etre. Use your corporate id and send the url as the subject to fetch2me AT gmail DOT com and it will fetch the page. If the subject could not be resolved to a valid url, respond with the google results of the search string. But then, all my friends wanted more out of the project. I am not saying that this is all I had in mind from the start but I am considering this as a start - to be useful. Stay tuned.

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