Tag Archives: future

Thinking VS Doing

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After getting back from Kolkata, I have been acting rather crazy crazier than before. I am almost doing a full time thinking now.
What I mean is I spend almost all my waking hour and perhaps some part of my sleeping hours too thinking and planning the future and making up scenarios and trying fit all crazy in it.
Having a nerd-ish brain (refer The Nerd Handbook for details), I wanted to perhaps think through all the possible outcomes and scenarios that the future might hold and make a well-informed and wise choice. What I failed to realize that finding the right choice for today is more like finding the position and momentum of an electron (refer Uncertainty principle). And as always it took me ages to realize this and now perhaps it’ll take some time to get over it.
There are a lot of things that I figured out and learned during this time. Also, I did come up with a daily master plan. I like to call it Multitasking simplified

  1. You can not judge the future
    No matter how hard you try, you can never judge what the outcome of something will be. You can make a best guess based on how things have been in the past and trying to put yourself in that situation and playing out roles in your mind. This may be a good idea while trying to figure things out with code its way more difficult and almost a waste of time when doing this with people and utterly ridiculous when you are doing it with people whom you really don’t know that well…
    The best you can do is know your goals.
  2. Know your goals
    Not knowing what to do next is like the worst thing that can happen to a person and that happens only in two occaisions. Not really having anything on mind or having too much at a time. While I would have loved discussing the first one, I have no personal experience in that region so I can not empathize with you if you are there. So I’ll pick the one I am facing right now. After an initial round of thinking, I figured out that my current goals are the plugin manager for DokuWiki and making the future of Enjoy Studies. I love the idea behind Stalk Ninja and am somewhere in the team (not very sure what role I am playing). So here are three major things that I have to be concerned about right now. Apart from these, there’s a client turned friend’s project which has been ultra delayed due to various reasons (one of them is me!) and he’s been very patient and supportive about all the college semester exams and now with GSoC taking most of my time. Then there’s sambhuti, WP FB Comments, VSSUT.com, moving everything to linode, fundakid, codeitout, hacktard, open-graph plugin, fb-merge and a lot of ideas that keep adding and piling everyday…
    Isn’t it insane to actually have that many goals at once?
    Does that seem like your life? If your answer is yes, you need to drop some things and group goals
  3. Drop things and group goals
    From the huge list of goals you have right now, like it or not, you’ll have to scratch some out and pick only the ones which are in best interests of your future and of the future of others involved. Divide them into groups of tasks you can cut easily, tasks you can not avoid and the gray area.
    In my case, first victims would be Codeitout, hacktard, fundakid and a bunch of other ideas. As I haven’t started with any of them, I probably should wait a little longer. may be also VSSUT.com.
    The things I can not delay at all are the DokuWiki Plugin manager (Because of a deadline, commitment to a huge community and failing the summer of code), the client site (Because he’s a great guy and has been so patient with me). I can’t leave Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies (Because they are things I love a lot).
    In the gray area come WP FB Comments(Sorry Ankit, I had to…), moving all sites to linode and sambhuti (it is pretty much stable now)
    Once you have this list, pick the things you cannot avoid and start prioritizing
  4. Start prioritizing
    When you have just a bunch of really super important stuff left, you need to assign weights to them. According to these weights, you need to devote time and effort for each goal. The best way to understand your priority would be checking in what sequence you wrote the list in the previous step.
    For example in my case DokuWiki Plugin manager is the most important thing. I can not let it pass at any cost (I have let it slack a little in the past 3 days and am feeling terrible already, I need to get to speed again on it)
    Next is the client site. This is something I am not very sure about because there are multiple variables here and according to #1 above, I can not determine which day I’ll get my next task for the project. So I keep it in the important-if-I-have-a-task category.
    Now I have Stalk Ninja and Enjoy Studies. One is my idea and I am somewhere between an evangelist and a team member on the other. I love them both equally and I see (read: I am bent on making) their fate intertwined in a very deep sense in future. Enjoy Studies has not yet been pushed to a full throttled launch and Stalk Ninja is already there, ready to “pivot” (the famous and often misused startup word, meaning scaling. origin: more or less pivot in popularity chart or sales chart).
    When faced with a decision like this, you have to make your best guess and go with it without blaming yourself 2 years from now.
    In my case, I pick Enjoy Studies… Partly because of a plan Pocha Bhaiya gave me for Enjoy Studies (surprisingly, Kushal Bhaiya came up with a similar plan. both unaware of each other) and mostly because Stalk Ninja has already two minds giving probably more than their 100 percent into it. IMHO, Gaurav and Pocha bhaiya are the best people you would want to hand over your new startup to if you want it to work. (This is the reason I would advise startups to float their projects on SN). I feel we have come to a point that they’ll ask me for help whenever they need me without hesitating and I would do the same. :)
  5. Practice Implementation
    Now that you have a clear weight based analysis of things, you should fix a time based deadline and stop thinking anymore about the need to re-organize this priority list. Unless of course, something really urgent comes up that you need to fit in somewhere…. After this its just plain implementing it over and over again till you find the perfect balance between the goals ;-)
  6. Thinking and Doing
    There can never be a scenario where you can do anyone of the two, they need to go together. When you overdo Thinking, remember step #1 and when doing doesnt give any results repeat step 2-5.

I am sure there must be better authors than me who have written articles like this one. But if you have reached this line, I think I did a pretty good job :P

Getting into “Code Mode”

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The last two months have been really exciting. So much has happened in such short time that I haven’t been able to update the blog.
We had our final semester project. I got yet another reason to start “thug awards” (more on this later). Sat through yet another set of exams which made no sense at all. hopefully will pass them yet again.
Am back home. yay! currently working on DokuWiki for summer of code, a paid Social Network for a client turned good friend and planning the next year of my life. Its weird how we start feeling like grown ups. I still cant seem to leave behind feeling like a kid, probably I wont ever be able to do that…

I am back from college from 3rd of this month and its already been almost a week and I haven’t coded much yet. I was pretty pumped up when I left college about going back home and working at my own schedule. The first step to that is, making the schedule and I am having a hard time doing that. Perhaps this is what happens when you are a little too sure of what you are going to do for some time. You start getting too relaxed. I should be working a minimum of 6 hours a day and today was the first day in the whole week I actually did some coding and that too for only around 3 – 3 and half hours….
I have a huge task list and I need to brace myself up and get to speed with it. Here begins the time of my life when I’ll have to continuously prove myself for the next few years of my life. Wish me luck people!

Social Search Engine

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We are living in great times. Social layer of the web is getting its swing and the game layer is round the corner. Doesnt it feel very limiting that all the social sites have their own search engines and most never even show on popular search engines like google and stuff? When you search for some person or company or a place, you almost never get to find that person’s social page. Sometimes linked in though but nothing else at  all. Even if he has some 4000 friends on facebook, his profile never shows up for his name and infact you may find a completely different person sitting on the spot one who just made a good search engine friendly website…

Its time present and popular search engines started paying attention to the social layer or we will soon see the rise of a new era in search… In earliest forms of search, things were done by a small group of people, then some innovators automated it and figured crazy cool search algorithms which led to revolutionizing search. Now its time for a new revolution where people start coming back into the equation but not from the search engine side, from the user-contributor side… There are a few social search engines and the trend is shifting one small search at a time. Hope I see new search engines that integrate the current social sites and find their correct place in the current equations of search engines…

Plans for the new year

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Confused?? What are you thinking?
New year? Its more than half the year over… Why now? Oh man! this guy is running six months behind everyone??
Its not the solar new year. Not even some lunar or Indian calendar new year…

Its the new year of a student. Yup! you got it. Its the academic new year. Though, I am not sure there is anything academic left in most of ours.
Whatever may be the case, here it stands before me, challenging me right on my face. Asking The Question

“What is it that the mind of this mortal thinks it can do worthy of me?”

I passed out of my school in 2005, seems I lost my ability to answer that question too.

Every year, like any other B.tech. student, I brace myself up to go to the same classes again.
See the same faces getting worse, wrinkled. Ageing [Americans read Aging] faster than their natural course under this ultra flawed system. When they joined in they seemed like in their early twenties,due to the previous flawed systems, but now they have fast forwarded to early forties (may be I am imagining things but thats how they look to me)
All I see is lack of any sense of where we are going and a complete disaster of another of the Supreme Species(Will write on that in another post). Sometimes it feels like living in some zombie land. We have been trained to believe in this system and most of us are trained with such an excellence that we cant even see that the system is flawed. May be the same excellence in hardwiring other things in our minds would have done us more good but thats a different story altogether…

While for most of them the cycle is “yaar is saal padhai karenge”->”abey kya classic movie thi be!” AND/OR “Ki maal toki be!! [censored]” AND/OR “Chal dhaba jiba” AND/OR “Saale us teacher ki [censored]“->”Abey mid-sem ku 7 din rahila be, kichi padha sarini”->”ma [censored] mid-sem. semester re bhala rakhile mid-sem ku kehi khatir karibeni”->”[tom/dick/harry] ku dekhilu? nungu sala mandu dhari fest saara bulu thila”->”haba haba haba”->”Tara [tom/dick/harry] lab lekha sarichi?”->”Viva re [teacher] [censored] dela be”->”Semester aarambha re bhabithili, e thara padhiki [censored] pakeibi” OR (reply)”Sabu seiya bhabanti”->”[teacher] [censored] kichi patha janini saala ma [censored] ku [censored] hou thila”->”[censored] End-Sem ta saru gharaku jiba”->”haba haba haba”->[holidays]->”yaar is saal padhai karenge”

For me, it was more of “bas 3/2/1 aur saal. ho jaayega be”->”sab class kar lunga”->”kuch to kar hi lunga”->”nahi hota yaar. grrr”->”abey kuch karna padega be nahi to nahi hoga”->”projects karte hain”->”mid-sem aaya be. phew aadha sem gaya aur adha bas”->”Attendance banane ki try maarta hoon”->”please mujhe ye fest me mat ghusao be”->”nahi be I should try for them atleast”->”bhak saala, help karne jaao to zabardasti ka natak”->”bhag jaaun beech me se?”->”projects karte hain”->”lab records kaun likha hai?”->”Viva? main acha  phenkta hoon be” OR “Viva??…..”->”projects karte hain”->”Attendance… sigh! kaise samjhaun kyun nahi hota”->”End-sem end-sem end-sem”->”back nahi lagwana hai be jaise b yahan aur nahi rukna hai”
Coming back to my question (Dont mess with the zombies!!), Its been five very long years and with each passing year, my answer to The Question grew progressively feeble.
Every semester I would get back to college atleast 3 days early and then I would stay here thinking of some decent reply… This year I have planned to make an opensource framework which will be the heart of EnjoyStudies and any other website that I develop. Will appear for Zend PHP Certification(aint sure on that). Will try to get stable with my projects and earn enough to get a place to live in when(hopefully) I pass out of college. Then I have to try and get in better terms with my teachers. Work on atleast 5 different websites thru this year. Get a plan for having a sustainable source of income so that I can concentrate on creating…

Its just two more days for the official start of our new semester and the final year of our B.tech life. This is the year everyone will get into the next level of their lives. Discussion(read “Division on the basis”) of jobs, payscale and higher education will be all around me now.
Hope everyone around me has thought his/her reply to The Question and will do something to do justice to this year…