Author: Tarique Sani

Creating a second line of command!

A few (well only 2) people asked as to how I managed to create a second line of command in such a short span. Umm… I have not really documented the process and there is no magic formula which will work… besides I am an awful manager. I am sure a lot of management gurus out there must have got this honed down to a fine art but none the less here is what we did.

Some background first – None of my current project managers knew PHP when they came to SANIsoft which was a good thing because I got to teach them PHP exactly the way I wrote it – complete with all my finesse, flaws and work flow quirks. So in many ways, in the end, they were my coder clones – that made my job easier – I knew how they worked.

One fine day I just switched the daily reporting method. The top three (based on experience) now got daily reports from three newbie/trainee/junior programmers each. These reports were summarized and then sent to me. Over the next few days they learnt that what was written had to be verified and not taken on face value, I nudged them into realising that if they kept tabs on what was happening throughout the day instead of trying to gather things at the end of the day it would be simpler for them.

What took me by surprise was they had to told to be more forgiving towards mistakes of the juniors and the difference between what was good enough and perfect and when to opt for either (roughly views, controllers – good enough. models – perfect). Then came judging – who could be trusted with what level of code… this last part is still on going and perhaps will go on forever – I need to evolve this into a kind of employee gradation process.

Since all of the above was happening on live projects – I had to, for some time, work bit more with minding the minded and the minders ensuring that the clients did not suffer in anyway. In the end it has been a hugely successful exercises for everyone involved.

Well thats about it.

Rendered redundant

Redundant – adj 1: more than needed, desired, or required;

Am once again looking at ways to make myself redundant at SANIsoft.

About 18 months ago we realised a need to have a second line of command in the programming team, the work was just too much for me to keep up with first hand – I needed some filtering and summarizing of the day’s events. about 12 months ago we achieved that and I am very happy to say that my project managers are doing a great job, there are occasional fires which I have to overlook so that they are handled correctly smoothly but more importantly the work flow has been smoothened to a point where such incidences are greatly reduced.

So what will I do? The image adjacent is a rendered view of our new home cum office – the construction was started sometime last week after Swati literally shook the entire bank machinery from the country head to the lowest level executive here to get the loan amount sanctioned. The ETA for completion has been put to about 12 months. As far as SANIsoft goes the new facility will allow us to double our capacity. As myself and Swati sat on a stone at the new plot and reminisced how we had started nearly 8 years back with one computer and myself as the lone coder targeting an annual income of Rs60,000/- (we did much better) to present 12 coders and …. we felt a sense of pride similar to what a parent feel on seeing their children grow, however we have been warned that we should now view the complete business in a more detached manner.

As a new home the place offers larger living space and there is a huge pond on the South-West – the result – a lot of birds and our bedroom is going to be over looking the pond. In fact this guy was the latest visitor.

The new location is at N 21.15180 and E 79.01074

This is 5.3kms as the crow flies and 7.1kms by road from our current home, placing it just outside the city limit – in fact the road which runs in front of the new plot divides the city from the outskirts!

In more recent happenings – yesterday myself and Raju did a tour of all the nearby lakes looking for any signs of illness / death in the birds, thankfully everything seems to be fine for now.

The afternoon saw an awesome shoot where for the first time I tried bright yellow as the theme colour, yellow backdrop and floor, matching yellow drape for the model and lots of gold jewellery… Skepticism prevailed all around till the preview of first few shots but I ultimately got more displayable pictures than in any shoot before.

And yes – Happy birthday to an *Old man* ;)

You think that there is nothing but PHP on the web – questions M$

Found this and had to blog it. If you do not understand the french (no pun intended) take a look at the notes on this Flickr entry https://www.flickr.com/photos/12538148@N00/100864754/

Now am waiting for the spoofs to pop-up!!

Do me and I’ll do you

Would like to see if this really works https://kevan.org/johari?name=tariquesani

Leave a link in the comments if you want me to do the same for you, of course you can be totally anonimouse and screw the results but be a sport and let the system work 😉

V – day!?

Guess we are married for too long, I remembered only when the bank called Swati and told that the client’s payment has come in… been playing around with the Yahoo! UI Library it is pretty cool but I do not think that we are going to drop what we already use, the Y! library is about 8 months too late. Besides, it does not have anything drastically new in terms of widgets or for that matter ease of programming.

But if you happen to have lived beneath some rock till now and have not tried your hand at the so called *web2.0* (I hate that phrase) you can start with this one – lots of documentation available.

I would really like to see this expanded into a complete widget toolkit, right now it looks like the widgets were put in as a second thought to differentiate it from the current world favourite Javascript framework – https://script.aculo.us

BTW, if you happen love AJAX (damn! another buzzword) but hate to do all DOM rewriting manually and further hate writing JS in your PHP or vice versa – try out https://taconite.sf.net

A conversation and some more

Swati: Who are giving Valentine gifts to?
Aasim: No one!
Swati: Why?
Aasim: S******i has gone mad…. she was always mad now she has gone worse
Swati: So why not An****a?
Aasim: sigh…
Me: She is just too good… better than him :P
Swati: Is that true?
Aasim nods in assent
Swati: Then it is great, you always must pick girlfriends (partners/wives/spouses implied) who are better than you!

Me and Aasim – Speechless

Sometimes I really wonder what kind of mess we are making with that kid’s mind.

And now for the weekly summary – Aasim was not well for most of the week due to a viral infection but is now better, once again we did not have to resort to any antibiotics (read his immune system resisted secondary bacterial infections well) and am happy about it.

Yesterday I went birding with some friends to Wena Lake. Swati stayed back with Aasim, got my first pictures of Kentish Plover and Small Pratincole and we counted an approximate of 15000 ducks mostly Red-crested Pochards. There is also news of Bar-headed Geese at a nearby lake will have to go and get some pictures. An idea for publishing “Out of distribution” paper was brought up – I already have records of at least 8 such birds with pictures but the question is who will write… these days I can’t seem to write anything more than half a page on any subject.

Rapture!

The week went by in trying to get things done and the Sunday went by trying not to do anything! For a moment I could almost understand the rapture or rather psychology of pleasure-pain nexus…. the week however was a fruitful one and Swati did manage to get things done (doesn’t she always :x ), so hopefully this week we will be embarking on a project (project not as in coding) which is larger than we ever believe we would / could ever manage, more on that in a day or two.

Last week I discovered that a photographer of nudes is generally considered as not being very smart if not outright dumb – I had to set that right on two PHP application forums where I am active under an alias. Now don’t jump to conclusions the alias is just popularise my alternate photoblog.

Yesterday we had planned on going birding but it fizzled out, somehow since bird photography has now essentially become dependent on need for a longer lens and more time, both of which I cannot afford to spare, I don’t see myself doing that often. Yesterday I also tried something which I hadn’t done ever since Aasim was born – picked up Swati and walked across the aisle, not that she need any help. I leave the question – Has Swati lost weight or have I gained that much strength – open to speculation….

Untitled I

Suddenly it is cold! week before last it was as if we are going to have an early summer and now the temperature has dipped ushering an extended winter – I love winters in Nagpur specially sitting in the warm sun on Sunday afternoons.

It has been a very hectic past few days with Swati playing nurse/foster parent to her niece who has had an accident and then to Aasim’s class teacher who was operated upon to have her appendix removed – Swati’s verdict – She (Aasim’s teacher) is a 27 year old Aasim :P I guess anyone who see’s Yoda in Degobah when under anesthesia rightly qualifies as such! Swati’s also discovered that how being empathic towards the physical suffering of others can sap you up emotionally… this is something which I use to complain about when I was practicing but one needs to experience it first hand to truly understand what I meant….

Yesterday morning saw us again at the near by Wena Lake for watching birds – this time while Aasim, Swati and Raju roamed about I sat inside a hide which Raju had fashioned out for me using Ipomea branches right on the spot. I had the thrill of seeing Common Teals, Greater Cormorant, Little Ring Plover and some more waders at nearly handshaking distance – unfortunately the close proximity also meant that they could not be photographed really well :(

Late afternoon turned out to be very creative and fruitful – we have finally found a new model (after interviewing and rejecting many dumb tweenagers) who is intelligent, creative (she is a Kathak dancer), 30+ and most importantly comfortable working the way we want her to… looks like the year is going to be interesting! B-)

OK! we are not a Sweat Shop

Got some flack for calling SANIsoft a sweat shop…

Two of my biggest clients pointed out that calling SANIsoft a sweat shop would not please their investors (heh! I did not know that you people read my personal journal)

They went on to point that you cannot call a SME which creates PHP apps optimised to take 10,000,000+ hits a day, designed to work seamlessly on clusters, designed to be easily plug-able, designed to be secure, a sweat shop. Sweat shops do not have clients who are partners with *the* biggest web companies in the world (Wow! we do all that? damn, we are not getting paid enough!)

Sweat shop also connotes that the employees are treated at just one rung above slaves. Oh well! my programmers are slaves, slaves to program what they choose to – they cannot do anything else when they are at SANIsoft – when on bench they are forced to work on Open Source projects, forced to participate in mailing lists and forced to answer mails for problems they can solve. Yeah! they are all paid once a month on the last day without fail and then given performance bonus whenever Swati can afford (5 times till now in this financial year). They are free to freelance if they have time after they are released for the day – so that way the working conditions are a shade better than a sweat shop.

There – I have set the record straight, done PR for my company on my personal journal and pleased everyone – All smile please =))

Failure of your business model is not my problem

“Failure of your business model is not my problem” It is sad to tell a client this but that however does not mean that I do not understand business or business process, The following in no particular order are my few common sense guidelines

I am outright wary of clients who wants my opinion on their business model/idea. Dude I had a wonderful business idea and I am following it to the hilt right now! We wanted to be and are a “PHP sweat shop”
I prefer to take clients who are taking their existing brick and mortar business to the web – these clients usually last with you for a long time.
I know that clone of a previous big idea is not going to make it as the *next big idea“ however these clients have money to throw around – if you are ready to let go of the last installment of your payment take them.
I refuse to give discounts on my rates to a new client – these clients are usually troublesome, we however give a lot of non-billed hours to our old clients and they are thankful for it
I know that a proposition that is ”too good to be true“ usually isn’t – development in lieu of partnership/profit sharing/extra money later is always a loss making deal – want to do free development? do it for free software, the returns are worth their weight in gold (no that is not a joke or a flame bait)
I am wary of propositions which begin with ”We are looking for a long term relationship with a development company having strong technical knowhow“ – Good deals come with a detailed project(s) RFC documents

P.S. I have most probably written all of the above somewhere before – just cant remember where