“You are not beautiful” These harsh words have to be endured by almost every girl/woman at some or the time of her life – unfortunately it is the chauvinistic setup of the society we live in. However it is not just male chauvinism which is at play here but something which angers me much more, though this is in no way tolerance or acceptance of MCP behaviour by men.
Continue reading You are not beautiful
Over the years I have been involved with many a hiring selection for ______ specialists at all levels, and I can share an observation that I believe will surprise nobody.There is an abundance of ______ job candidates with impressive resumes who do not possess even the minimum basic ______ skills. Resume inflation is only partially to blame.The bigger problem is that for the most part these candidates sincerely and earnestly believe that that two-day “advanced ______” course really gave them the advanced knowledge and understanding of the system in question.
No, the ______ does not have what most of you might think considering it is from me but the alarming and a very saddening thing is the ______ can be filled up with almost anything and it would be still true. Perhaps a bit more in mid level IT related jobs….
The interested can see where I quoted the passage from https://www.directionsmag.com/editorials.php?article_id=1972&trv=1
Recruitment is most often the most frustrating of the things that I am supposed to handle. Anyone and everyone who can write mysql_fetch_array() thinks that they are better than Rasmus, it is an entirely different matter that the response is always “Rasmus who?” from these delightfully disillusioned geniuses when you really ask about him.
Once again it is reaffirmed that my old strategy of taking *intelligent* freshers and training them to think the way it works for us is the best…
Other than that life goes on – lot of things are being worked out on the construction front – most important being the electrical layout, with roughly 15 tonnes of AC cooling supposed to be put in I rapidly learnt all there is to about calculating electricity bill. Being finicky about construction quality I learnt about how the waterproofing is done for RCC slabs and the likes. All of this is much more than I had anticipated, specially considering that the designated experts of the contractor and architect are supposed to look after the QA – but then for everyone it is “just a job”. For me? it is my money which is at stake!!! At times like these how I wish that all I had was “just a job”
On second thoughts – naaaahhh!
Arrrrghh!!! Sometimes I feel that I am married to 4 different women!
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
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” 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
Aarrrghh!!! for all its usefulness and genius of design, I specially like the Auth part, the Flickr API does not provide a straight forward method to get all the comments made on a particular photo.
The only hack I could think up was to aggregate the Recent Comments RSS, parse it (they do not send the image ID as a tag either) and cache the results in a DB to be shown with appropriate photos… the downside besides being very crude method is that I cannot get comments on my non-public pictures 
Anyone got a better idea?