Tribute

Posted on | January 9, 2009 | 1 Comment

While graduating from Penn State, I bulk-applied to any jobs in the school job bank that has a word ‘Open Source’ in the description.

My resume was attractive. Stated in there, a thesis about using Ant-based algorithm to solve an NP-complete problem. Spikesource wanted someone who can speak Apache Ant, the build tool. I was modelling the ants, the pesky hard-working creatures. It was a match made in heaven!

Ken asked me a great interview question, “What’s your favourite text editor?” Notepad would have been an obvious reject, Emacs would have been good, Vi would have been great. My text editor of choice is Joe! “YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!!!”

Calvin asked me for the latest kernel version. I was off by two minor release points.

Shastri asked me a simple puzzle that I couldn’t answer, I’ve been using that question to interview people now.

I told them, their stack didn’t run in 64-bit OS, and that my license plate was ‘OPEN SRC.’ I was hired that evening. Spike should have given me a marketing job!

I owed most of my personal growth from Spikesource and Spike’s employees. From yaml to json to sso to openid to management to product development to pitching to marketing to java to perl to python to soap to rest to cricket and poker.

Larry Wall says that laziness is a virtue for a programmer. Never have I seen it truer in Chris Chan and Vinay. Anything they have to do twice, the have a function, a script, or a class to automate it.

Murugan preached and lived his 5 rules:

Be Passionate
Keep It Simple
Create Opportunities
Communicate Transparently
Keep Learning

Calvin is the most technically savvy manager I’ve known. He also stretches, pushes, and takes care of people too.

Nimish has a focus that is really unbreakable, except oh.. ever so slightly by cricket scores. So enviable.

Stephen is such a debugger, quickly identifies wild geese and chase the right duck bug.

Venkat just doesn’t quit, at work or in real life. With Everest base camp behind, and Kilimanjaro ahead, he will be running out of hills to climb soon!!

Ed brings balance to the force with all his ‘Evil Plans™.’

A lot of the great qualities of Prem is apparent in Aswin, his son. And Aswin is such an impressive young man. Prem, thank you for your leadership.

Rob, thanks for everything, and oh.. you owe me a pint!!

Sylvester, thank you very much for everything, Brother! I got a nice D40X because of you!!

Jai, thanks for such a great time in Chennai last time.

Heikki, thanks for all the pythons references, especially for Element Tree.

Manish keeps improving himself. Give him google, and he’ll find a solution to anything.

Hang has some knowledge of anything and everything, very impressive..

Don, I know the factories are in good hands