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Hum Developers Kab Banenge?

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I was sitting at my office desk as usual, besides the window enjoying the cool breeze of post 6 pm friday evening of a summer day, 7 floors in the sky, at our office. We’re now 2 regulars in the office, and while it does get a little boring at times, there are also times when I appreciate the silence, the sound of wind through the little window on my left, the occasional rattling of helicopters passing by. That desk and that window are really interesting, my gateway to a different world where I just sit 15 minutes at a stretch staring at a distant building, the lights on its terrace blinking harmoniously. The occasional helicopter, and the people inside of it. Where must they be heading? Are they appreciating the fact that they’re inside that bird that countless individuals like me adore from the ground. I don’t know.

And just like that, I get to think about my own self. My thoughts four and a half years ago, in the first year of my college. There was so much excitement of getting into computers formally, finally. Now I could actually read interesting stuff off the Internet all day long and call it studying, without raising my mum’s eyebrows. I had a friend with whom I could share my technical side, which wasn’t much then, to be honest. Programming was the new thing and we knew we needed to learn this wizardry. Why and how we never thought of. There wasn’t a lot of knowledge within, not even speaking of wisdom, startups were unheard of, and life’s goals were defined in terms of what to learn next and ‘let’s see if we can solve this interesting puzzle with code’. It just was this raw energy that we had then, a kind of purity towards learning, the way opposite magnetic poles attract; no stray intentions.

It always brings a smile on my face thinking of those days. That purity towards the thing that you love, not asking why or if it will help me figure things out in the ‘big picture’ or will it look good on my portfolio, just that desire to go do it, to learn that absurd thing that has been obsolete for half a decade; why, because why not. I clearly, very clearly remember the happiness I felt after learning enough C to write basic programs, enough Python to flaunt my first ‘full stack’ web application. I learnt much later what full stack was, and even later that it was a job title. It was nice being able to make those things. We did whatever we thought was cool at that moment, anything that would tickle our curiosity.

In the midst of all of this, there was always a question I remember asking myself and my friend: ‘Hum developers kab banenge?’ All we knew was that a ‘software developer’ gets paid to do the kind of things that we do as hobbies. We had seen in total one software developer by then. He was Asa Dotzler from Mozilla. He was a nice person, but then we saw him as God because he could write code, you know. We kept on asking the question, but then sometime later, we stopped. Life got busy, everyone dashed towards their personal goals, the bigger picture and all that adulthood stuff. Suddenly, all of us were identified as developers, got hired as software engineers and started working for a monthly paycheck.

We were there before we even knew we were, and things aren’t much different on this side of the fence. Only now, you have to work whether or not you feel like working, your hobbies come in secondary to your professional goals and your life starts to revolve around this weird hierarchy of going from bottom of this growth ladder towards the top, occasionally changing the ladder. I guess that was all part of the package that we never bothered to explore properly. Or perhaps all of this is the optional bit that we took because everyone else was taking it, and maybe, with some courage we can get rid of this extra weight slowing us down and be those balls of raw energy that we were in college, being the ‘developers’ that we always wanted to be. I don’t know which one it is, but I guess we’ll eventually find out.

Thank you for reading.

Recommended: Career Advice – Moxie Marlinspike

Trek To Brahmatal (Uttarakhand)

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Hello! It has been more than a month since I shared something here. Although there has not been much, I’d like to share my experiences of the trip I went on last month. It was one of those trips that I’d remember for a very long time.

Since our first trek in the Sayadri ranges in January 2016, I and my friends had this big wish to go on a Himalayan trek. Finally, in October last year, we decided that Bramhatal would be it. (Not embedding maps because it was too much effort. Also, heavy images ahead. May take some time to load. Patience!)

There were a few reasons for this. Firstly, it was an easy trek. The only real challenge was a bit of high altitude sickness, but it was marginal. Secondly, it was the same group that we went to Sandhan Valley with, so there was this trust factor. Thirdly, it was scheduled for January, hence there was no chance it would coincide with our term tests.

We started preparing for the trek from November, regularly running 5kms to increase our stamina. We also booked our train tickets, to and fro. Then the long wait began. It was my first trip out with friends and I was really excited. We literally spoke about it every single day in college, all 4 of us. We were scheduled to depart on 21st January to Delhi. The last week was the most difficult. I couldn’t sleep at night, for the thoughts of what was about to come kept me awake. I’m sure Ankit, Manasi and Jyotirmay felt the same. Last two days were reserved for shopping and packing. Not much though, since we were not going to bath for the next 10 days anyway!

Saturday 21st – The journey to Lohajung

Finally the day came, it was a Saturday. I took my 13kg backpack and left for Thane where all four of us met. We had to leave for Delhi that day. So we left for Hazrat Nizamuddin from Mumbai Central. The journey was a bit hectic, for our seats were separate and the train was crowded with unreserved passengers. But the views outside the train made up for that. Really enjoyed the transition from a comfortable 27 degree Celsius in Mumbai to a chillish 15 something in Delhi. We got down by 7 in the evening, and then by the Metro, we headed for the ISBT bus station, from where we were to board a bus for Kathgodam, Uttarakand. Had some Palak Paneer at the bus stand and boarded the bus. The bus journey was comfortable enough, but the cold wasn’t. By the time we reached Kathgodam at 6 in the morning, the temperature had already dropped below 10. The coldest I had ever experienced. I was shivering like I never did before. Talking was not possible because my facial muscles had just refused to coordinate.

Just 20 meters away from where the bus stopped, we met other guys from our trek. There was a jeep awaiting us, which would take us from Kathgodam to Lohajung (our base village), a little town in the Chamoli district of Uttarakhand, a ten hour drive through the ghats, terrifying and nauseating. Trust me when I say this, it was a very beautiful town. Look just about anywhere and you’d have a wallpaper like scenery, old houses, beautiful people and snow covered peaks in the background. And it was cold. I believe it was 6-7 degrees when we reached there. Walking barefoot on the floor wasn’t possible. The water would numb your hands if you dared to touch it, so washing face was out of question right away. We were welcomed with hot Pakodas and tea. The food there was surprisingly good. Great Dal, Rotis and Sabzi. Rice and a sweet dish at the end. So our trek leader briefed us about the next day. We had to start early in the morning to reach the Bekatal lake by afternoon. We were introduced to the kitchen staff who would carry all the heavy equipments on Donkeys (Kachhars) and make us good food throughout the trek. Also, we had a local guide, Ranjeet dada, who, in spite of being a Redhat Linux certified professional, preferred to be around the mountains rather than Linux boxes. A really cool guy who loved to talk and tell stories. He runs his own ISP in the Van village of Chamoli, and had quite a lot of knowledge about networking and *nix in general. We packed our stuff, and went to bed early.

Tuesday 24th – Trek to Bekatal

We started at 8 am, after having a good breakfast. It was through the town, walking on mud roads to the top. It was not difficult, but exhausting. We continued to walk for some 6 hours that day, taking short breaks every 5-10 minutes, occasionally taking long breaks. We had to ascend some 1000-1500 feet on that day, on a trail of some 5kms. We reached the camp by 2 and were given Rhododendron juice. It was too good, and addictive too. Drank some three glasses of it before I had to stop myself from refilling the fourth time. Then it was lunch and we rested in our tents for a while then. In the evening, we went to explore the Bekatal frozen lake nearby. Seeing a frozen lake is a magical experience. It was just like the one Bear Grylls features on his show ‘Man vs Wild’. It was awesome!

At night, we lit up a bonfire for some heat and had fun around it, all of us. We were served dinner around it (which we insisted since we didn’t want to go away from fire). The food was great and guess what, they made us dessert at 9,500 feet. It was fruit custard, and it was delicious. We chit chatted around the fire after dinner and at around 10, we were served ‘hot drinks’. No, it wasn’t alcohol, but Bournvita. It was delicious.

Wednesday 25th – Trek to Bramhatal

We started early again. Had a good shit (seriously, a challenge in the woods ;P), brushed my teeth and had breakfast. Left for Bramhatal. After an even more exhausting day, we reached Bramhatal. The routine was the same on reaching, juice, lunch, rest, tea and then we set out to explore Bramhatal which was some 15 minutes away from the camp. It was beautiful. The night was similar, with bonfire and good food. The next day was summit day.

Thursday 26th – Summit day

It was the Republic Day. We did our morning rituals and gathered near the India Hikes campers. We hoisted the Tricolor, sang the national anthem and took some photographs. We were some 25-30 people together, and it definitely was the most memorable Republic day mornings ever. We then started the walk to the summit. It was at 12,500 feet, and the thinness of air was evident. It was not the longest walk, but definitely the most tiring. We kept walking and at around 12, we reached the summit. It was the top of a mountain, snow covered, surrounded by grasslands on three sides and Himalayan ranges on the fourth. One can see Mt. Trisul (22,000 feet) and Nanda Gunti (19,000 feet) from the summit. It was a clear day and we made full use of it. We hoisted the tricolor again on the summit and took pictures.

The descend took some two hours, and we reached the camp by 3. The rest of the day was just usual stuff and the next day was back to basecamp, Lohajung. It would have not been any more interesting from here, if it wasn’t for the sudden snowfall that started when we were about to go to bed. The temperature dropped to 2 degrees and we were all dancing, when it began to snow. We ran into our tents and slept, assuming we were covered!

The Tricolor on the summit. Nanda Gunti on the left and Trisul on the right!

Friday 27th – Back to Lohajung

So that night, at around 1.30, the tent broke down. The weight of the snow on top of it was too much for it to handle, and it fell on our faces. The ice cold surface of the tent was touching my forehead and nose, but I only woke up at 5 am. My reflex was to call for help, believing that the tent has got buried under the snow. Thankfully it wasn’t exactly buried, but just broken. We spent the next two hours holding the tent with one hand and trying to sleep. It was terrifying!

Daylight made its way in, and we tried to open the tent to see the situation outside. It was seriously frightening, for the grasslands and plains that we saw a day ago had all vanished and replaced by dead white snow. It was snowing so heavily that it took me an additional 15 minutes to gather courage to move out of the tent to take a dump. That was the most daring shit I had ever taken; a foot of snow, chilly winds and -6 degrees. It was nature at its best and worst, simultaneously.

I spoke to our leader and casually told, ‘No way we’re going to descend in this weather, right?’. He said we have to, no options. We cannot survive here. My heart sank. He told us to get ready in 30 minutes and we did. Slowly, gathering courage, we started walking in that foot deep snow, following the footsteps of the person in front. Snow was getting collected on our shoulders and bags and it felt great, but also added weight and had to be shaken off. It was probably the bravest thing I had ever done, walking on the slopes with snow hitting my face on one side but maintaining the balance so that I don’t slip and go sliding all the way down a thousand feet. It was for real.

This went on and on for the next 7-8 hours, which were quite easily the toughest 8 hours of my life, slipping and falling multiple times and thinking ‘I don’t want to die here’ to myself. My shoes, socks and pants were all wet, and my hands had become numb due to the snow. Our faces had turned blue. Finally, we reached the base camp at about 4. I took a bath since I was feeling very, very dirty. It was a bad decision, because after that I was shivering so much that my mouth just lost any coordination that was left. It was all kha-kha-kha-khaana ki-ki-kither ha-ha-hai. It was fun. I slept for some time then. I woke up to a great non veg dinner, Gulab Jamuns and more Bournvita.

After dinner, the entire team had a good chat. We were given ‘High Altitude Trekkers’ badge for completing the trek, and ranked amongst ourselves who performed the best on the trek. Then it was story time by Ranjeet dada who shared some of his experiences and the lifestyle of the people in that area. Amazing.

Saturday 28th – Back to Kathgodam

The next morning, we had some Maggie and black tea, took some group pictures with the staff. They packed out bags on the top of a similar jeep and we set out for Kathgodam. It was better this time, since I enjoyed the scenery and didn’t feel nauseated. Just and hour before reaching, we learned that our train got canceled. We took the public transport buses, and started our journey back to Delhi. We reached Delhi at around 2 in the morning.

Sunday 29th – A day in Delhi

Knowing the reputation of Delhi, we decided to spend the night at Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station, so we took a cab from ISBT to Hazrat Nizamuddin and spent some time there, in the waiting room, which was already filled up to the brim. Here we got a chance to freshen up for the upcoming day, so we used it. At around 6 am, we kept our huge backpacks in the cloak rooms, taking the essentials with us, we started our Delhi expedition. We explored a lot of good places that day; Connaught Place, Guru Bangla Sahib, Raj Path, Jan Path, Rapid Metro (Gurgaon), JNU campus (just outside), Hauz Khas village, Chandni Chawk, Red Fort and then back to Hazrat Nizamuddin, in that order. We boarded the Deheradun express that night and reached Mumbai early morning on Tuesday.

Seriously, what a trip!

Birthday Week

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Here it comes, finally, my birthday. Not that it is something new this time, but surely one of the special ones because I passed another decade here on Earth. Last time this happened, I didn’t realize how important it was, maybe because I was just 10 back then. But this time, it would be different. I realized I have moved around the Sun 20 times now, which is amazing, because I have travelled around 18.8 trillion kilometers, since my birth, relative to the sun. That is a lot.

On 3rd of October this year, I will have lived some 7305 days which comes to about 613 million seconds. Woah! Good going. I travel a lot, and almost all of it is from and to my college. My college is 61 kilometers from home, and I am into it for the last 2 and a half years. Considering a usual semester to be of 3 months (which is lower bound for most semesters) and a usual month to have 22 working days, in the last 5 semesters I have travelled around 40,260 kilometers; a little more than the circumference of the earth at the equator. I wish I had had the fortune to visit another country or even distant parts of my own, but that’s all right.

20 years is a lot of time. From a pilot, to astronaut, to a star gazer and now a computer guy who talks code and science. My ambitions never ceased to motivate me. There have been some really nice moments, like getting into an engineering college, getting a personal computer and a mobile phone, good friends who love food and all. I was fortunate enough to be born in a family where I get all that I needed, to do things that I love, because what I am looking at is 20% of poverty in India

Also, I am sharing my birthday with Free Software Foundation and GNU project. They have turned 30 this year, which is cool. RMS would be real proud at where his initiative has reached today. I would like all of the people reading this to hit the link once and read about GNU and it’s philosophy. I feel they are amazing people, and their contributions to the community, especially.

[ Celebrate 30 years of GNU! ]

Top reasons why you should start using Mozilla Firefox right now

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If you have visited my blog a couple of times, it must be clear to you by now that I am a Mozillian. I love their way and goals and in this world dominated by corporate giants, they are like a candle in the darkness. I promote Mozilla everywhere, at college and in my friends’ circle. See that little banner at the right hand bottom corner, yes, its an affiliate banner from Mozilla, the only affiliated thing on my blog.

I am sure most of you have heard or even used Firefox, the browser by Mozilla Foundation. The 1.0 version was released just more than 10 years from now (In fact, they just celebrated their 10th birthday) and they are getting better with each release.

But then, you might ask, why do you have to care about all this? All you wanted to do was browse websites. That’s it. Why care about the company which creates it and all those mess. Why try to be a hero by downloading another browser, when it is just a piece of software, right? No. Not so much. Talking, not from the point of view of a Mozillian, but someone who stopped using IE and Chrome way back and has been using Firefox on all his devices from atleast 3 years, I will try to focus on the most significant reasons to drop your existing browser and start with Firefox.

Add-ons

Does anybody remembers that there was a time when people used to use browsers just for the sake of browsing, and nothing else was even expected from a browser. That all changed with Firefox. You had this thing called add-on and plugins that can be easily downloaded to do little tasks to make your browsing experience better. They have one for all your needs (or most of them, if you question that!) plus you get to install third party add-ons too.

To be honest, Chrome has a market place of their own. Their add-ons (or extensions, as they are called) are generally considered more secure than their Firefox counterparts. Also, Chrome has more extensions than Firefox. But then, no third-party installs, sandboxing makes them so. In turn you don’t get powerful add-ons in Chrome, for example No-Script and AdBlock. In short, Firefox’s add-ons are much more capable to do a particular task, than any of its competitors’.

Customization

Most of the browsers available right now are too closed to get any close to Firefox in terms of customization. Chrome looks clean and feels fast and responsive. Opera is great too, but you don’t get stuff like about:config in any browser. With some days of experience, you can literally make the browser work for you. Everything’s under your control. It feels good to have control, trust me.

If core customization was not enough for you, then themes will do the rest. Free and open, feel free to give the browser your own look and feel. Don’t like an icon at a place? Move it. No, seriously move that icon to a place you are comfortable with.

Every installation of Firefox is different, users make it. Each one is using his or her version of Firefox.

NPAPI Depreciated? We use Firefox

NPAPI is the interface developers use to develop plugins for our browsers (the Java, Flash and Adobe Reader types) and Google has decided to remove them completely, unless it approved by Google. Now why should you care about this? Yeah, actually you should not. You will still be able to watch Youtube videos and read ebooks online, but it would be like, someone giving you all the comforts of life, at the cost of your individual freedom and preference. Are you okay with it? I’m not. Thank you.

Privacy

Now who won’t agree. Companies have started to revise their privacy policies to match their personal gains. Almost all the browsers collect information about the sites you visit, sell them to other corporates to give you targeted ads. No, I’m not saying this. It’s written there, right in their privacy policy. Now-a-days most of the popular browser have a DO NOT TRACK feature to prevent sites to give you your ‘tailored ads’. No one likes random sites, that you are visiting for the first time, know as much about you as, say your mail provider knows. Not me atleast. An important thing to know here is that Google Chrome has still NOT implemented the DO NOT TRACK policy, as of the time of writing this article. So now you know it is time to switch, right?

Sync

So, it is really convenient to have all our bookmarks and stuff from our mobiles to computer and vice versa. Firefox now makes it possible, securely. For power users, who work on the web all day, this comes as a great addon. Although some other browsers have had this feature before Firefox, we know well whom to trust with our information, looking at their individual policies.

Security

Out of the box, maybe Firefox is just second in security to Chrome, thanks to Chrome’s sandboxing techniques that Firefox has not implemented yet. That said, a little customization with use of proper addons (No Scripts and Adblock, mentioned earlier make a good example here), can make Firefox way more secure than Chrome, let alone other browsers.

Speed

Apparently Firefox appears to be a bit sluggish, especially on Windows. But here is a thing I noticed. That speed is constant, regardless of the number of tabs you have open. Compared to this, I have used other browsers that seem faster and more responsive at first, but just cannot take the load of heavy use (like I have my Iceweasel running for about 15hours at a stretch, with an average of 10 tabs open at all the times, and it runs flawlessly. Crash? Yes, sometimes, but I certainly get my session back each and every single time). Next time some friend of yours shows you the quickness of any browser, ask him to try the same with 15 tabs of heavy multimedia filled sites open and see how they perform (and yes, horizontal tab scrolling! Tabs on Firefox don’t shrink in size as you add them ;).

Final words

You see, I tried my best to keep this article going into another ‘Firefox vs Chrome’ battle, but it slowly slipped into it. The reason being the competition between these two browser. Technically, Internet Explorer comes in second most widely used browser, but had Microsoft not shipped it (forcefully!) with every MS operating system, I doubt the fact had been the same. Chrome is taking the lead, head on, and others are falling back. I got no personal problem with it, of course, but I hate monoculture. There was a time when 95% browser share was of IE, and Mozilla brought us out of it, made us see the web the way it was meant to be, not the way some corporations wanted us to see. I will promote Mozilla till they stand with what they say, ‘power in the hands of user’ and I will promote them or anyone else who stands up to make the web better, give power to the individual users who actually run the web and let them take control of what they want the world to see, and what not.

Although the title suggests that this was an article about ‘Mozilla Firefox’ as a browser, it clearly isn’t limited to it. It looks at a much bigger picture of the web. Tell me, what you feel about it, even if you are cool with handing over your data to companies. I would really like to know.