I have been fortunate enough to have worked alongside some very smart and kind people in all the companies that I’ve been part of. And in all those people, I always noticed a common element. You instantaneously have an appreciation for how wise they are from the way they talk about random things, the way they think. It almost makes me wonder, especially as a computer nerd, what did they do to get a thought process like that?

And to clarify, I’m not just talking about software engineers. I’m talking about managers; product, marketing and people from other domains. So this isn’t a bias for people good with code. They might not have been the best in their respective domains, but it didn’t seem to matter. They were all super pleasant to be around and working with them was always a joy.

Initially, that was weird for me. How can someone be so good at what they do and not be super famous? Why are they not millionaires or working in, I don’t know, Google or something? I remember thinking about all these things, but not knowing the reason. Now, after gaining some maturity and finding a lot of time to just pause and ponder over such questions, I think I have some possible answers.

Ever since I was a kid, I was fed this idea of what a successful person is supposed to be like. He’s rich, he’s famous, he’s smart. He can afford whatever he wants, has a big house, lives life without any struggles and works for a large corporation as an executive. If you want to be called successful in life, you ought to become like him. I’d imagine many of the children brought up in cultures and societal structures like mine had the same idea of what success looks like.

So when I got out of this environment and met people who felt like they were doing well in their lives on the whole; are happy doing what they do, are influencing and making a difference in the lives of people around them and so on, my trained mind had internal conflicts. On one hand, it felt like they’re pretty successful and happy with what they do. On the other, my definition of a successful person didn’t seem to match them. What was happening?

It was simple. Just as we sometimes accept a very specific definition of health, intellectual or creativity, and regard anything that deviates from this definition as disabled, dummy or mundane, I had this one definition of successful and everything other than that was just a compromise at best.

But I was massively wrong. It had to be wrong all along. We’re all different, and trying to fit everyone under one umbrella was doomed to be a failed generalization. There are as many ways of being successful as there are humans and ways to be alive, and each one of us can define it for ourselves what that means for us. From drawing doodles to collecting rocks, only you can judge if you’re successful. This isn’t to undervalue those of us who work super hard and are actually successful in my old, partial definition of success. This is to broaden the definition, my definition, to accommodate all the variations we see in life around us and appreciate it all.

The world isn’t a level playing field. Just like in video games, the game of life can be played on easy, medium or difficult setting. Unlike in the video games, you don’t get to choose it. Some people are playing the same game as you at a very different difficulty level, and there’s not much that can be done about it. The least we can do, is not make it even crazier.

In closing

I’m very glad about this shift in my perspective over the past half a year or so. This serves multiple purposes.

• One, I am more open to exploring and appreciating the ideas of fun, weekends, vacations and in general living a good life from the perspectives of people who’ve been brought up very differently than I was.
• Two, I don’t lock myself in this tunnel-visioned world view that just because someone is not a senior-something by the time they reach a particular age, they’re not ambitious, talented, smart or whatever.
• Three, I get to experience a lot of new, wonderful aspects of life that I never knew existed; laying in the grass and feeling warm sunlight on your skin, running a marathon, skateboarding, gifting, making people smile and laugh, and being grateful for little things in life.
• Four, I detach the concept of a person’s value from the money they’re making. It changes a whole lot, and makes me look at people around myself in a completely new light. A light which emphasizes on someone’s skills, values and thoughts over their paychecks and job titles.
• And five, it makes me more empathetic in my daily life while talking to someone who’s not like me.

To close this essay, I’d like to come back to the title of this post. Take it a little easy, little slowly. You’re in a car driving on a never ending road that meets the horizon in the distance. Keep an eye out for where you’re heading, but make sure you don’t miss the scenes on the sides, for those are real. What lies at the horizon might not.

Cheers, and thank you for reading!

2018 is almost gone and it is time to review some of the good and some improvable events from the past year. I’ll also list down some TODOs in the end, derived from the list of things that I could’ve improved upon.

In a brief

The year started on a remote village’s railway station in Odissa, during the 2017 Jagriti Yatra. On returning from the Yatra, I was headed for some adventures in LaughGuru, work related and otherwise. I enjoyed staying at my new house in Mumbai a lot. Life was very chill until I had to depart from LaughGuru around mid of this year. After that, I spent some time learning full stack development with Python, then started applying to companies. Around mid-October, I had found a new full time job. The next two months were spent preparing for it, learning some non-tech things and just spending some good time with friends and family.

Highlights

Some things went right; planned or otherwise, and I learned a lot from them. Here are some of them from the past year.

• Visited various places in the Jagriti Yatra, spoke with many unique individuals and made friends.
• Took over bigger responsibilities of the codebase (and the tech team) of LaughGuru. Learned how major features are planned and implemented.
• Learned quite a lot of advanced CSS and some SASS, implemented designs that were way out of my league.
• Learned functional programming. Concepts were learned from Haskell, but most of the actual implementation was in Javascript.
• Made small contributions to Freedom of the Press (and some other) repositories. Got the DigitalOcean Hacktober tee.
• Learned backed development with Python and Flask. Learned how ORMs are used, schemas designed, app structured and tested.
• Landed a new job, interviewed with many companies and spoke with many interesting and smart people.
• My algorithms, data structures and computer science game in general was leveled up, thanks to the interviews.
• Learned how overflows and overflow exploits, function calls actually work under the hood among other interesting low level stuff (thanks, Hacking – The Art of Exploitation).
• Read some 15-20 (hard, soft and audio) books, most non-tech. Many were classics like 1984, Sapiens, The Mythical Man Month, The Selfish Gene and Pragmatic Programmer.
• Read Applied cryptography and Serious cryptography, got a hands on with Coursera’s Cryptography 1 course by Dan Boneh, wrote ELi5s on cryptography primitives.

Mistakes and Areas To Improve

There is always room for improvement (a lot of it in my case), and in the following points, I’ll list down my own observations and some by my friends on ways to self-improvement.

• Didn’t keep in touch well with friends and relatives.
• Wrote very little actual code, especially in the second half of the year. Didn’t learn a new language or technology either.
• Didn’t contribute to the open source as much as I’d have liked.
• Didn’t implement the cryptographic primitives that I had spent a lot of time learning.
• Spent too much time browsing reddit/youtube that could’ve been used to read books/learn something worthwhile.
• Had a private room but didn’t set up the ideal work station that I had always wished for.
• Didn’t workout regularly and got marginally overweight.
• Didn’t plan the post-LaughGuru time properly, and didn’t follow whatever little plan I had religiously.
• Got a chance to speak at a tech conference, missed it.
• Didn’t dressed up decently, or looked like a professional.

# TODO in 2019

• Web engineering, security engineering and open source needs to take front seats again.
• Make active efforts to keep in touch and maintain healthy relationships with friends and relatives, be a nice-r person to be around in general.
• Participate in opensource communities and build real, useful projects.
• Walk, exercise and meditate daily. Wake up early.
• Practice and get good at public speaking.
• Save money and travel during holidays.
• Read 24 books.
• Put into practice the software engineering best practices that I have learned in the past year.
• Remind myself that consistency and regular practice to become better at something beats one time wonders and luck on any day, and it is fun to be disciplined and process, systems oriented.

See you next year!

I hope you had a great year as well. I also hope you have a wonderful new year, filled with interesting problems, learnings and experiences.

Thank you for reading!

I went through an interesting roller-coaster of understanding what the world of computers and the internet actually looked like in real life. Having no software engineer in my family or friends didn’t help either. The net effect was that I had no idea what actual software development looks like, or how different it would be from the online programming idealism that I was exposed to early on.

It was in the second half of my college that I really understood that most software engineering jobs are not the glorious stay-up-late-night-to-save-the-world kinds. The stay-up-late-night part might still be applicable, but for completely different (and often, less significant) reasons.

So you’re excited to do good work, and have lots of energy that you wish to put into something meaningful and worthwhile, what do you do? A couple of my friends and college acquaintances decided to start their own companies, and I found that very interesting. Some went for a masters degree in western countries, and that is also a great option. For me, I decided to go work for startups.

In this article, I’ll list some interesting aspects of working for startups which I’ve learnt in my little journey so far.

Flexibility

Flexibility is being able to bend rules to fit some edge case or just be more human. Yes, the office time is 9-5, but if it makes me more productive to work 11-7, why not? Maybe I’d like to work from home some days a week, or maybe I’ll want to work more hours this month and take a vacation in the next. Not hungry during the lunchtime? Feel free to eat your meal later when you feel like. Of course, with great flexibility comes greater need for discipline and care must be taken to not misuse the trust your employer has in you.

I personally like it when things are flexible, but you must remember that things work both ways. Your employer might also expect some degree of flexibility from you (so occasional work on the weekend, longer work hours when nearing a release etc). As in the case with you in the above paragraph, be mindful about keeping it a fair transaction for both the parties.

Culture and Bonding

The startup culture is usually very friendly and informal. In case of small startups, you know almost all the people working for the company by their first names. Small talks are common, storytelling is a good way of deepening the bonding and so is sharing your lunch. At the startups that I worked for in the past, the entire team had their lunch together (or went out to have lunch in the nearby restaurants). We celebrated together when it was someone’s birthday, had a town hall once a month where the entire team would come together and present updates on what they’ve been up to.

As a result of all of that, the atmosphere was most often very positive, and when that’s the case, one looks forward to waking up and going to the office every day. It is a win-win for everyone.

Impact and Work

The next important bit is the impact of your work. In any early-stage startup, you’re sure to find loads of opportunities to build interesting features, be responsible for major chunks of the codebase and be an integral part of the team in general. A small startup is unlikely to have funds to hire multiple people for similar roles. Hence, the job will require you to take ownership and be responsible for anything that has to do with your part of the codebase, which is an excellent stimulant to do good work.

You might also need to occasionally work outside the scope of your job (talk to users, brainstorm the exact requirements, give your input in other parts of the product/service etc). It will get intense at times (the realization that you are responsible for a particular part of the product can be intimidating in the beginning), and you’d have to remind yourself that it is all part of the experience, the adventure. Like Sigmund Freud said,

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful

I certainly remember the day when I and my manager had to work till 4 in the morning to get a prototype ready for demo due next day (technically, the same day), or the last few weeks at my previous workplace where we were pushing ourselves to deliver. I feel I’m naive enough to enjoy these experiences instead of loathing them. But if that’s really the case, I’m happy to stay this way for more such adventures, for I feel the reward outweighs whatever drawback these experiences might have had on me.

Salary and Perks

In India, tech startups pay quite decently, especially if you’re in a tech or product role. Many have no official vacation policy so you can negotiate a vacation at any time. Many aspects of the job are flexible (see flexibility above). If it is a small company, you can except fewer perks (maybe just an annual bonus). As the size of the startup goes on increasing, the perks and salary increases. Note that I’m not talking about huge multinationals here which are notorious for paying very little and overworking their employees.

While how much you should earn is very subjective, there are many websites (for example) which will give you a range if you provide them with your details (like your education, skills and city). If you’re unsure about what you should get paid, these websites can help.

But note that monetary compensation is only one of the many ways you get paid at a job. Your happiness, professional growth, the network you’re building and the value your current work has on your career in the long run are some of the other currencies that you can take into account.

Caveats

While this article might have pushed you in the direction of thinking that working at a startup is without its downsides, that’s not true. Like many things in life, it isn’t binary and definitely not a black-white choice. For example, large multinational corporations would offer you more job security than a typical early-stage startup (this is less true than it used to, as I keep hearing about ‘layoffs’ in large companies in the news, but still a point to consider).

Similarly, if your goal is to make a decent sum of money, but while living as chill a life as possible (for example, maybe your priorities are your social life, family, living in your home city, less workload and responsibilities etc), then the startup life might not be the best fit for you.

With regards to finance, it should be noted that a ‘startup’ is a company trying to make money through various means (like investor funding, sales of their product etc) and things don’t always work out as per plans. In fact, a quick web search revealed that around 75-90% of all startups fail. What this means is that salaries can get delayed, extra workload if new resources cannot be hired, low enthusiasm of the team because of the previous two and many such problems. When considering a company, look for their funding status to get an idea about how they stand financially (Crunchbase is a good place to research). Glassdoor reviews and a simple internet search can also yield a lot of information that would help you in making the right decision.

Having a short interview with the founders is a good way to get to know the long-term vision of the company and the direction things are heading. Similarly, interviewing with the manager of the team that you’ve applied to (although not always an option) is a good way to see if you’d enjoy working in their team.

In Closing

Finally, don’t take it too seriously. Remember to learn and have fun, make new friends and visit new places. One thing I can guarantee you is that almost everyone you meet will have some interesting experience and important lessons that you can use in your life. Cross-pollination of ideas from one context to another is important, and that happens not just in business meetings but over lunch and coffee breaks. I hope you found this article useful. If you wish to talk about your startup adventure, or you’re looking forward to your first, feel free to drop me an email.

Thank you for reading!

So today is my last day here at LaughGuru, my first company. I might still be working with them after this point, but most of the active development would stop and the role of the tech-team will be reduced to just maintenance of existing systems and the like. My plans for the time after my dose of Laughter Guru is still away from total clarity, so won’t really write them here. What I do have some clarity on is how I spent the three quarters of my last year as, and that is what I’ll write on in this little post.

The journey to LaughGuru

Around this time last year, my final sems were in progress. I had no job in hand (that was a thing in the final year, everyone asked everyone else if they had a job. I used to called myself berozgaar, and that is what I’ll call myself from tomorrow). I had some direction, but nothing in particular. My friend Abhishek was my gateway to the world of startups, because I knew of none and planning the future wasn’t my strongest game. So borrowing his experience and startup wisdom, I made a little list of companies that I could apply to and look forward to spending some good time learning and building software and making new friends. Those were literally my only criteria when selecting the organizations that I was going to write to. One of them was LaughGuru, the company Abhishek was then working for.

I wrote an email to the co-founder of the company sometime in mid-May. The communication was initiated through Abhishek, and I was effectively an ’employee referred’ candidate. The conversation went well, and I learned that this person is also the product and engineering manager at the company. He seemed nice. I learned that I’ll be working with ReactJS and the formal interview will start sometime after my exams were done. In the meanwhile, I also spoke with other companies that I knew of then, and most of the experience was pleasant. The people I spoke to were interesting, were open to the idea of accepting a college fresher into their teams and in general open to helping. While the entire experience was intimidating, and the idea of talking about yourself and your ‘achievements’ in front of (some very successful) people was not something I was very comfortable with (but yeah, on this blog it is okay :P), in hindsight it was a great experience into the startup world. Most importantly, I learned that getting a job at some startup is very easy. Getting a good job, at some good startup? That’s the trick.

After my exams and after some really interesting adventures on Indian roads, I got back to the business of adulthood. The company gave me an assignment, which was an interactive card game. The challenging bit was that it had to be implemented in ReactJS that I had little idea about until then. I made a decent looking version of it in around 4 days and the call for interview round 1 came sometime after that. I’m not sure about the type of that interview, but there was a mix of questions, technical and the others. It lasted some two-two and a half hours, and went well. I felt comfortable with the team, and while they seemed like nice people in general, it definitely didn’t seem like a place full of elite programmers working extra hard to bring something of a dream to reality (that is how I naively imagined startups to be like).

A week later, my second on-site interview round was conducted. This time the frontend lead was present, with whom I would be working if I get selected. The second round was much more casual than the first, and not many technical questions were asked. We spoke about my personal projects a bit and then for sometime about the technical assignment. It didn’t last very long, and the casualness of round two meant either very good or very bad news. Couple of days later, I received a call from the company and they had decided to offer me a job. I was happy. We negotiated on the offer a bit, and then I bought a day’s time to think. Not just think but I also had other interviews in progress that I had to close if I was going to take the offer up. Did that and I accepted LaughGuru’s offer. The offer date was not announced then, but I was okay with it. It was supposed to be, as some people described it, my last big vacation (which turned out to not be very true, or at least not as scary as it sounds). After the interview, I waited for another two months for the job to start. I used that time to explore my deeper interests, work on some good projects, read books about my newly found interest in cryptographic engineering and spend some good time at home in general.

Joining LaughGuru – Initial Impressions

My first day at LaughGuru was filled with mixed feelings. It wasn’t all scary as was my first day at Samagra. Back then, I didn’t know what was expected of me, and if I’ll be able to live up to the expectations of my mentors and friends. This time, there was no such feeling. I knew I was hired to write Javascript, build frontends, collaborate with an even more experienced developer and hence, I had a clear idea of what I had gotten myself into. I was not a hundred percent happy, and that was because of the sinking feeling of adulthood starting, that I was into frontend engineering which wasn’t a long term interest of mine (nor did I plan on making it that) and just plain dejection that the long vacation was over and I’ll no longer be able to spend time on the things that I wanted to. All of that aside, the day went okay, and they gave me company email accounts and added me to the comms channels. It felt good.

Since I had worked a bit before this, I couldn’t help but notice the contrasts in the way both the companies and their people operated. I missed the ‘hello’s and ‘good morning’s when people came into the office everyday wearing a wide smile, lunch sharing, office hangouts and town halls, a family like environment and a CEO who actually speaks to you and hears you. On the plus side, I was working in an actual ‘tech team’ with people who knew more about most things than me, although people weren’t into tech, I could have decent technical conversations, learn about patterns and best practices and more. The ‘working in a tech startup’ dream had become a reality and I was naturally happy about it.

Given that the company wasn’t very fast paced and our manager was very considerate about deadlines, the work load was very low. Due to that, I could do quite a few things on the side, read after coming back home and the weekends were entirely free (I only had to work during the weekends during my last couple of weeks). I managed to squeeze enough time to learn Haskell, build a nice speaker, write on this blog regularly, learn applied cryptography and implement algorithms, read books and travel to some extent (Jagriti Yatra was during this time). Another perks of working for LaughGuru (or any tech startup in general) is, you get paid decently well. And when you get paid well, you can buy time with it (I got myself a nice house close to the office to ease commute), or service some of your expensive hobbies and interests (a paid VPN and email provider, a fancy laptop, lots of paperback books etc).

Last 4 Months

So after the initial month’s dust settled and things started to become natural to me, I started to enjoy my job a lot more. The work that I did (mostly writing ReactJS and lots of CSS which I had recently picked up) had become second nature to me, and as a result I could put in more thought about what I was doing, why I was doing what I was doing, asking questions and learning things from a product and even business perspective rather than just the frontend or tech perspective which I did in the initial months. Along with the work part, I was also hanging out with my office friends, seeing and learning things outside of tech, hanging out at nice places and exchanging stories. Due to a weird turn of events, the frontend lead (whom I used to report) and Abhishek (my friend who had referred me to LaughGuru) had to leave the company. It was not a very happy time for me, for I was very close with both of these people and had become very comfortable with having them around. Guess it is part of being in a professional setting, people come and go.

Things were different after that, not necessarily better or worse. I was reporting directly to the manager (also the product guy). He gave me all the product ‘gyaan’ that he had accumulated over the years, we discussed tech during work and checked out other company’s products and borrowed inspiration from them. Since I was the only person on the frontend of our product, I had to put in some thinking before jumping into code, and that was a very important lesson that I knew I needed to learn. Towards the end of my time at LaughGuru, I was doing more thinking about how to implement a feature, the data flow, handling edge cases and basic optimization than I was actually coding. I had also simultaneously read the novel ‘The Mythical Man Month’ and was realizing its importance.

Our manager was a very smart guy and quite friendly. Another one of my colleagues, the person who took care of the content, had also become a good friend. I would really miss the nice lunch and coffee conversations with these two. Both of them were math, history and science nerds, and it was always fun to listen to them talk. I went to a star gazing session with one of them, and a mid night cycling event earlier in the year and it was very cool hanging out with them. Will definitely miss that as well.

Closing the LaughGuru Chapter

While the departure of my friends was heartbreaking, I had decided to continue my work on the awesome product that we were building, especially now that I was in total control of the codebase of the frontend. It was delightful to see the frontend take shape and become usable as each day passed. We were building a lot of new features, and I felt extremely proud to be able to deliver them end to end. It was similar to my time in Samagra where I would get to build the entire projects end to end, only here I was much more mature. Because of all of this, or maybe not because of it but because of my own sluggishness, my personal studies were taking a hit. I wasn’t making much progress in that direction.

It was sometime during March that I found the time I gave to my personal studies inadequate. I also had a very clear understanding that nows the time to experiment and risk it for a dream, and it will only get harder the longer I wait. Talking to some people and thinking thoroughly about this, I told my manager that I needed time to study and hence I’d be discontinuing (at least full time) with my role as an engineer at this organization. The discussions that followed lead to this day today and all of it sailed very smoothly. Last few weeks were very busy; vacating my rented flat, working to get the product in decent shape, the nostalgia of my amazing time spent here and the anticipation for a brighter future filled with happiness. I’ll be unemployed again soon, will look for a way to sustain myself but most importantly, do something that I’ll never get tired of doing. That’s the simple end goal here.

Good Experiences & Learnings

I think working with some very smart people has been the best part of the experience. It gives you a benchmark to look up to with regards to everything, from books to humor. You learn a lot in the everyday conversations, the occasional outings and the way they work. That was one thing I couldn’t do sitting at home (I would’ve anyway written code or learned a new technology, so that’s not something particular to LaughGuru). I read some really nice books and articles thanks to my colleagues. My understanding of tech products has matured a lot during the last couple of months, and I think this will come in handy for my personal projects.

One thing that I’m proud of learning in tech is CSS. This is genuinely something that I wouldn’t have learned if not for LaughGuru. As a result, I’m writing it here. CSS is already coming in handy at many places. From fixing random things on my blog, to the other websites that I manage, to even modifying some random theme’s stylesheets found on the Internet to suit my requirements. The CSS I wrote at LaughGuru was strictly mobile responsive, was interactive and used many of the newer CSS3 semantics. Now, because of that, writing a much simpler static blog’s CSS feels quite easy (not talking about this one. Obviously). Learning CSS, maybe not the most pleasant thing, was, in hindsight, a great investment of my time.

Before joining LaughGuru, I scored myself a solid 8 out of 10 for Javascript. But then, I learned so much more here, from service workers, caching, index DB, shadow dom, es6 and 7, abstraction for Javascript components (the OO way), the list goes on and on. Now I’ll hardly score myself a 6, because I’m pretty sure the more I dig, the more there will be to learn and it is in my best interest to stay modest, haha!

I’ve made some friends here. Not just here, but at every place I’ve interacted for the job, I made a conscious effort to be nice and likable (how well that went, I can’t tell), tech can come in second. I was horrible with my social skills in junior college. Things changed a bit in engineering, but I still was around a select few, not interacting much (if at all) with the rest of the class. This time, I made it a point to speak out honestly what I thought, and not just to the few friends. It has been successful so far, and no one has called me a weirdo yet. The Jagriti Yatra really helped me in this regard, and boasted my confidence on many fronts, most important of which was that even if you take the tech out of the conversation, I can still keep the chat going and not disseminate into silence.

Useful Lessons Learned

I’ve learned some lessons during my time here at LaughGuru, some of them the hard way. I’ll start with the one I personally felt very good after learning. It was about the way of the society. For the better part of teenage and until the end of engineering, I always did whatever I did with computers for myself, for the fun and satisfaction. Then suddenly, I got into this fast paced world of startups where your career came before anything and growing professionally was of prime importance; where you become your job description, and I became a React engineer. I had almost fallen for this, taken this to be what adulthood was meant to be. But I am so glad I was wrong. And I decided to again go back to the basics, to doing things that I enjoyed doing. I don’t know how this will turn out, but at least I’ll be happy.

I learned that one has to be smart, not academic but the street smart. While people in general are nice, occasionally you’ll find someone who’s just there to use you. And that is fine while you get a fair return (rewarded in some way), but not without that. There will be people who take the word ‘resource’ a bit too literally and act that way. The important bit for me was realizing that I’m dealing with such a person and taking control of the situation. It is funny how I’ve read about the paranoid mindset all the time in the infosec world, and it seems obvious there, but I had to ‘learn’ it separately when it came to people and the world outside computers.

I learned how powerful negativity is, and how important it is to distance oneself from such forces. Negativity around you is never healthy, and in a profession where your job is to think, plan and create, negativity is a disaster for productivity.

Things To Look Forward To

While LaughGuru was a great place to be at, there are some things I really look forward to for my next gig. First, given my interests, I’ll try to find a job at a place that understands and encourages free software, and that the work I’ll be doing will be open for the world to see. ‘Open Source’ started as just a word for me, then it quickly became an idea that I’d want to be part of sometime in the distant future, and now after working for a for-profit startup and writing proprietary code (which I honestly believe is a perfectly valid thing to do), I realized how integral had the idea of writing free software become to me. For this reason, I’ll try to find a place where I’ll fit ideologically just as well as technically and socially.

I look forward to working for an organization where the chief(s) officers are in touch with the employees and have conversations with them regularly. I feel this is important to the entire growth feedback loop, growth for the organization as well as the employee. This, unfortunately, never happened at LaughGuru. I saw the CEO for the first time three months into my time at his company and as far as I can remember, we never had a meaningful conversation during my time there. Maybe I could’ve tried more, or maybe I need to work on my communication skills more. I’m sure there must’ve been good reasons for that (the obvious one being I simply wasn’t important enough). Whatever might’ve been the reason, that’s past, and for the future I’ll see to it that I have a conversation with the chiefs of the organization before joining and get to know them (I realize that it isn’t feasible for even the slightly larger organizations, let alone the medium to big ones, but I think it is a good personal objective to have).

Money is the root of many evils that happen in an organization. Delayed salaries, pending bonuses, unmet commitments regarding finances and many such things lead to decay of trust between an employee and employer, however good the other relations are, and that is really unfortunate. One thing I’ve realized here is that speaking out the truth upfront rather than giving away excuse after excuse can save quite a few things to both the parties. Going out of business will inevitably happen to many, if not most companies. It is how the situation is handled by the employee and the employer that makes the difference. And I look forward to seeing better ways of that being done.

In Closing

There’s so much more to write, but one can never fully express eight good months of adventures, learning and building through a little blog post, can one? I hope you found this article interesting. If you have any comments, feel free to write them to me at my email address. Thank you for reading.

I’ve not stayed away from home during college to experience the hostel life, so I never learnt what it was like to go back home after a long time, the ‘ghar ja raha hu’ feeling. What makes one house our home and the other just a place we live in. Why do we get attached to some walls and a roof more than the others that we stay in. What makes some immaterial things more dear to us than others. I was randomly wondering about these little things in the past couple of weeks. Why?

Around 3 months ago, I moved away from home, to this new place. It eased my commute to work. But it was still just a place away from home where I was residing, paying rent in return, not really home. How does one turn such a shelter into something we call home? What makes a home? From my experience so far at this place, the memories are what gives everything a personal touch. Four walls and a roof don’t make a place home. The people visiting you, the moments lived in it, both good and bad, are what creates memories out of nothing. These memories get tied to these four walls. The way data gets tied to a unique entity via a foreign key, our memories get tied to a place, time, to people, to emotions. That’s why college is special. Not for what you gain there, but it is a place for many of our most memorable events.

I had my college friends come over yesterday. There was a lot of chaos as one would expect with a bunch of loud people packed into my little apartment. There were jokes, laughter, swearing, music, planning, silence and lots of other things that we associate with life. Similarly, I have my parents over today. My life becomes very comfortable when Mom and Dad come over as I get good food and snacks right in my hands all day long. Not something I’m very proud of, before you point it out.

Once you have regular visitors to your place, you try to keep it decently clean, organized and keep essential food handy. It isn’t just a place you reside any more, it is your home. You take care of it the same way you care for your real home. You wear a smile when you leave the house, you greet the neighbours and the security guard. Slowly, the brain starts to think of it as that comfy place you go to after a tiring day, home.

I miss my real home, but not as much as I would have if I had not accepted this as my second home. Mom asked me yesterday, ‘What will you do after the contract for this house expires?’, and I didn’t have an answer. Sometimes, things feel so permanent that we don’t think about being without them, and then suddenly, just at the thought of having to let something go, you realize the amount of love you have for it. That finally brings me to this thing of getting attached to non living things. ‘How could you name your things?’ I get asked for personifying my laptop, my car and many other things that are dear to me. I haven’t got the slightest regret for my affection towards these ‘things’, after all, they’ve made me, just like the real people have.

Thank you for reading.