It's been a year. A year which in retrospect went a lot quicker than most years of my life. It was all a quick blur of landscape from a train with some stops whose tea stalls I can still remember. There was never a destination, or at least that was the plan. Last year - that's where this story starts and it is still mostly under construction. Once the story's done, it will be painted pink with lots of with fairy godmothers, unicorns and the dawn of spring - and exactly where Santa Claus gets funding from. I guess you'll just have to read along and find out whether I am as high as that sounded.
I joined Yahoo! to work in their platforms wing which deals with all the BSD magic that happens in the background of all the frenzied money making that is the real business. I have always wanted to work on some core stuff far away from the business, where I could really focus on getting the job done rather than how much money this is going to make. A year later, I've done some bits and peices - some of those bits I can talk about, like APC. I've truly enjoyed working on it - it's been a fun experience to just jump in and fixing it up for php5.
Last year has been almost like a paid vacation. Literally no work pressure, no deadlines whooshing by and no arm twisting from anybody higher up. But somewhere in the back of my mind is that hey, you're getting way too comfortable there which keeps pointing me to my real achievements. My coding skills have only regressed in the last year. Where there was a needle sharp point of code-foo there was it is now directed in so many way that a fakir could sleep on my skillset without hardly a prickle. Been doing too many things and not enough of each - flitting from flower to flower like an idle butterfly with a summer afternoon to waste.
Anyway, today I know that my dreams of writing core bits and peices just needs a bit of a breeze from reality to disperse. A very cynical bit of me has always been expecting this saying - "boy, that was a surprise." (sarcasm spills from the same well). The ultimate optimist in me always thought that things work out if given time to do so - my life is full of cutting things too fine. I've always come out upright and in one peice. Last minute rescues and disdainfuly fool-hardy attempts punctuate my life in the midst of boring plateaus of inaction.
Wipro was hard work. My manager (a nice chap named Sampath) was quite understanding and yet there was little else he could do than pass on the pressure from the client onto us. To tell the truth, I enjoyed the pressure and sense of urgency the project had. It was about survival rather than victory and we gave it the good fight. And we were happy at the end of the day, though probably not during the weekends.
Now, the situation is flipped. I've got a well paying job, a lenient work place and I can go home any weekend I like. But I seem to crave for real work pressure. At the end of the day I just want to go home feeling happy that I made a difference. For the less cynical, the literal translation might not mean Look ma, I'm not useless - but that's what it finally says to yourself. And whatever others think about your performance, you cannot lie to yourself.
It has been awesome to work at Yahoo!, but I wish I could say work with a straight face.
--Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is nothing important to do.