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YourStory published my Interview{:target="_blank"} in 2017. It sums up pretty well.
My life, here is my take on it. I have been super fortunate to have an amazing family. They supported me as much as they could. My mother worked tirelessly at both fronts, home & work, to meet ends, my father did everything possible he could do to make sure that we get our bread. All my life my elder siblings have showered unconditional love.
I have an amazing life-partner{:target="_blank"}, who stood by me for everything I did, the crazy rides of life won't be anywhere close to where I am today without her, thanks Shraddha. Shraddha has stood firm behind alongside with me, providing me the support required and adviced on how do we deal with our life together.
In this journey I got many amazing friends, they have shaped my life, in so many ways than I can every imagine. I have been super forunate to know them, and have them in my life.
So Thank you everyone! all of you made me who I am, I can't list all of you here, but I will try to put many of you in my people section.
I started with designing wedding cards, business cards and later advertisements for newspapers. I helped my brother with his Accounting & DTP business. I sold assembled computers and then helping run printing business late 90s. I got interested in computer programming; curious to know how can I write my own software, sinc software was expensive, that got me started learning programming languages{:target="blank"}, starting with C and later joining National Centre for Software Technology as student, then I worked at NCST as technical associate and finally working in R&D unit as staff scientist, mainly working on multilingual software for indian languages using Unicode.
Early 2000s I joined ThoughtWorks{:target="_blank"}; a niche agile software consulting firm; As their first India office employee in October 2001. I joined as Developer, and went on to work with ThoughtWorks for next decade, I worked in multiple countries and helping various clients with software solutions. Primarily a programmer, but having huge interest in IT infrastructure, automation, configuration management. This led me to go solve complex performance issues, deployment issues and on top of it enabled me to become swiss knife for teams. Joke was that many people never believed that I can write software. I ended up playing Director of Global IT operations for ThoughtWorks and later became Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks India Region.
Consulting firms end up making you travel a lot, and that's fair, since the business is consulting. Given hectic travel schedule and not able to focus on my family. In 2012, When I had another Son (Welcome! Raaghav) I decided to take few months break from ThoughtWorks. But since I wasn't sure whether I want to continue with them, I ended up resigning from ThoughtWorks. Later I joined Bharati SoftBank startup, Hoppr, as Chief Technology Offier, later Hoppr got acquired by Hike Messenger{:target="_blank"}.
I have always tried to do something on my own, and that list goes on
- Tried opening a screen printing press in 1990s
- Sold computers and peripherals in my town
- Helped my brother sell cellphones - It was fun.
- We ran a school
- Almost opened up food catering business
So, given that, Early 2010s cloud computing and software deployments were two interesting domain to venture in, And in late 2012, early 2013, we, me and my few friends, decided to start another venture, a cloud automation and software deployment startup, CodeIgnition.
Later, gojek{:target="_blank"} asked us to join them in late 2015.
I have been working since I was 14, professionally, I started at the age of 22, but earlier 7 years is where I learned to survive and thrive. So in terms of experience, lets say, I can draw, paint, code and survive.
What ever I write about software technology will be obsolete in 1.5 years and keep updating that will be tedious, I can just say that I know enough to tell you what I don't know about life, work, software, painting and drawing.
Let me put it in proper Indian way - Cooking (Not singing and dancing), Writing software, Playing Chess, Squash and Some online strategy games.
Now a days, it's mostly drawing, cooking and writing software. I always keep a sketchbook in my bag!
[//]: ## Work
[//]: I founded CodeIgnition in 2013 with few friends, and now I work for CodeIgnition, a DevOps or infrastructure configuration management and automation startup. [//]: Our vision is to help startups by providing world class scalable, fault tolerant and highly available [//]: infrastructure. CodeIgnition serves budding startups helping them scale and respond to growing [//]: end user needs, and we also help big enterprises with transforming their existing team setup to new [//]: age environment with help of DevOps Tools and Culture. We primarily work with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, Rackspace and Digital Ocean.
[//]: ## Technologies
[//]: I love working with variety of technologies and tools, I have worked in various languages, frameworks and tools. Now a days I primarily work with Ruby, Go, JavaScript and related frameworks. [//]: I also work with mobile development environments such as iOS and Android. I play with swift, java, objective c.
[//]: Apart from languages, my interests include virtualisation, network management and infrastructure management. I have been using containers, virtualisation platforms and configuration management tools such as [//]: Chef, Puppet, Ansible etc for almost 5 years.