Wednesday, October 12, 2016 - 10:54
I don't remember the last time I worked late nights or even more than 10 hours. My window of productive working hours is from 4 AM till 5 PM in the evening. I work usually 6-8 hours when I have the peak workload and frankly I work 4-5 hours most of the time. Am I working too less? May be. Is it bad thing? May be. Will I be able to achieve a lot more if I put in more hours? I don't think so. I am happy with whatever I doing and that is more important. I look at people these days, mostly working professionals or startup guys and sometimes I feel guilty of not working like them. I want to confess that although I am good in what I do but I don't like working for long hours. I prefer finishing my work as soon as possible and have fun for the remaining day. Now you must be familiar with the non…
Friday, October 7, 2016 - 12:03
I just finished writing my second book - Mastering JIRA 7. It will be published in few weeks from now and I can't explain the extreme pleasure I am experiencing right now that I decided to write a blog about it. Well I have not been writing much on my blog for the past few years. I tried to write often but I didn't feel like writing or sharing my feelings. Anyways below is the link to the book. You can pre-order it if you want right now.
My second book is going to be published
I started writing my first book in Sep 2014 and it was published in May 2015. Writing the first book was really tough as it required all the thoughts and ideas to be written from scratch. That book was mainly based on my experience working on JIRA and other Atlassian tools. I was quite involved in the first book…
Wednesday, February 17, 2016 - 01:44
These days everyone is talking about startups and entrepreneurship. It is quite cool to start a company, build a product and get funded. I am writing this blog based on my own experiences that how I am able to run a company successfully for several years and why you too don't need a funding.
So you have decided that you want to start a company, it is a topic of another discussion and I will write more about it but you should always think twice, thrice and ten time before starting a company and you should have solid reasons for that. Now coming back to the topic why you should not take any funding and why you don't even need it in first place. One thing I feel is very important for all the wannabee entrepreneurs is to answer whether they are starting a company to gain something for…
Tuesday, February 16, 2016 - 13:26
I am trying lot of different things recently both in personal and professional life. Since last one and a half year I am taking my work not quite seriously. I work only 5 days a week and don't even open my laptop on weekends. This is working quite well for me. I feel much better now as I have less to worry. Working less doesn't mean less business. We are doing pretty good, my company Sparxsys is doing great and I am happy about it. Just that I am not to ambitious these days and I make small achievable targets. My idea is to feel good about whatever little I achieve and not set very high goals.
Last year was not very good health wise, I didn't go to gym regularly and I gained few kilos. This year I have made lot of plans for myself that may require giving up some pleasures but I know in…
Friday, September 25, 2015 - 10:02
Yeah I am back to writing blogs, I took a long break and I didn't really feel like writing much. Today I am actually writing during my work hours as I don't feel like working, in fact I am feeling guilty that I am not working but writing blog but that's ok. I have been working consistently hard for the past two months and I deserve to do little things that I like during my work hours :) I promise I will get back to work in 15 minutes.
Past two months were hectic and I was traveling a lot. I went to Hyderabad and made new clients there for JIRA consultancy work and I earlier this month I went to Chennai after several months and this time I liked begin there. May be the weather was surprisingly good. It rained when I landed in Chennai.
When I woke up and looked outside my hotel window I…
Friday, September 25, 2015 - 06:30
When I was little kid I used to hate the idea of going to school everyday at the same time, follow a strict routine everyday for several years, preparing for exams, going through school tests and final terms. Now when I look back I can not even image going through all those tough routines. I was really glad when I got out of school. Then I started college. It was comparatively easy, we can always bunk classes, go out for movies during class time and we actually had little freedom to spend time where ever we wanted, but still I used to get scared about the idea of exams. I never liked doing something without any reason and the only reason I studied and somehow managed to pass engineering was the fear of getting failed. What will happen if I fail? I was scared of so many things.
While in…
Wednesday, February 11, 2015 - 10:26
Life is full of ups and downs. Last two months especially December and January were not very exciting for me. I was no able to work productively and I need some break time. However in late January and so far in Feb things are super exciting for me. As I am moving ahead in my life I somehow feel that I am getting closer to what I want. At of the day if I feel happy and satisfied then everything is good. When I started my own company I had this tendency to try different kind of work, being in service industry it is tempting to try to get as many clients as you want. I did this mistake of doing any kind of work that brought money in the company, but everyone is difference. We started trainings on Drupal and then on JIRA since the beginning of our company inception but just recently we have…
Saturday, November 8, 2014 - 11:22
Every month in the beginning I take 3 empty page, write something on it and stick them in my room where I can see them everyday. What are these three pages?
Page 1: Pending Money
I don't have the luxury to hire an accountant or someone who can simply take care of collecting money for all the work that we guys do at sparxsys. At any given time we usually do 5-6 projects, sometimes more, sometimes less but we do have lots of projects which are in maintenance. Every month we need to ask our dear clients to pay us pending dues, that is important activity for us so that we can pay our salaries and cover our expenses. Every month I prepare a list of all such pending payments. The active projects priorities are also defined by how much cash flow is coming and from which client.
For instance…
Wednesday, October 22, 2014 - 09:01
Today I was playing a bit with my router, trying to explore what all I can do. Actually I was trying to enable port forwarding, though it didn't work yet. I noticed that in the router there is an option to upgrade, I click on it and it said that there is an update available, I downloaded the new firmware "WGR614v9-V1.1.2.30.chk", but when I uploaded it on the router, the upgrade procedure started but failed and as I feared, the router stopped working at all. I also reset the router, it didn't help either.
I search and found this link, where it is explained very well on how to fix your router in such situations.
I am just repeating the steps here, with very little changes.
Disconnect the router from all cables except the power cable.
Push reset button for 30 secs.
Without releasing reset…
Friday, October 17, 2014 - 01:03
The first half of this year was not so good for our company, there was a tremendous drop in our company's revenue, we had some projects running but were not able to deliver the best quality work. There were no good projects coming in too. Also personally I made some wrong decisions in the company by hiring wrong people and choosing wrong clients, but most importantly I didn't work hard enough. Somewhere in the middle I knew that things are not going in the right direction but I didn't act promptly. It continued like this for 6 months, since we are a small company we often see results - either good or bad, too quickly. In July I decided to change all this. I know my capabilities really well and in the past I have able to come out of such situations so why not this time. For the past 3…
