Monday, October 13, 2014 - 09:23
I formally started Sparxsys in March 2010. I am just an engineer by education and never really learned anything about managing a company or a team. There are specialized courses like MBA for such stuff, I do feel sometimes about not knowing all these things when starting out, but I know from my experience that you can always learn it in the field and that learning is life long.
Today I want to share something I learned.
At Sparxsys we are currently into Drupal development services and JIRA trainings. This post is all about software services and how you should deal with clients. In web development services client will share the requirements of what they want to build. May be they are looking for a web portal or some web based application. Over the year I have learned so many things about…
Monday, October 6, 2014 - 22:50
Almost every week I install new JIRA instance either for training purpose or as part of the JIRA consultation service that we provide to our clients. I recently bought a new laptop with Windows 8.1 with 8GB RAM, this is only for training purpose and yesterday I installed JIRA on this laptop. Everything was fine but I noticed that that language in various JIRA project reports was hindi. May be it was because of the system default or due to time zone. It is good to have language support but we all are more comfortable with English, also some of the characters were not visible properly on the chart.
It was only the language in charts that was in Hindi, everywhere else in JIRA English was the default language.
For changing this the first thing I did was to look into the System > Settings…
Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - 08:53
Today I clicked on outlook icon by mistake, all of a sudden it brought back so many memories, mostly good. I worked for 11 years before diving into my startup completely. I have always been honest to myself and all other people around me about my journey so far.
We have tendency to showcase our best on social networks, most of it is actually fake. No one will share their true feelings. It is like a small self dosage of happiness that we seek in terms of number of likes. We upload pictures of partying, enjoying with friends, pictures of happy moments. I think it is all fake. Everyone does it and I do it too.
The point is that everyone around me thinks that it is really brave and cool to start something one your own, but in reality it is quite the opposite. I am not brave to leave my job…
Saturday, August 9, 2014 - 01:07
Last few days are amazing. Learning so many things, especially setup of Vagrant in our company. I had few issues with the performance of Drupal running on Vagrant on windows host which I fixed yesterday. That was one milestone achieved but I didn't realized that there would be more obstacles.
We started using Omega 4 for all of our projects now and it is great. Especially compass support of SASS that enables us to design great websites in short time. The only problem is that it is not smooth to setup. If you read the Omega 4 documentation you will come to know that they have clear instructions on how to setup this stuff. I will not cover that in this blog. It is already well documented and there are plenty of articles on the internet.
I did all the setup for Omega 4 but the problem was…
Friday, August 8, 2014 - 00:47
I recently install and setup Vagrant on my Windows laptop. The only reason I used Windows on my laptop is because of the trainings I conduct. Most companies use Windows based systems and it is difficult to train them if you are showing demos on Linux and they have to repeat the same on Windows. For that reason only I used Windows. When I am not providing training, I am usually developing stuff. Mostly on Drupal and most recently on JIRA Plugins (Yes I am learning Java).
I heard about Vagrant in the past but never really had enough space to try it out. Recently I decided to not take usuall Drupal projects and will only work with smart clients who are willing to pay for the service and quality. That decision is costing me money, as I don't do lot of work now but I am happy with the peace on…
Thursday, August 7, 2014 - 01:03
For the past few days I am trying to setup Vagrant for uniform development environment in our company, personall I work on Windows 8.1, iMac, Fedora for development and our servers are running CentOS. It is pain I know.
Last weekend I installed and understood Vagrant on windows 8.1, it was great. I will not get into the details on setup here. You can check the documentation on their website.
Today I cloned my Vagrant box, which I want to duplicate on my fedora machine. So for that I need to install VirtualBox first on Fedora 20. It is not as simple as yum install VirtualBox, it requires some effort. Here are the steps.
Step 1: Add the VirtualBox .repo
su -
cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget <a href="http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/rpm/fedora/virtualbox.repo
[/geshifilter-…
Sunday, August 3, 2014 - 02:08
I am a big fan of Emacs. I am not saying it is the best editor but I feel it is light weight, yet powerful and it can be customized easily. Of course vi is equally good. It is just a matter of personal taste. I also now rely heavily on Org-mode for storing all my tasks, random thoughts and to-do in org files which is I feel by far the best to-do tool. Calling it a to-do tool is actually understatement. It can do lot more. If you need to remember something with dates, estimates, tracking then org-mode can handle it pretty well. It is fast and super powerful.
The only thing missing is the syncing. If you are like me then working on multiple computers without your tasks in hand could be difficult. Org files are just text files and it is upto you to make it portable and sync with other…
Friday, August 1, 2014 - 10:52
More than half of 2014 has passed away and today it is 1st August. Today is my mother's birthday and also starting August it is festival time. Rakhi is next week, then Independence Day, next month is my birthday, then Dusshera, Diwali an so on. Really looking forward to next few months.
I am happy. There is a reason. My company Sparxsys is doing really well, especially the way I planned. We are by far the best JIRA Training provider in India right now. I don't think any other institute or organization who is into JIRA training can match our quality and experience. That is one. Second we are also one of the leading Drupal training provider in NCR. On an average I receive atleast 10-15 Drupal training requirements every week and around 5 JIRA training leads. Lastly we have some really…
Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - 01:08
Few weeks back I went to Chennai once again but this time in a different company. I was called by Polaris to conduct a training cum doubt clearing session on JIRA and JIRA Agile. For me it was a great experience and I learned lot of new things too. Especially the level of customizations they are seeking in their instance.
It was just a 1 day session which is not really enough but the agenda for this training was decided before and I too prepared ahead. Unlike other JIRA training sessions where I usually conduct training to cover the topics which are part of standard content, this training was more like a brain storming session where they asked me lot of questions which are related to JIRA and its possibilities. I was glad to see that they already explore the JIRA quite much but were…
Monday, July 28, 2014 - 02:25
Over the past few months I have seen a tremendous increase in demand for JIRA Trainers. I guess lot of companies are now moving to JIRA for their Issue Tracking. Already Atlassian has done a great job in create a world class product which is being used by so many companies like linkedin, twitter and even facebook. There are lot of other tools like Fisheye/Crucible, Bamboo, JIRA Agile, Hipchat and Confluence which integrates really well with JIRA.
I guess that is one of the reason why companies prefer to use JIRA as it is not just a product for issue tracking. One can customize it to act like a Helpdesk system, Test Management or even keeping tracking of HR processes.
Though it is really very simple to customize JIRA, it is usually a good idea to plan the customizations really well.
Things…
