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…
Saturday, May 31, 2014 - 19:10
For so many years I am following a rigid schedule for my self. Primarily it is all about waking up early, I have always been early riser and do important things in the morning. I have tried in the past to work/study late but that never really worked out for me. In fact I can hardly do any productive work after 5 PM.
Here is my schedule that I am following these days. I made little change in it, instead of 4 AM I am going to wake up at 3 AM. I really need an extra hour to finish never ending tasks.
3:00 AM - 6:00 AM: Do the most important thing to survive
6:00 AM - 7:00 AM: Go to gym
7:00 AM - 8:00 AM: Breakfast and get ready
8:00 AM - 9:00 AM: Go to office
9:00 AM - 1:00 PM: Primary Work of the day
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Lunch & rest
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM: Secondary Work of the day
4:00 PM -…
Tuesday, May 20, 2014 - 23:46
I have been using webfaction for so many years and it is definitely one of the best shared hosting service I have ever used but since last year I felt the need to host sites on a VPS, there are certain things that you can only do when you have full control of the server. The problem with shared hosting is that you can't just do everything (but in most cases they are good enough). Also they RAM they offer is not enough sometimes.
Also our tech savvy clients want to use VPS and good that they are willing to pay for it too :) so that's why we started using VPS last year. When I researched about VPS hosting I narrowed down linode, it is not only affordable but also there support is good, they also have lot of online guides.
Apart from client websites we also use couple of linode machines for…
Sunday, May 18, 2014 - 21:37
Yes the first thing you would say that "Are you using windows?" and the answer is yes I do use windows 8.1 and I am not ashamed of it. I have some convincing reasons to use Windows which I am listing below.
I use Corel Draw
I really want google drive to sync files on my machine. There is no good free linux alternative for that
I use MS Office a lot, especially Excel
My new laptop has UEFI boot and I can't install fedora on it, I tried and it didn't work
I provide trainings on Drupal and JIRA. In my experience in such cases using a Windows based machine is always better, because in most companies people use Windows for their work and people can easily follow me during the training
BTW I still work on fedora which is installed on my netbook, which I carry with me all the time, taking notes…
Thursday, May 15, 2014 - 02:38
I always used SVN for managing my projects, that was the case till last year. Though Drupal.org moved to GIT too few years back, I did not completely move to GIT. The main reason was the comfort level. Of course GIT offer plenty of good features but SVN was also not bad, and most importantly I was the only developer on those projects.
Since last year our team has grown and we now use Bitbucket only for managing our code on git repositories. At Sparxsys we offer Drupal development at really competitive prices and our main USP is to deliver fast. Some of the projects have common functionality so we re-use the code of other projects. This may not be true for big complex projects but if we get a requirement for a relatively simple site with standard dynamic features for managing the content…
Tuesday, May 13, 2014 - 10:32
Few days back I had a great experience of organizing JIRA Training in Cognizant Chennai. It was a 2 day training program which I conducted in their training center.
Cognizant has several offices in Chennai but they have this particular building where all the trainings are organized.
I could not get the picture of all the participants but here are some of them. Most of them were experienced developers with 3+ years of experience.
The main objective of the training was to make them comfortable with JIRA so they can install, customize it as per their requirements.
There was even one participant from US who attended the session online and he was some senior guy who is responsible for managing big JIRA instance with more than 1 lakh users.
Apart from the standing JIRA Training content,…
Friday, May 9, 2014 - 07:36
I am writing after so long on my blog, though I always promise myself to update this blog regularly but it never happens. Well things were indeed quite busy in the past few weeks. At sparxsys we are now planning to do more challenging work than ever. Recently we started working on mobile app, currently we are working on an app that will fetch the data from a Drupal website and display it on the app. I hope this will enhance our portfolio. We are also now trying explore into overseas market. I am hoping for the best to happen.
Well, recently we started promoting our JIRA course more aggressively. We updated our website Slashnode.in which is dedicated portal for Drupal and JIRA corporate training and surprisingly we got amazing response. I now receive lot of calls from all over the world to…
