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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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-…