Saturday, January 31, 2015

The Year 2014 - for me

As usual, this year too, I am starting with my thoughts on the previous year, especially at my personal front.

General Observations - Positive & Neutral
  • Realized that our workplace is slowly adopting paper-less practices and an important step of HR records moving online
  • Got a first-hand experience in using various crypto-tokens
  • Managed to organize 2 big technical events - One on DNS Security; and another on Digital Signatures and PKI
  • Realized that to reach people and propagate your message, you should use all mediums. So, Started relying heavily on Social Media (Facebook and Twitter) for promotion of our concepts and efforts
  • Finally visited US and UK this year, and had already shared my experiences in this post
  • Smartphone era finally heralded in our homes, (and relatives) this year
  • Wondered what will happen if Google decides to close Blogger one day ?? So, decided to have my blog posts replicated in wordpress too
  • Guided around 10+ Interns this year (though some of them were been my interns since last year) Also met several students who visit our campus each year as a ritual 
  • Places Visited: Mumbai, Kollam, Shimla, Noida, Los Angeles, London, and New Delhi
General Observations - Disappointments
  • Much expected elevation in my career did not happen this year too, despite list of significant achievements to showoff had been increasing!
  • Realized the pathetic situation of M.Tech studies in many not-so-popular institutes! One institution withdrew its intern student saying that the problem assigned was too difficult! Another institution's students got the work published in 'paid' conferences due to their academic pressures! However have to admit that, met a few bright students also.
  • Did my best as last ditch efforts to increase the use of the system that I had been building for last few years (4 years). Spent significant efforts in the first half year working on it, tried using AI techniques, changing the UI, increasing interaction mechanisms, and had to also have to overcome difficulties in hosting and integrating with social media and also shifting the connectivity.  But despite all these, more barriers were raised, and it dawned that the current approach is no longer going to be feasible
  • Quite frustrated with one of our client, who were adamant on a round-about technique for doing an activity, and even that too did not materialize due to several procedural and technical issues. - An absolute time & effort waster! 
  • Figured out how a famous  company's (It had a great name of an important celestial object, with out which life is not possible) software product that was offered at very fair prices, when taken over by another, were offered at exorbitantly high prices using a different model, with just a logo change!, while the code and features remained the same! 
  • Realized the pains of organizing a event (had a first-hand experience of it), where many people who you know participate and had to be extremely careful such that their egos are not hurt

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