I am a total Geek in every sense. I love learning about something new everyday.
- Technology both hardware & software,
- Motorcycle riding on track and racing (almost stopped riding on streets)
- Motorcycle safety (design motorcycle safety gear for our own brand)
- Photography (Motorsports & Candid)
1988-94
I started working on computers when computers were known as TV + Typewriter in my part of the world in late 80's. Thanks to my friend (Tejas and his family) who was the partner in crime. I got my 1st computer certificate in 1988. We used large floppy disks 5 1/4 and had those monochrome and green color monitors. In parallel I was fortunate to work with home computer ZX Spectrum which connects to TV and supports Basic programming language. It's pretty cool how you load programs connecting a walkman (music player with cassette) to it which loads the programs from an audio cassette. It used to take 5minutes or so to load Basic :)
Experience of creating 1st Virus for testing... Those were the days of boot-virus and partition virus. One of the popular magazine of that time was PC Quest. They gave a screen shot of infected boot sector of a floppy and a clean boot sector picture. So we powered up PCTools and started editing boot sector of a new floppy. Once we finished we had a floppy with a boot virus (called Marijuana).
Then came the time when C (Turbo C) came to my hand when I joined a professional computer course. That was the most enjoyable time of my developer life. There were several interesting things I could do with C language. Two of my favorite areas were Graphics & TSR programming. Also those pre-Windows 3.1 days you had the option of writing directly into Video memory. Which simply means that we can write our own print kind of functions writing directly to video memory. TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) are programs which loads and stay resident watching a specific interrupt call. You could do all sorts of things from your TSR's, useful as well as mischievous. For example create a TSR which watches Interrupt 13h (disk activity) to delete the EXE file which you executed :) Then creating animation using characters built inside a 2 dimensional array. Making the character walk, fall - it was fun!
I also worked on several freelance projects developing retail applications in Foxpro.
1994-1998
When I joined my first job, we had a network of 15 PC's. Since the company was new, these PC's were more like dump terminals for a Novell Netware Server (server word used to sound like a monster). So till the servers came we were supposed to setup the PC's and boot it from floppies. The boot floppy was detected with boot virus but we didn't have any anti-virus to clean it. Writing 1st Anti-Virus was cool. In C there were functions available to target disk sectors called biosdisk, biosread, bioswrite. So how does the anti-virus work? Read the clean boot sector from a new floppy and insert the infected floppy and write the new one to it. It was so simple those days and I agree it's not the case with the newer generation of virus & malwares.
1998-2001
This part of my life was spent in Abu Dhabi the capital of UAE (United Arab Emirates). I worked in one of the best company there and got to work in different job roles. This includes Developer, Infrastructure/Solution Consulting, Training, Network Administrator and On-Site support. This is the same place where I got to learn Microsoft Backoffice products which included Windows NT, Proxy, SMS, Exchange. I also got to migrate (from Novell + Netscape Email) to complete Microsoft Back office stack and manage the network of the entire company which spread across 5 locations in the country. While working there I got a job offer in US and decided to come back to India.
2001 - 2002
I came back to India (Kerala) and got married and decided not to move to US. Decided to take a job of Consulting/Training where I had enough fun teaching C/C++, 3D Studio Max etc... This is where my interest towards design world got triggered and also did some freelance work in 3D Studio Max mostly for creating walkthru's etc...
2002 - 2003
Since I decided to stay back in India I moved to Bangalore the silicon hub of India. My next job as a developer came calling and moved to a company in Bangalore. This company was more of a development department for a company in Dubai (UAE). This is the same time when I started working on .NET more specifically on ASP.NET. Since most of the things I learnt was from internet, I started sharing my knowledge on .NET in several forums and newsgroups and was awarded .NET MVP award.
2003 - 2014
I worked at Microsoft Product Support based in Bangalore helping customers to fix their grieving problems with their servers. I joined IIS team and became a Technical Lead in 6 months of joining and later when IIS & ASP.NET team merged started supporting ASP.NET as well. I also shifted from writing programs in VB.NET to C#.
Later moved to a team called Developer Support Integration working as Escalation Engineer who covers support for mainly North American region during US nights. North American region is also the escalation site for the entire world so I also worked on issues escalated from other countries during US nights and sometimes with the help of translators (for non-English speaking) customers. I worked on a number of technologies namely IIS, ASP.NET, Distributed Services (18+ technologies including DTC, Web services, WCF etc...), BizTalk and MSMQ.
This was also the time I developed and published worlds best .NET post mortem debugger called Debug Analyzer. Effort consisted of 20,000 lines of code and 2 years of person time. Also received Business Value Award at Microsoft Garage showcase event for this. Will write about what happened after that is a long story, will blog about it in future.
The experience you get out of this job is very unique and difficult to explain. If time permits, will write about some of the customer scenarios and experiences, the thrill of fixing burning issues on production servers. Some of them are easy to resolve and some of them too complex to touch.
2014 till date
This was the year, I decided to get out of comfort zone at Microsoft and took the first step to change the world :)
Post 2014 will be detailed as blogs and linked here later
>> to be continued...
PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENTS SUMMARY
- 1988 onwards - 28 years experience in Technology areas like Programming & Networking
- 1996 Wrote 1st anti-virus
- 2002 Golden Web Award for Design
- 2003 MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Award in .NET
- 2003 August - Started working at Microsoft
- 2011 July - Started Motorcycle Riding Community "BORN RIDERS" and organised almost non-stop 100+ events of weekend riding, overnight events and track days.
- 2011 Published Debug Analyzer.NET - Worlds best .NET post-mortem debugger
- 2011 Received Business Value Award for Debug Analyzer.NET during Microsoft Garage showcase
- 2012 March - First experience riding on a race track with Indimotard
- 2013 Certified in Level 1,2,3 - California Superbike School
- 2013 September - Founded "THE BREED GEAR" a motorcycle riding gear brand where I design the products too
- 2014 Left the job at Microsoft to pursue own business in Embedded Hardware & Software products
- 2014 Got recognized by xBhp for my contributions to motorcycle community in India
- 2015 Participated in MRF Motorcycle Championship in 600cc class
- 2015 Participated in 2 rounds of JK Tyre Motorcycle Championship in 600cc class
- 2016 March - Founder & CEO of Yaw Software Private Limited, working on embedded hardware and software experiences.
- 2016 May - Founder & Managing Director of Schild Solutions Private Limited, working on products focussed on Motorsports and Protective gear on 2 wheels under the brand name TBG ( THE BREED GEAR )