Speically for the friends at Chennai

Folks,

Hope you are doing fine and getting prepared for Diwali vacation. I am already on vacation ... not signing for any program till end of this month from tomorrow onwards. Want to work on my portal and getting it ready at the earliest.

Guess some of you might be upset with me as I was not able to respond to your mails/calls in the past few days. Extremely sorry for that. You know, I can not erase the past but at least I will try not to repeat it. I attribute my lack of communication with the loads of work that I had to clear. Not sure if you believe it or not, but I slept only for 3 hours a day on an average in the month of October so far. I had assignments Mon to Fri in Bangalore and Sat & Sun in Chennai. Its all preparation, travel, classes and nothing else :-)

Fine, I trust you do not need any more explanation to believe me.

How are the things moving at your place? I hear that many of you have been allocated to projects or being called for interviews. As expected, I found that few of you are asked to work on technologies that you never worked on earlier. Its the way of life. Lets face it. Especially when the rest of the industry is facing severe uncertainty, you should be more careful at accepting/rejecting the offers made to you, whatever it may be. I must say that you are really fortunate to be with your organization at this point of time. The trees that are flexible survive rough whether, not the tall or bulky ones. Learn to be flexible and align with the organizational goals. Whoever listen to the needs of the organization are the ones who will be listened to when they are in need. Support your management and customers. Sometimes, we may not get what we may like, but once we develop affection to what we do, we like every thing that comes in our way.

Apart from emotional preparation, you will have to prepare well in handling new technologies when you are on the project. The ways may be different for learning different technologies. However, the underlying theme is always this: Learn by doing mistakes and questioning every statement. Never look for handholding. By questioning the statements made, you are not denying them rather you are trying to understand them from different perspectives. By doing mistakes you are not failing, rather you are trying to understand which of your assumptions are wrong.

Another common way of quickly learning a new technology is by sharing your learning and discussions. Try to share whatever you learn to the other person; the questions that he/she asks would stir up new thoughts in you ... which leads to wholesome understanding of the technology. By discussion, you can quicken the learning.

I am sure you all know it ... there is nothing new in what I am saying. However, I wish my words make you more conscious in whatever you are doing.

I have learned a great deal of AJAX and its related technologies in the past few weeks. I say, confidently, that I know more now, compared to what I know a month back. How can it be other way around when I have people like you?