Gaarva ani Saanj Gaarva – downloads

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खालच्या संकेतस्थळांवर तुम्हाला गारवा तसेच सांज गारवा ची सर्व गाणी मिळतील.

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आशा आहे की हे post लोकांना उपयोगी पडेल.

–Mystic

ता. क. : हे post लिहिण्यासाठी गमभन साईट चा उपयोग केला आहे. त्याचा मराठी लिहिण्यासाठी वापर करावा.

Dealing with the interfaces

Few days ago… I received an email from my old buddy…

From istressed Team Lead
To: VJ
Subject: Dealing with Interfaces

Hi VJ,

I have successfully made my way to a project called “XYZ”. Now I need some serious help from you. I am mostly involved in a something called as interfaces. There are a lot outgoing/incoming interfaces in “XYZ”.

Please let me know what has been your experience in old projects wrt interfaces and what are the pitfalls that I should avoid.

Also give some rules of thumb so that I can manage my work as well as my personal life. Hope you understand.

Regards,
Interfaces Team Lead

I wrote following response to him from my experience, hope others would also find it helpful.

From: VJ
To: Interfaces Team Lead
Subject: Dealing with Interfaces

Dear Interface Team Lead,

To Answer your question better, I should need to know.. in what capacity would you be involved in “interfaces” ? As Project Management Lead / Tech Lead?

I am sure that you already know most of the blabbering that I am gonna do below. Still… Let me try to answer.

Following answer is kind of mixture of both (Project Management & Tech) anyways.

First n foremost thing to understand is : Interfaces are always tricky.

Because,

1. They involve external systems and external teams (this one is even more trickier!).
2. Every system would have its own communication protocol of offering / receiveing data (MQ / FTP / HTTP / Listener)
3. Every System will typically exhibit data inconsistency from the originally worked out data contract.

My ex-project has many interfaces and they all show above characteristics.
Now that we know what are dealing with when it comes to interfaces, this is what I would advice when you are about to deal with the interfaces:

Project planning

1. DO NOT ACCEPT FIXED PRICE AND DATE when it comes to interfacing systems. That is so because, if you need any change in interface, you need to work with their team and managers in order to achieve a mutually acceptable priority and date. So we can easily get screwed if we promise our clients a fixed price and date for delivery. Kindly bring to attention of your customer even a smallest delay possibility for interfacing systems.
2. Put a lot of time to do testing. Reasons would be apparent in following technical section.
3. Ensure that you have offshore connectivity to ALL the interfaces and the interfacing systems are up in offshore timezone. If they are not, prepare to change your plan to absorb the downtime or prepare to get screwed.
4. In the plan, probably put milestones for each interfacing system to be ready to receive / send data (in case they are not ready already). This would help in getting such issues tracked in front of customer well.

well well well.. enough of PM crap.. I know you know better than me on this front so go on add more from your side.

Technical aspects

1. Signed off Contractual Agreements between your project and interfacing system teams. This is a must so that any further change that is requested (by us / them ) can be clearly be tracked.
2. Signed off NFR Documents. NFR gives clear idea to both teams what load and response time expectations are at the beginning itself. This is very important if we figure, later on, that interfacing system is not able to deliver on the promise.
3. Many many times, the interfacing protocol that is been agreed upon does not turn out to be the best in terms of scaling, performance, etc. That is why doing a POC on each interface can be a good idea. At least on the ones where you know lot of data is being communicated.
4. If you are going to send data, prepare a whole lot for test-cases for sending all sorts of junk data (when i say junk, it should adhere to contract but still be junk e.g. when you want to send name, try sending spl characters, try testing for unicode support, etc)
5. If you are receiving data. Make sure that the contract is foolproof. Check if you need to support unicode, spl characters, do you need CDATA conversion (u receive ‘&’ in xml and your xml bombs), etc. Ask interfacing team to provide you a way to send all such kind of data on devel env so that you can test such scenarios while in development.
6. Ensure that if you are receiver of the data then your system is cluster aware. [meaning.. even if your program runs in multiple nodes of the cluster, it would not depend upon some in-memory values which would be different in individual cluster members.]

boom!

That’s a lot of stuff Guess this would help!

Oh, on the work-life management, my only advice is, if you track every issue at work closely, you would mostly be able to demonstrate that you were not at fault and you should not be penalized for others’ mistake. That would automatically help having less of ‘work’ and more of ‘life’ in your daily life

Take care of your family! Else work and life both would be hell. Oh .. you know better on that front again, I guess

Enjoy..
Regards,
VJ

Gone Flying

Probably, I must have seen it first time on Discovery Channel. It looked amazing, breathtaking and by far most remote (unreachable) thing for me.

Then I saw it on Orkut… done by my college friend Ankur Verma. I was like.. wow so people whom I know… also do it… I think that must have put the thought about Sky Diving in my mind.

So.. then when Saif, my ex-roomie, mentioned about going for a skydive… I was immediately supportive of the idea. Khair… it looked like we were not gonna make it due to insufficient no of people joining us! What insufficient… No other person is ready to join us! Its only me n Saif. Sadly.. we dropped the plan till my Andy, other ex-roomie, returned from India. God knows for what reason, he immediately joins the charade for sky diving! And there we go, 3 old roomies together on sky diving trip.

We got the online booking for 1:30 for 5th July. And I had no clue as to what I am going for till 4th afternoon when I took a look at this video on YouTube.

I freaked out! Just by watching the video my heart was skipping the beat and in less than 24 hours… I am going to be part of that video. Uff.. I was knowing that I am not going to sleep that night!

We started in Indian style [read 1 hour after planned departure time]. The journey was pretty uneventful. As we were approaching the hanger for skydive chicago… We saw people coming down with parachutes… that gave the forewarning as to what lies ahead.. without further waste of time.. we went for registration n immediately encountered a personn on video with a like 2 feet long beard!

He was funny but his words were real dangerous. In essence, we were sign an agreement which takes away all rights in this whole world from me. Even if I die while doing this diving, no one can dream of sueing these guys. [Well rest is ok... but that mentions my possible death, you see!]

Anyways, as if we had any choice, we read through the document telling us what all legal rights we were giving away and signed the document and then started looooong wait for our slot for flying. Had we had clue as to we have few hours to kill and also that after skydiving we would be dea tired, we could have utilized this time for doing some site-seeing. Thus, we ended up just relaxing in the hanger waiting for our names to get listed.

Well that helped in at least one way. We saw video of so many people jumping down that freaking plane.. that we go our heart beat rate back to normal.. well almost.

After a looong long and further more long wait, finally our time came.. We got all robed in our diving gear (which was just some mesh of straps) and some kind of green jumpsuit. I met my instructor Mike and videographer Jenny.. Mike scared me for moment telling that he made his first jump just last friday and today he is going to jump only 5th time in his life! I mean what the heck man… I am about to jump out the freaking plane trusting my life on this guy…. and he has jumped only 5 times in his life!! But of course it was a joke to scare me. .. He later on told me that he has been doing this stuff for 11 yrs! man.,, Jenny also was very professional with 4 yrs of experience of jumping.

With that assurance, we started off to the plane. there was no place in the plane to stand also… we had to kneel down to get inside of plane. There goes my lucky point of the day… it seems that there was not enough space in plane… so I got to sit in cockpit.. first time in my life. man there are just soooo many controls in cockpit. I was taken aback.

We started seeing altitude increse in our own altimeters. Once we reached 10000 feet everyone started getting ready for jump… my instructor got me seated in front of him and got myself bound to him using 4 hooks… Boss.. so my life is bound on 4 hooks now!

Before I could even realize, every other person from the airplane was gone, leaving me and my instructor alone… Here comes my turn!

Despite every attempt made by Chicago Skydiver, I was still not fully panicked.. so it was pretty cool to stand at the airplane door… And in a moment, we were airborne..

Man… that one moment.. is simply not describable. You feel all silent and only weightless. That’s because my instructor was below me only for that moment shielding me from air pressure. Come next second, we turned around and I faced the ground, the clouds, the horizon. Man.. I don’t remember whether I scrambled to get some support or not… I guess I did recover pretty fast… mostly due to air pressure I guess

Then it was time running away at speed of thought.. I saw that Jenny is flying right in front of me.. asking me do so some stuff.. Man.. at that moment, there is absolutely nothing you can really do.. You have only your hands and ur head and you have them hardly in control. Even to get them together, you have to make a lot of effort. I was just trying out anything foolish that was possible in that roaring air turbulence.

Time flew like crazy. I could not even realize that I have already fallen 8000 feet. I did not notice altimeter. If I did not had instructor behind me then I could have continued right to the ground without parachute,,, maing that a last sky dive for my life but thank god Mike was there.. Looks like they see such stuff often.. so he pulled the trigger and opened the parachute.

Parachute opened with a jerk giving me bigtime pains in my groin area.. Cant do anything. Your hands are holding parachute on your head. pain can wait! Mike quickly asked me to clear my nose and ear if they are blocked due to heavy air pressure loss. I was already feeling dizzy. But I dragged on. Then we saw some breathtaking scenery. Now with parachute on my head, there was not much to worry or so I thought

Soon, Mike showed me that even with parachute you can go swinging down in no time.. He made our parachute circle 2-3 times to increase my anxiety. Then we navigated (rather 90% he navigated) to ground.

We slipped over the grass and did a smooth landing n thats it. Man.. I was feeling every single bone shattered, dizzy in my head… but it was ok.. I just did the sky diving successfully! thats all mattered.

Finally, there goes my video.. I know I was not able describe in words what this video shows for you.

Gaarva ani Saanj Gaarva

Jya Lokkanni ya duniye madhe Gaarva and Saanj Gaarva aikala nasel… tyanchya sarkhe kam nashibi tech!

Bhagwaan.. kaahi kar ashya lokansaathi!

Shabd ani Awaaj (sur) yacha jo milaf sadhalay ya donhi albums madhe.. tyala tod nahi!

tyala kalas chadhvlay to tyacha ganyanchya madhlya sabdanni.

Its a “must-listen” for all marathi people.

Update: The post with download links is here.

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