Ketan's Musings

This has been a long pending post. It’s been almost three weeks since I’ve left ObjectEdge. I’ve now joined ZenSar Technologies.

There’s a lot of things that I’ve learnt at ObjectEdge, lots of friends that I’ve made. I’m grateful for all of it. I’ve been one lucky bastard! There’s some bad experiences that I’d rather leave behind, and forget. I’ve learnt (the hard way) that it’s best to let go of bad memories.

At ZenSar, I’ve already started work on SBP.

Here’s a lesson that I learnt:

Cost to Company (CTC) is a term used to describe an “investment without return”. Travel expenditures, interviewing, spending time with potential customers can all be interpreted as CTC’s.

Cost to Company can also be used to describe the total cost that an organization is spending towards their employee including the salary, perks, benefits, hiring, training, retirals, infrastructure.

Here is more input:

• Cost to Company is a buzz word to describe how the company can slowly pay you less and less, and remove all your benefits, until you are “self funded” – in other words you pay for all your “benefits” yourself, while the company receives the tax benefits for these payments, and perhaps also bills the customer for the same. This improves their profit ratio, and if this system is extrapolated, you will eventually pay the company to work there. So you’ll need a second job to fund this.
• CTC – Cost to company is a trick of a company and HR department, to show we are paying a big salary, but unfortunately it is just bubble. They overload total expenses of human resources on salary, and show that they are paying this much salary to the staff. but actually they pay less and show more. For e.g. your salary is 600K p.a. Means that you are getting 50K per month. But actually person gets only 25K per month. All other money is deducted for facilities. Means we are paying for getting facilities, but company shows they are giving us good facilities in the organization. In short, we pay from our salary for getting facilities, but company says they are giving good facilities to there staff. So you are paying for even unwanted facilities which you don’t need. Before deciding CTC ask for breakup of facilities.

Back from an exciting Saturday afternoon at the Deolali Gliding Club. It was a weekend I’d like to have some time again. The joy of lifting up from the groud before you can even hit 20NM is great, liftoff happens within 100ft; the joy of seeing the ground slip fast under your feet is absolutely unmatched. At a high altitude of about 300 ft, you are able to see most of Nashik.

The pilot rams the stick up front to nose dive the plane for a fraction of a second to gain a lot of speed, and a lot more thrill (make sure you carry a plastic bag if you get sick on a giant wheel or a roller coster). Landing the gilder was a great experience altogether. You see the ground approach towards you at a speed of about 55NM.

The experience is worth a lot more than the ticket of INR 250.

A video is worth a million words.

Some pictures (view entire album):

We were here.

Before takeoff.

Sonal, Shilpa, Capt. S. S. Chahal, Archana, Vinay (with Siddhi), Myself, Neetij.

If you are interested in flying, here are the contact details for the flying club:
Gandhi Nagar Airport,
Deolali Gliding Club,
Nasik Road,
Nasik – 422 006

Timings: Sunday: 9.00 A.M. to Sunset.
Weekdays: 4.00P.M. to Sunset (Thursday Closed)

For Booking Contact:
Tel: +91 253 2412482
Mob: +91 98228 20235

Bangalored adj

(said of a corporation, project, or employment) having been relocated to India; having lost business or employment due to such a relocation.

Huh, what, when ? Don’t worry, I did not lose my job to Bangalore. Somebody else did.

So how did somebody else getting Bangalored affect me ? To enumerate:

1. Bad, bad code. There’s no notion of “refactoring” or “code resuablity”
2. God object: too many responsibilities for one object.
3. Spaghetti code: Systems whose structure is barely comprehensible, especially because of misuse of code structures
4. Copy and paste programming: Copying (and modifying) existing code rather than creating generic solutions
5. Reinventing the square wheel: Creating a poor solution when a good one exists.
6. Big ball of mud: A system with no recognisable structure

With an infinite monkeys around, everything is a one banana problem. But yeah, the world needs all kinds of people. If it was not for these Bangalorites today, I’d have never appreciated a lot of the Anti Patterns. Thanks guys.

We at ObjectEdge had the opportunity to interact with Dave Collins. Dave Collins is one of the few remaining SmallTalkers, and author of the bestseller Designing Object-Oriented User Interfaces.

This was a 3-day basic Object-Oriented training session for begineers as well as advanced people alike.

This was a very good session that covered from basic OO concepts to Design Patterns to various techniques in persistence. It contained simple but effective exercises to better understand things.

This 3 day course was basically based on Chamond Liu’s book SmallTalk, Objects, Design

Some pictures(click to enlarge)

Amarjeet Garewal introducing Dave Collins.	Dave Collins talking on the Command Pattern	Dave Collins talking on the MVC pattern