Summer 2009!
College closed on the 12th of may and i reached bangalore a couple of days later,for doing a project there ..
PHASE 1:
The first day of work , i got introduced to my task,to create an online ticketing portal (somewhat similar to yatra.com) in about 45 days .I was given a designer to help me out with the task . Seriously i had no clue of how i am gonna do this . I was blank.
Terms like SOAP , WSDL frightened me . I barely knew ASP.NET & C# . I had some hope of doing this with JAVA, but the company we consumed the web service from misguided me saying using JAVA here will make things complicated(crap:SOAP,WSDL have nothing to do with the platform).
We decided to stick with ASP.NET with C# .I achieved one major thing,i was able to communicate properly with the server and get the flight search results .But a week had passed by already and i was convinced i need someone to guide me on this . So i got a project manager (luckily he had a similar project before) . He went through my work and decided that we need atleast 3-4 more guys to work along with me to finish this project in time.So i got a team to work with now
Things were way easier now . Working as a team is fun . I got used to a lot of industrial practices(naming conventions,project architecture,estimation) . I mainly worked on the backend( the transactions for booking the flight/bus ticket),also did some javascript & database procedures & a couple of pages & some CSS…Software Work is highly taxing,the tight deadline added to the workload and moreover i was learning all these technologies on the fly . Things were really hectic . Usually leve to office 11 and came back around 9:30 ..Stayed in a nice comfy PG but no proper food..
Everything was going as planned .A month has passed by.Made a few friends in the place i worked,Cool people . I enjoyed the work i did,it was so satisfying to do something real time ,something which a lot of other people will use.And that drive kept me going .And yes we finished the task successfully by the 27th of june and i came back to my house,hoping for 15 days of no programming!!And yeah i had my first income from softwares!
PHASE 2:
I reached home and barely did I rest for a day when an offer came up where i could work in an EMBEDDED R&D FIRM here in coimbatore . I went though their site and they were really interesting . I didnt wanna miss this opportunity, so i went to work again . First day i saw linux (latest kernel) running on a 2*2cm ARM microcontroller and was amazed.It was really cool.I decided that i should do my best here .Basically they needed a custom built linux from scratch for their chip.So i started to learn abt the linux bootprocess,boot process of an embedded system,the filesystem and … Built a linux from scratch for the pc. Then did a cross linux . And now almost completed a 14mb filesystem for them ….
My first project was a very high level project and the second one was very close to the machine …Both were exciting and enjoyable .. But i realised that the real skill of a computer engineer is his low level programming skills . I could say i was a SOFTWARE ENGINEER in my first project but a COMPUTER ENGINEER in the second.All be it ,I still feel there is better market for a software engineer.So i will continue to horne my high level programming skills and start working on my OS skills!!!!After all,i am a computer engineering graduate
Soooo my summer 2009 was really productive,very unique to my previous summers ,very taxing.Had no time for family,friends. Whatever IT WAS FUN....