Well you might think they must have used a wire saw with a 7″ blade and wide flat steel wedges.

But in the 11th century there was no electricity nor were there wire saws. The approach they used was,

• they established the plane they want to follow by drawing it on the stone,
• proceeded to drill small holes with a primitive chisel and hammer,
• they drilled holes every 6 to 12”,
• inserted half inch wooden wedges into the holes,
• poured some water into these holes,
• left it over night for the wood to absorb water and expand.
• finally, the boulder would split along the established plane.

The wood and water method is till date used in a few places.

Here is a picture from ruins of Hampi where this technique was practiced in the 11th century.

And this continues to puzzle me….

Through the Agile Software Community of India, I’m organizing three workshops by Mary and Tom Poppendieck in Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi. As a way to ensure quality (passionate and committed) individuals get to attend this workshop, I introduced the concept of a position paper. To participate in the workshop interested people have to add their position papers to ASCI wiki. The position paper is a simple, plain text response to 3 basic questions. The idea is we have an index page (home page) for the workshop in each city. People are supposed to add their name to the table (index) and link their position paper page from this index. This helps each one create a position paper page on the wiki, add what they want to add to the page and then link it up to the index, so that anyone can see who all have signed-up and if they want to know details about any person, they can click on their position paper link.

This might sound a little cryptic, but when you have an example to see, it all seems to make perfect sense to me. But if you see what has been happening on our wiki with these position papers is:

• Some people don’t know wikis and they just email me saying here is my position paper. I’m happy at least these folks are not messing the whole wiki
• Some people can add their name to the index, but don’t know how to create link. Even if there are 30 other people who have create a link one line above their text, they cannot figure out how to create a link. There is a link to the guide, but that apparently is not helping people either.
• Some people don’t understand or don’t want to understand how to edit a table on a wiki.  Even if there are lots of other people who have added their rows to the table, some people cannot figure out how to. They keep doing wired things like randomly adding pipes and that messes the whole table up.
• There is a description on the top of the page linking to the position paper description page. Some people click on this link, delete the position paper definition and add their position paper right there.
• Some folks just clicking on the first person’s position paper, deleting the content on the page and adding their own content. So you click on person A’s position paper and you’ll see Person X’s position paper
• Worst of all, some people are deleting the whole index page and just adding their position paper without any name or any other details.

In all these instances, people are not try to knowingly mess the wiki, but unknowingly are doing all this non-sense. Now one might feel this is common sense, why is this so difficult? If nothing else copy what others have done and that seems to work. My big question is “How can these guys build complex software applications for their clients, if they can’t work with a wiki”?

You know what scares the shit out of me, when I think of over 1 million people in the Indian IT industry who are out there. At least these people are taking an initiative and trying to learn something by attending these sessions. But what about those over million software professionals who don’t even have the drive or energy to learn something new?

Finally Bangalore is blessed with a new airport. Few of us happened to travel from Bangalore to Mumbai on the inaugural day. While I was excited to be part of the new airport experience, I was scared that we would end up becoming victims to the chaos at the new airport on the first day. Well we really did not have a choice, so we embraced it.

The new airport is 45 Kms from the city. So we had to leave 3 hrs before the flight so that we could get there at least an hour before the flight takes off. Luckily it just too us less than an hour to get there. The airport looked beautiful from outside. It’s very nicely done. At par with most international airports.

When we reached the airport everything seemed fine. We did not find people running in different directions like headless chickens. But this joy did not last long. The most frustrating experience turns out to be a damn software installed at the airport.

Venkat Subramaniam and I show up at the airport, we are thrilled to see a checkin kiosk. Venkat and I rush to the kiosk to checkin.

While Venkat is happy and thrilled to be part of the new airport experience, the screen times out.

Venkat patiently goes thru the process again. And guess what he finds?

A touch screen. Notice we have to check the 4 check boxes, mostly meaning the same thing and there is no option to check all in one go. The funny thing is if you see the size of Venkat’s finger is equal to 2 check boxes put together. The problem is not that Venkat’s fingers are fat, but the items on the screen are so damn small. With great difficulty we click all the check boxes and then what next? Venkat and I stared at the screen for a couple of mins, we could not find any Continue or Next button. After a couple of mins, Venkat screamed in joy (or was is frustration), when he found :

A scroll bar at the right corner of the screen. With great difficultly we managed to scroll down and then clicked Continue. But I think by mistake we had forgotten to check one of the check boxes. It complained about it. (Well, they had validations.) After fixing it, we moved to the next screen, on the next screen, we entered our reservation number and finally it complained that they cannot check us in and asked us to see a representative at the checkin counter. All of this to finally go back and stand in the queue.
So what was the real problem with this software? I’m sure they would have functionally tested this software. The problem is they would have never tested it on a touch screen. It was simply not usable. This is an example of a disgusting user experience. If you find these guys, shoot them down. Such a disgrace to the software industry.

Screaming and yelling we go join the checkin queue. After waiting there for 10 mins, we were told that they had an issue. I guess they somehow heard Venkat’s talk on Agile tools and took automation too seriously. They forgot the porters. They thought they could eliminate manual labour and automate that. Turns out that they could not checkin anyone till they found some porters to lift the luggage off the belt.

Luckily we did not have any checkin luggage, so we could avoid the queue and get ahead.
Well if you live in Bangalore and have not visited the new airport, you are missing something.

Why are companies so afraid to Fail?

When I meet folks from companies, most of them want to implement Agile, but they want ready made solutions from experienced folks. Basically what they are looking for is a Dummy’s Guide to Agile Transition. They want a completed tested and proven approach (Best Practices) to adopt Agile. They want to make sure there is no room for failure.

Well I don’t really understand how can one learn new techniques/approaches without failing a couple of times? Isn’t failure an implicit part of learning? To really learn something, you need to understand its boundaries and test the waters yourself. Babies don’t learn to walk without falling/hurting themselves. IMHO, if you want a babysitter (Coach), all your life, you will never be able to appreciate and learn new concepts. I’m afraid you will learn how to be waterfall in a different way.

You could get a coach to help you avoid big failure and give a helping hand after a failure, but its unrealistic to expect that a coach will help you successfully transition without any failure. Hard learnt lessons stick around longer.

Currently I’m suffering from massively over-committing to conferences, community building activities and open source. With one conference every month and commitment on few open source projects, I’m finding it really hard to fulfill my full time job @ Directi. After thinking about this for a couple of weeks, I have decided the following:

• No more conferences for Naresh Jain in 2009 and possible 2010. I might attend may be one conference just to stay in touch with folks. I need to focus on working in the trenches and continue learning and innovating. Right now I feel I’m getting quite hands-off.
• I’m taking a temporary part-time break from Directi for the next 4-5 months. I’ll still continue to be an employee of Directi and I’ll also spend 1.5 to 2 weeks a month working within Directi. But my involvement on their products will be drastically reduced from leading some aspects of the project to consulting on them until these 4-5 months.
• For the next 4-5 months to sustain myself I’ll be open to consulting/training for 3-5 days a month. Hopefully this can fund me for the series of conferences that I’ve signed up for this year.
• In 2008, I’m already over booked, so starting now, I’m refusing all new offers to speaker at conferences.
• Over time, I’ll reduce my commitment on ASCI activities. I’ll try to keep my involvement to a minimum, mostly a coordinator/contact point for some activities.
• I’ll continue contributing to all the open source projects that I’m involved with, but over a period of time I might reduce the number of projects I’m involved with.
• I’ll continue to play customer role for the Penn State project, but hopefully I’ll be done with it in May.

If you have any suggestions or ideas to help me, please feel free to guide this blind man

After taking a nice break of 3 months, I’m back in business. I decided to move to Mumbai and join Directi as Quality and Community Evangelist. My new role would involve, but will not be limited to:

• Defining and Implementing organization wide processes and risk-reduction practices (borrowing upon Agile and other philosophy as appropriate)
• Building and growing a sizable QA team, whose task would be to percolate Agile practices and other Product Engineering philosophies across the myriad product engineering teams at Directi
• Organize country-wide open camps, conferences, rallies, shows, contests etc for knowledge sharing and community building

Luckily for me Directi’s Profile suited the kind of company I was looking for:

• Directi is a product company which builds innovative mass-market Web Products serving millions of Customers worldwide
• Started in 1998 by two brothers (Bhavin and Divyank) at the age of 19 and 17 respectively. Today the company is worth 400+ million dollars.
• Opportunity to work directly with the Brothers.
• The only bad decision at Directi is no decision. An aggressive, young company whose mission is “World Domination”
• The Brothers took a loan of Rs 25,000 from their parents to start the company. Directi has been profitable from its inception. All assets of the group are organically funded without any external debt or borrowing.
• Directi has been ranked in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 list consecutively for the last 3 years

If you are looking for a similar company to work for, please drop me a note, we are always looking for “Intelligent People & Smart Ideas”.

From today, I started biking (cycling) to work. I realized that there was no point in me traveling alone in my car when I can reach work in about the same time without contributing to the pollution and congestion. It is also a great way to burn some calories.

It takes me 10 mins to get to work and guess what, I don’t have to wait at traffic lights. I’m still concerned about rains and heat strokes in Mumbai. But that is certainly a few months away and I decided to “make hay while the sunshines”.

Starting Monday Jan 28th 2008 I’ll be based out of Mumbai. (I’ll have a Mumbai based cell phone.) Lots of people are amazed that I moved to Mumbai from Bangalore. Bangalore is the silicon valley of India. I’ve lived in Bangalore most of my life. But now I’ll be in Mumbai, my birth place.

Last 2 weeks have been crazy. I think next week will continue to be crazy. I saw 48 apartments before I decided to rent out the apartment I’ll be living in. This is my second stay in Mumbai. By now some of the agents know my taste. Last time I lived in Mumbai I had seen 102 apartments.

Real estate in Mumbai is sky rocketing. 2.5 years back I was paying 15,000 Rs rent. This time I’ll be paying 28,000 Rs rent. Its crazy.

Drop me a line if you are around Mumbai, I would be happy to hook up with you. If you are looking for accommodation and want to experience a home stay, you are most welcome to stay with my family!

I would like to share my experience of how I stared blogging. If you are not a blogger and feel a little left out from the elite blogging community, this might help you get started.

4 years back, while I was still at ThoughtWorks, there was a growing blogging community inside ThoughtWorks. There was a general feeling that you are not “kewl” if you don’t have a blog. I had ideas about software development and adventure sports that I wanted to share with others. So I wanted to blog and belong to the growing blogging community inside ThoughtWorks. But I was not motivated enough to blog regularly and I was probably not too disciplined to blog as well. I also had (and still have) a very big complex that my written communication sucks. This actually turned out to be a good motivation to start blogging. As a way to improve my written communication skills. Also I’m not good at reading, so I thought if I start a blog, at least that will force me to read other people’s blogs and write my own views.

So I found some motivations to blog. But what I was looking for, was a good topic that I could blog on. Esp. something that had continuity. That would make it easy for me to blog regularly. Finding new, different topics to blog about could be difficult to start off with. Luckily for me, we had just started an internal object boot camp at ThoughtWorks Bangalore office. There were lots of interesting things I was learning during the boot camp. Things like Getters and Setters break encapsulation. Such powerful thoughts! I wanted a way to capture this learning and share this with others. Also I want to record them to retrospect at the end of boot camp what I learned. So I found a topic to start blogging about.

Once I was motivated enough to blog and I had a topic that had a continuity, I wanted to figure out a place to blog. Most people don’t have their personal servers. At least, I did not have one then. So I asked a few people which is the simplest, free blogging site. JRoller and Blogspot were the famous free blogging sites then. I choose to go with JRoller. Was very happy with its services for a while.

After about 3 years I had got very regular blogging. I was surprised people actually read my blogs. Some people I met at conferences, knew me coz of my blog. I even got offers to advertise on my blog. By now there were so many blogs on JRoller, that it had become very slow. At that point I decided to get my own server and host my own blog. WordPress seems to be the favorite tool and I went with it. Very happy with the performance so far.

In retrospect I think there are 3 main ingredients to starting blogging:

• Motivation: Strong enough reasons to start blogging
• Topic: A topic that is modular and has continuity. A topic that matters to you. If you are learning a new technology or you are starting on a new project, it would be easy to blog about that.
• Tools: Some free blog hosting sites and easy tools to manage your blogs

Hope this helps!

From today onwards people will refer to me as TQer instead of a TWer. That’s right. Today, Nov 12th 2007, is my last day at ThoughtWorks. It has been a wonderful 4 years for me at TW. I have learnt a great amount of concepts at TW. Fellow TWers have really helped me refine my values and provided me with a vision which will last with me long after I’m gone.

For the next few months I plan to take off and think about what I would like to do next. In the mean time, I would be focusing on Agile India . I also quite a few open source projects that I need to focus on. This would be a great time to do so.

I’m really looking forward to starting the Uncertification Workshops in India.