Nothing gives me much more than to create a software that could be put to use and have been doing that since some time, I still remmeber the first time i got my own PC I was so overjoyed with the fact that I would no longer have to go to the Machine rooms at NIIT, where i used to go at 11 AM in the morning and leave at 7 PM.

We used to have couple of hours two days in a week where we could practice what we had learned, but that never was enough for me and I used to land up the center at 11 in the morning. We had a quota system called walkins, so after each batch had got in the machine room the remaining empty seats used to filled up by a draw of identity cards and I used to get lucky quite enough that I was there for every batch between 11 AM and 7 PM.

But when I got my PC i no longer had to go for those as I could practice at my own leisure work on stuff that I wanted to learn.

To be quite serious which ever computer insititute you can go to does not even teach 20% of the things, its how you take your learning forward is what matters between being a good software person or a bad software person.

As time passed by I would try and learn more and more things on myself rather depend on what they thought at the classes, infact I had finished the entire course ware at home even before they started teaching the 5th chapter.

I was overjoyed when I got 95 / 100 in my first project, well it was a simple one which was assigned to us to be done using Java and SQL Server where user had to register and the details had to be stored in the database.

Well though i completed it in 2 days flat but I still had 18 more days to kill before the project submission was due, but as always I took the initiative to do something they would not expect, I kept on adding features to it like login and when I was complete with the project I had a mini shopping center in place.

Though that project gave me immense happiness I realized how stupidly I had coded once I got into a real job, but still that is one of my prized possesion and I still have the code with me, a whole 4000 lines of my first codes.

To pass time I had to do some work so I started teaching at a local computer institute, well there I could learn more as this was sometime before I could get my hands on my own computer. So now out of the 16 hours i was awake in a day atleast 14 were spent in front of a computer, not that it is any different today.

Then I was trying to get a job in software I had no such luck then as the criteria was very high in those times, they needed engineering and science graduates for the jobs but I had not even completed my commerce graduation.

Though one thing that irked me was the way these interviewers were skeptical when I told them I was doing commerce, and it made me very angry when they said if I wanted to get into software I should have taken up science or engineering, I was like what the fuck does that have to do with anything in software.

But as luck was to be me with me I got a breakthrough in a small office because of my friend where I started to do HTML work, well that was good enough for me as I would atleast get some exposure to how work was done and stuff.

From there on I went on to work at rediff.com to the present company I am today and all this journey has been more than a pleasant experience for me.

You see I am not a job jumper and would hate to join a big company even though I have had offers from pretty big companies except for a few where they still want an excellent academic record like Infosys, TCS etc, but I would rather stay where I am for the past 2 years.

Well that's all for now, I will continue with my experiences working at rediff.com in the next part if you would still be there to read it of course.