Coming soon ...
This section will cover my educational background
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Journey so far ...
A journey of 6 years in the landscape of information technology driving on the wheels of hard work, dedication and excellence has taken to places with increasing altitudes. What has been the silver lining of this journey has been the learning experience. I never had the chance to step back and think about anything else. I have learnt a lot in a wide gamut of areas like technology, management and strategy. I grew from the technical role of a software trainee to the middle management role of delivery head and then again to a mix of technical and managerial role of a product head. All along the way I managed to stay in the domain of my interest --- GAMING!!!!
"Some Software Development Company" (Mauritius)
I recently joined this company in Feb 2008 because of my hunger for PC game development. There was another reason to it; I was fully involved in middle level management in my previous organization apart from design and coding which had been greatly reduced. I wanted to break out of purely managerial tasks into some coding and design related work and get my hands dirty. I can't say anything more about my work due to contractual obligations.
Ishir Infotech (Noida)
Ishir has been my longest tenure in one company and it has given me a lot of growth along the way. I joined Ishir in May 2005 as a Senior Developer and was there till Jan 2008 as a Delivery Head (Gaming). When I joined the gaming division was very new with only a few people in it. This division was started off in collaboration with a UK based company called Octavian International. We were required to build casino games for the slot machines for Octavian.
Immediately after joining, I was sent to Barcelona to be trained on a development kit for one of our customers. The training was successful and I came back with vigour to work on my first casino slot game. We developed couple of games on this SDK and our coding team also grew. I became the team lead for the coding sub-division in gaming. I was involved with designing the game applications and coding for it along with allocation of parts of the coding to other team members and their follow up. During this time I went to Barcelona again with our Game Designer for some senior level meetings which gave me some exposure to client handling not to mention that I had already befriended the technical people who had trained us.
After this Octavian decided to buy a game engine from a company in Barcelona. We needed a team to be trained on this product to fully take control of it. I assembled a team for this and we again went to Barcelona for around 2 months to be fully trained on this system which was a server based lottery games system. I was made the Project Manager at this time to manage this knowledge transfer. This time I had a greater exposure in terms of clients as I met with top officials from Octavian as well as I managed officials from the company from Barcelona. Being away from our homeland I also had to keep the team in check and boost their morale. It was a great learning experience for me to understand team dynamics. Meeting people in office is one thing and staying with them for 2 months is different. We had our arguments and fights but in the end it was logic which prevailed. Once again the training was successful and we returned to our homeland with flying colors.
Soon after we returned, our Head of Software Development left Ishir and I was promoted to the position. We started developing games on the platform. I was still involved in the design and coding as I like to code. Along with this client for the platform I had to oversee development for other clients which had their own development teams managed by me. We had grown further. In parallel, our graphics team was growing too.
It was time for our Unit Head to grow from his role expand his horizon. This was when he approached me to take more responsibility in terms of managing the division and he offered me the role of a Delivery Head for gaming. Apart from the coding division which I was managing till now with around 10 people, I was supposed to manage the graphics, sound and math team too taking the total to around 40 people in the whole gaming division. In addition to this I had to be the face of Ishir to Octavian and coordinate with Octavian on all production matters. This was the toughest challenge set forth for me by Ishir. I learnt a lot during this journey from all my superiors, peers and other colleagues specially Pankaj who was my COO and Sidharth who was my CEO. These two people taught me lot about my own abilities.
I got involved in the institutionalization of SEI CMM level 3 processes for our gaming division as Ishir was preparing for an evaluation. I was part of the project management team which was interviewed the evaluator and Ishir was successfully assessed for CMM level 3 certification. I was helped a lot by our process consultant Tariq Kamal and our Head of Quality Satpal Kaur. I owe a lot to these people for the knowledge of processes that I have today.
Following this I had to visit London for the ICE (International Casino Exhibition – 2007). This was my first visit to a casino exhibition and I made it a point to learn from it. I also had to do a lot of pre-sales at that time meeting with prospective clients and understanding their technical requirements. Immediately after ICE, I was required to visit Russia for a client demo of our platform. I visited Russia with Amit, a colleague of mine and this time again the trip was successful. Few months later, we went to Russia once again for another client demo and training of the Russian team on the platform. This time I was accompanied by my colleague Puja and yet again we had a successful trip.
My superiors in Ishir were aware of my passion for PC games and hence when it was time for me to move on it was the smoothest transition ever and trust me, it was a very emotional experience and was very difficult for me to leave some of the best colleagues I had ever worked with.
Paradox Studios (Mumbai)
I started my journey into the professional world of gaming with Paradox. Having worked for Infosys for a while, I started thinking about how break into the world of game development. Opportunities in game development in India were scarce. I was contemplating joining University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland for their masters’ course in game development. Then I got the opportunity to work on PC games in Paradox Studios. I joined the PC team in Paradox. This was the place where I learned the basics of game development. My colleague and mentor Alok Narula was instrumental in this learning process. Alok is a very sharp and intelligent programmer and I leant a lot working with him.
We worked on a demo for a PC game we were planning to develop in Paradox. We used the OGRE engine with Tokamak for physics, OpenAL for audio and Coldet for collision. We developed the demo in one month. The game was a third person FPS. The demo included a main character with all movement animations and physics element in one level (jumping, swinging on a rope, climbing walls etc). The project was later scrapped due to various reasons.
Infosys Technologies (Chennai)
I started my professional career with Infosys Technologies. I was selected as a trainee and underwent the one month fast track training programme in Infosys. Soon after the training I was put into a development project for a new customer TTI. This was an additional pressure for the project as the client was new.
I along with a fellow trainee was the first inducted developers in the team. The project was about converting the front end of their Order and Delivery Management System from existing CICS screens to Java swing based screens to enhance the productivity of the TTI sales people. The project was divided into three tiers client, mid and mainframe comprising of a team size of over 70 people. The 70 screens to be developed were divided into four iterations.
I joined the project as a Java developer. I was involved in client side development. I was also involved in the Integration testing, User Acceptance Testing and Support. I was the only Java person in the support and warranty team for the first Iteration screens and was responsible for development of the functional enhancements, deployment of code on test servers and delivery of the client and the middle tier code. I was responsible for developing one most critical & GUI intensive module of the application. Developed Unit and Integration test cases for the modules assigned to me. Single handedly supported Iteration 1 modules during warranty & roll out phase of the Iteration (which itself was designed and developed by a team of 35 people).
I was known as the CART-man in the team as I developed the most critical CART screen of the project. Infosys is a very methodical company and I liked working there. If it had a gaming division I would have stayed in Infosys.
Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur)
Having finished college, I really wanted to get into a masters’ course for Aritificial Intelligence and pursue the subject further. Since I did not have deep exposure to the subject, I decided to join I.I.T. Kanpur as a project associate. I was told that I would be allowed to work on A.I. projects. Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity to work on A.I. projects there but rather I was involved with a web based project called “Digital Mandi”. As a project associate my work involved doing research on various trading portals on the Internet and developing the website for Digital Mandi.While working in I.I.T. Kanpur I got the chance to work closely with the students of the institute.
HCL Perot Systems (Noida)
As a part of my graduation curriculum I had industrial training in my eight semesters in the final year. I did my training in HCL Perot Systems which is now Perot Systems. My work over there involved developing modules for the websites like discussion forum, auto-site submitter, newsletter subscription and mailing list. I had worked as the Team Leader of a select team of four people. The system OOAD was done using Rational Rose and UML. HTML and JAVA SCRIPT were used for client side programming. Oracle was used as the database. Data interaction from database was done using SERVLETS/JSP.
"Some Software Development Company" (Mauritius)
I recently joined this company in Feb 2008 because of my hunger for PC game development. There was another reason to it; I was fully involved in middle level management in my previous organization apart from design and coding which had been greatly reduced. I wanted to break out of purely managerial tasks into some coding and design related work and get my hands dirty. I can't say anything more about my work due to contractual obligations.
Ishir Infotech (Noida)
Ishir has been my longest tenure in one company and it has given me a lot of growth along the way. I joined Ishir in May 2005 as a Senior Developer and was there till Jan 2008 as a Delivery Head (Gaming). When I joined the gaming division was very new with only a few people in it. This division was started off in collaboration with a UK based company called Octavian International. We were required to build casino games for the slot machines for Octavian.
Immediately after joining, I was sent to Barcelona to be trained on a development kit for one of our customers. The training was successful and I came back with vigour to work on my first casino slot game. We developed couple of games on this SDK and our coding team also grew. I became the team lead for the coding sub-division in gaming. I was involved with designing the game applications and coding for it along with allocation of parts of the coding to other team members and their follow up. During this time I went to Barcelona again with our Game Designer for some senior level meetings which gave me some exposure to client handling not to mention that I had already befriended the technical people who had trained us.
After this Octavian decided to buy a game engine from a company in Barcelona. We needed a team to be trained on this product to fully take control of it. I assembled a team for this and we again went to Barcelona for around 2 months to be fully trained on this system which was a server based lottery games system. I was made the Project Manager at this time to manage this knowledge transfer. This time I had a greater exposure in terms of clients as I met with top officials from Octavian as well as I managed officials from the company from Barcelona. Being away from our homeland I also had to keep the team in check and boost their morale. It was a great learning experience for me to understand team dynamics. Meeting people in office is one thing and staying with them for 2 months is different. We had our arguments and fights but in the end it was logic which prevailed. Once again the training was successful and we returned to our homeland with flying colors.
Soon after we returned, our Head of Software Development left Ishir and I was promoted to the position. We started developing games on the platform. I was still involved in the design and coding as I like to code. Along with this client for the platform I had to oversee development for other clients which had their own development teams managed by me. We had grown further. In parallel, our graphics team was growing too.
It was time for our Unit Head to grow from his role expand his horizon. This was when he approached me to take more responsibility in terms of managing the division and he offered me the role of a Delivery Head for gaming. Apart from the coding division which I was managing till now with around 10 people, I was supposed to manage the graphics, sound and math team too taking the total to around 40 people in the whole gaming division. In addition to this I had to be the face of Ishir to Octavian and coordinate with Octavian on all production matters. This was the toughest challenge set forth for me by Ishir. I learnt a lot during this journey from all my superiors, peers and other colleagues specially Pankaj who was my COO and Sidharth who was my CEO. These two people taught me lot about my own abilities.
I got involved in the institutionalization of SEI CMM level 3 processes for our gaming division as Ishir was preparing for an evaluation. I was part of the project management team which was interviewed the evaluator and Ishir was successfully assessed for CMM level 3 certification. I was helped a lot by our process consultant Tariq Kamal and our Head of Quality Satpal Kaur. I owe a lot to these people for the knowledge of processes that I have today.
Following this I had to visit London for the ICE (International Casino Exhibition – 2007). This was my first visit to a casino exhibition and I made it a point to learn from it. I also had to do a lot of pre-sales at that time meeting with prospective clients and understanding their technical requirements. Immediately after ICE, I was required to visit Russia for a client demo of our platform. I visited Russia with Amit, a colleague of mine and this time again the trip was successful. Few months later, we went to Russia once again for another client demo and training of the Russian team on the platform. This time I was accompanied by my colleague Puja and yet again we had a successful trip.
My superiors in Ishir were aware of my passion for PC games and hence when it was time for me to move on it was the smoothest transition ever and trust me, it was a very emotional experience and was very difficult for me to leave some of the best colleagues I had ever worked with.
Paradox Studios (Mumbai)
I started my journey into the professional world of gaming with Paradox. Having worked for Infosys for a while, I started thinking about how break into the world of game development. Opportunities in game development in India were scarce. I was contemplating joining University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland for their masters’ course in game development. Then I got the opportunity to work on PC games in Paradox Studios. I joined the PC team in Paradox. This was the place where I learned the basics of game development. My colleague and mentor Alok Narula was instrumental in this learning process. Alok is a very sharp and intelligent programmer and I leant a lot working with him.
We worked on a demo for a PC game we were planning to develop in Paradox. We used the OGRE engine with Tokamak for physics, OpenAL for audio and Coldet for collision. We developed the demo in one month. The game was a third person FPS. The demo included a main character with all movement animations and physics element in one level (jumping, swinging on a rope, climbing walls etc). The project was later scrapped due to various reasons.
Infosys Technologies (Chennai)
I started my professional career with Infosys Technologies. I was selected as a trainee and underwent the one month fast track training programme in Infosys. Soon after the training I was put into a development project for a new customer TTI. This was an additional pressure for the project as the client was new.
I along with a fellow trainee was the first inducted developers in the team. The project was about converting the front end of their Order and Delivery Management System from existing CICS screens to Java swing based screens to enhance the productivity of the TTI sales people. The project was divided into three tiers client, mid and mainframe comprising of a team size of over 70 people. The 70 screens to be developed were divided into four iterations.
I joined the project as a Java developer. I was involved in client side development. I was also involved in the Integration testing, User Acceptance Testing and Support. I was the only Java person in the support and warranty team for the first Iteration screens and was responsible for development of the functional enhancements, deployment of code on test servers and delivery of the client and the middle tier code. I was responsible for developing one most critical & GUI intensive module of the application. Developed Unit and Integration test cases for the modules assigned to me. Single handedly supported Iteration 1 modules during warranty & roll out phase of the Iteration (which itself was designed and developed by a team of 35 people).
I was known as the CART-man in the team as I developed the most critical CART screen of the project. Infosys is a very methodical company and I liked working there. If it had a gaming division I would have stayed in Infosys.
Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur)
Having finished college, I really wanted to get into a masters’ course for Aritificial Intelligence and pursue the subject further. Since I did not have deep exposure to the subject, I decided to join I.I.T. Kanpur as a project associate. I was told that I would be allowed to work on A.I. projects. Unfortunately, I never got the opportunity to work on A.I. projects there but rather I was involved with a web based project called “Digital Mandi”. As a project associate my work involved doing research on various trading portals on the Internet and developing the website for Digital Mandi.While working in I.I.T. Kanpur I got the chance to work closely with the students of the institute.
HCL Perot Systems (Noida)
As a part of my graduation curriculum I had industrial training in my eight semesters in the final year. I did my training in HCL Perot Systems which is now Perot Systems. My work over there involved developing modules for the websites like discussion forum, auto-site submitter, newsletter subscription and mailing list. I had worked as the Team Leader of a select team of four people. The system OOAD was done using Rational Rose and UML. HTML and JAVA SCRIPT were used for client side programming. Oracle was used as the database. Data interaction from database was done using SERVLETS/JSP.
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