A personal story. I used to work as a research engineer at IIT-Kanpur – which was my first job, so to say. I had two extraordinary mentors in those days – Prof TV Prabhakar, and Dr. Vineer Chaitanya. I was the only research engineer in the project – so, the entire work had to be done single handedly. This meant design, programming, testing, data verification, documentation, presentations, demos, writing installation scripts, maintaining the source code control systems, release planning, user manuals and so forth. Being the first job, I had virtually no clue about any professional software development. I was fresh out of college – with lots of ideas and ideals, but that’s about it.
The project was to develop a hypermedia platform for Traditional Indian Texts, like Bhagavadgita. Those are days of MSDOS, 640KB addressable memory limitations. We had practically no tools – all we had was a compiler. So, we wrote a HTML like language parser, and a windowing environment on top of DOS. I wrote close to 100,000 lines of C code (even though about 20,000 lines went into production). I used write and rewrite the programs all the time.
It is important to describe how we did the work in those days. Once in a week, the three of us would meet in Prof Prabhakar’s room. TVP as he is called is gifted with a mercurial brain and instinct, which was very nice if you meet him for a coffee, but very tough when if you have to work for him. Basically, he would invariably come up with a new idea every week, which meant a 80% rewrite of everything that was done till then. He would say something like “this current interface is not good, it is too clunky”, and then he would think for a couple of minutes, and suddenly with a child like enthusiasm, he would almost jump out of his seat. Why? Because he just had a wonderful, great idea – conceptually very neat. Well, it always sent shudders down my spine – it meant one more week of night-outs.
As a team, we had a basic rule that we will make a build every week. So, the beautiful, conceptually neat idea had to be implemented in a week’s time.
I had one personal rule. I would never reject an idea just because I had no ability to realize it. An idea, a requirement, a problem or a solution must always be assessed only on the basis of whether it is the correct one. More about it later
Vineet Chaitanya is a Brahmachari. He left his job as a head of dept of mechanical engineering, renounced everything , and became a disciple of Swamy Chinmayananda. For him life is a straight line – everything was a very simple exercise for him. Purity and idealism are the core values. He was a very patient man – I mean he could argue for hours. He was passionate without ever being angry – a virtue that took me ten years to learn.
Imagine, one Royal Bengal Tiger, one African Lion and a poor South Indian Deer and you get the picture.
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