Past few months

Life was very hectic and I couldn't blog for the past few months. So this blog post will only be updates [otherwise it will bore you to death. Well, even with updates it might bore you ;-) ]

1. August: Yogitha and I got married. Marriage was in Bangalore and we had reception in Hyderabad as well. We didn't go for a honeymoon or anything.

• We had known each other for six years and we didn't really feel that we need to time off to get to know each other.
• More importantly we wanted wanted to save the vacation and use it in three or four smaller breaks (4 or 5 days) as opposed to one long stretch of 10-15 days.

We setup our home after that. I'm congenitally kanjoos and I didn't let anyone (parents & in-laws) buy much stuff except for a few things that we absolutely need to have(Rice cooker, Gas stove, Grinder, New Bedsheets etc) . Marriage, Reception and setting up home took a week and I went back to work in last week of August.

2. September, October, November: Life at Riya got even more hectic. Riya was releasing a new product and it needed to be done well before the holiday season. For 3 months or so, Pallavi (Software Engineer in Riya) and I worked on setting up the engineering infrastructure for processing and building similarity search indexes for millions of products. It was mad scramble to get the release done in time. Finally on Nov 8th we launched a cool new product called Like.com. Like.com is visual shopping comparision site. You can browse for things you like and then search based on "likeness". It is really cool. Do check it out.

3. December and Janaury: I moved to the UI team headed by an extremely nice and hard working chinese guy named Dan Chiao. I worked on the various UI features.

• Backend tools that control the site content (Celebrities, Trends, HotPicks)
• The color picker functionality. (I enjoyed doing this. Can you figure out how it works? Checkout the color picker and let me know if you can tell.)
• The site map.
• The likelist functionality. [Div with miniature icons, user login/registration popup, likelist page]
• Various other miscellanious UI stuff and bug fixes.

Not much learning here as did the same thing day-in and day-out at Trilogy for couple of years but it was really fun because I get to brag about it (like I am doing right now ;-) I have to add that Dan and Sajan (Web designer) provided a lot of help while I was developing those features.

I enjoyed this UI gig quite a bit but on the negative side life became unbearably hectic. The reason being weekly releases and the fact that UI is the last thing that gets done before the release.

4. Mini-break in between christmas and New year's eve. We visited parents Hyderabad and relatives in Gangavathi, Karnataka. We also went to Hampi from Gangavathi on a bike. That was really nice.

5. Leaving Riya: I left Riya on Feb 2 and I joined Microsoft on Feb 5 and I am just getting used to the new environment. While it is too early to write much about Microsoft, Hyderabad my first impressions are very positive. Campus is nice, food is great (take that with pinch of salt coz i'm kinda easy to please w.r.t food) and the facilities (pool tables, foos ball tables, tt tables, tennis court, gym) are totally awesome. Do ping me if you are in Hyderabad and I'd be happy to take around the campus.

6. Yogitha: Yogitha is still in Bangalore and is currently serving here notice period at Sasken. She is staying with her parents. One nice thing to note: Yogitha got promoted to Senior Software Engineer last month.

Those are all the updates I have for now. I hope to post again soon.