Yup, that’s what I do for living, and I get paid quite decently for doing that… As the experts in the field of software development rightly say, the biggest reason for a bug to be present in a piece of code is the code itself. If there was no code in the first place, there would not have been that freakin bug. I remember while I was watching the California Wild fire coverage on the news channel back in 2008, there was a couple shown, who lost their home in the California wildfires put up a humorous sign that reads, "Finally! No Termites." No Home, no damn termites.

Well that’s common sense I know. Although I find it pretty fascinating that underneath my title of a software developer, I am actually developing ingenious ways to create bugs!

Happy Programming!

I think this is a no-brainer for a successful for startup company. As the world is getting shrinking due to internet, gradually each of your family members would get the taste of it (if they haven’t got it yet). That means as people search for stuff they need, they would use Google (Bing for those who like to search for porn), click on the link and hopefully land on one of your site pages. This makes your website literally the starting point of your business whatever it may be. And what if your website is a real cheap job. Well.. for those who hardly care about these things might give it a shot, but frankly almost all like to see something aesthetically  good design. Something which is less complicated and highly usable.

Lately I was rummaging several websites here in India to buy a new house, precisely in Pune. I do realize that India is not at a stage where every new business that comes in the market makes sure to have their own website. But businessman are getting aware of this mistake and taking baby steps towards changing this. Look at these sites I visited,

http://www.pscl.in/

http://www.adityabuilders.com/

http://www.goelganga.com/

Cheap ain’t  it? For a web developer such a website creates quite a bit of negative impact, believe it or not. Now look at one of Puranik builders site http://www.spaininindia.com/. When you have something cool, flashhy to sell, why not make your website feel the same? 

P.S. – I hope I can instigate this feeling in the company I work!!! http://www.synechron.com/.

Happy Programming!

Every time I visit a bookstore, my mind starts jumping around like that of a tiny tot in a Toy store (or like Glenn Quagmire in an adult store, whichever sounds correct here). I just wish I had the whole amazon book store in my room for use anytime! Sigh! Cannot have that. Anyways, I have a whole lot of ebooks on my machine, but I own some of them. Few of the books in my ebook collection are not available in India. Below is a snapshot of my book collection as shown by the Delicious library.

Each of these books are worth every friggin buck you spend on them.

Happy Programming!

I am running IE8 on my Windows XP machine. I am building a website for one my clients, the project is going really well. I am working on adding browser specific CSS to my site using the Request.Browser class in ASP.NET. Things are looking absolutely beautiful in Firefox, Safari, Chrome ….. you name it. Opened IE8.. wonderful as usual. Clicked compatibility mode in IE8, so running IE7 technically, looks good again. Closed the IE8 instance, opened IE8 just to make sure things were ok, YAIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE KARAMBAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!! Someone unleashed hell on my webpage. What happened!

They way I added browser specific CSS is in my code, detect the browser name and version and add css reference in the Head tag of the page. Now there is a situation where IE8 is in compatibility mode, but the UserAgent still has browser version of 8.0 in it, due to which in my case, the IE8 css was added in an IE7 scenario. The problem with my approach was I was trying to do everything on the server side. It happens so that to detect if a user has turned on Compatibility mode, we have to have some kind of client side scripting done. The magic property is document.documentMode, this value is probably only available in IE8 browser. For IE8, the value is “8”, for compatibility mode it is “7”. So one way would be to disable to IE8 css which is already added and add the IE7 css when the browser is in compatibility mode, like so,

 $(document).ready(function() {
        if(document.documentMode == "7")
        {
         var head = document.getElementById('pageHead');
         var linktg = document.createElement('link');
         linktg.type = 'text/css';            
         linktg.rel = 'stylesheet';            
         linktg.href = 'MyStyle-IE7.css';   
         linktg.media = 'all';                
         head.appendChild(linktg);    
         $("link[href='MyStyle-IE8.css']").attr('disabled','true');
        }
}

Happy Programming!

Salary is always a slightly weird if not uncomfortable topic to talk about during HR interviews at least for me. What should I say, would it be so much that I might be taken as a R-tard, or so less that I might be laughed at. Well believe it or not, very few folks know how much they should get paid depending on their experience, location, interview performance and other factors. When I was a fresher, it was pretty much a category in which all of us were put in when hired by a big firm. Everyone had the same amount on their paychecks. But as experience level rises, we get smarter and bolder (at least that is how it is supposed to be), we start thinking about our salary more seriously. I am yet to find a tool/website which would honestly provide a figure that would be very close to what I can ask for in an offer. Services like PayScale, Salary.com seem to be bullshitting us for quite long. Every time I checked my worth on these sites with my experience and other factors, I used to get a figure way less than my colleagues were getting. May be that could be a business tactics used by these services to entice us in getting their paid service to provide more information and get a better salary figure. 

Recently a famous job site in India Naukri.com launched a service called PayCheck. This service basically gives a graphical representation of where you stand among other people with similar profile as yours. A little bit of digging into this and you would realize that the data these guys are using is from the salaries reported by active profiles on Naukri.com. The problem here? Well, if we are talking about folks who have their current salary on Naukri, and are actively searching for new openings, there is a high probability that the salary they have posted is less than what they expect. Using such figures for calculating our expected salary seems a little dubious. Nevertheless, not all are searching for just a better pay, so there is some amount of good data which has helped in this analysis. I wish Naukri ties up with some kind of parallel service wherein they allow anonymous users to post their salaries alongside the companies and their satisfaction rates, something on the lines of Glassdoor, mouthshut etc. This way we really have a better dataset to calculate our expected salary.