Rambling stories from my days @ Code71 : My Takehome

Today is going to be my last day with the Code71 team and this is the last post of the series on my Code71 days.

The journey started on June 1, 2006 and now at this moment, I just wanted to summarize my takehome from the last three years' of work. I will go short, just touching the bits...

Teaming is at the core of Code71's culture. It went beyond teaming just for software development as we met outside for a movie, celebrated even the smallest of personal achievements and shared the excitement of a cricket or tennis match even at midnight from home over phone!

Planning and adapting practice. I have gone through aprroximately 70 sprint planning and 50 sprint retrospect sessions at work. But this scrum habit of inspect and adapt has been engrossed in my personal life as well. I try to maintain a written to-do list with deadlines and look back at times.

Continuous learning. As I worked on different technologies (.Net/RoR) and different domains (Financial/Vehicle dealership/Project management/Web community), I learned to grab new concepts. I developed a learning attitude towards solving a problem and realizing an opportunity.

Happy memories are great as takehome gifts and I feel blessed to have a large array of such memories. Helping the team growing and maturing towards best-practices is itself a happy feeling. And there are those great memories with seeing a start-up client making millions, getting gift card from happy clients on new year... and of course the team meets at the Code71 dining.

I will end with a few thanks note here. Thanks to Nimat and Syed for believing in my competence and giving me the opportunity to work, lead and learn. (I am really sorry that the I had to turn down the L-1 offer, it really was too late!). Thanks to all of my teammates for your ever smiling faces and support. Thanks to Omar, my first mentor at Code71, for introducing me to the basics and the pathway to continuous learning. A special thanks to Sohel, our office assistant, for his ever enthusiastic service and care. Wishing best of luck to Shaer and his team, you will take the company to the next height inshaAllah.

I am going to graduate school at University of Calgary, Canada this fall to start my MS under Prof. Frank Maurer and looking forward to it. I hope my experience at Code71 will help me in my future life and who knows, may be someday I will again be a part of the Code71 team!

Rambling story from my days @ Code71: My reading list

In my previous post, I got a bit nostalgic! However, ever since I posted the first one, I was looking for another post on the series. Trying to capture what I learned during the past 3 years, I found it would be really time taking for me and my readers. So, I sort of compiled the following list in this post. Hope it helps someone who is just eager to learn about software.

Books

• Founders at work
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code - By Martin Fowler
• Patterns & practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0
• Agile web development with Rails
• Head first Object-Oriented analysis and design
• The scrum primer
• Code complete

Most visited sites

• Google
• MSDN
• Rails API
• Wikipedia
• Rails guides

Blogs

• Jason Haley’s link blog
• Chris Alcocks’s reflective perspective

Community

• ASP.Net forum
• Rails forum

Rambling stories from my days @ Code71 : Startup days

Sighs!

Back then, on Friday, May 26, 2006, I was a final year undergrad student at CSE, BUET. I was looking for a part-time software dev job opportunity and found a little one page advert for a student job at asha-technologies (lately renamed as Code71). Visited their website and thought it might be worth giving a try!

As usual, I was interviewed over phone and enjoyed a long 2 hour interview on premise. I found it really inspiring and gained more interest towards the job after this session. I started waiting for a response… but was pretty certain about a positive one!

Good things happen in quick successions in our lives. Agree?

I agree. Because I just started a soul-journey with my soul-mate, Shahana, on the March of 2006. Then got the job offer on the 26th of May! Couldn’t be happier. A job for me during that time was just beyond its compensation, it was an inspiration, opportunity to see the real world and being part of something bigger than myself.

Photo taken at Chhera dip (The Torn Island), St. Martins, Bangladesh. The last photograph taken with my first digital camera bought from my first month’s Salary!

I started my job on the 1st of June, 2006 at Asha-technologies. Asha-tech was still to find an office and Omar asked to meet him at his home office! That’s how it all started. We met a few times a week at Omar’s home until we moved to our office at the green building of green square at green road, Dhaka on the first of July.

Asha-tech signed up a client before it was even formed! So, once we moved into the office, we were building our first asha-tech product, an online loan financing gateway. We were enthusiastic about agile scrum/xp practices from the first day at office. The result was found in just less than 3 months. We rolled out our first release of the product. It was really a happy start. A fantastic start for a start-up. The client started generating revenue in less than 3 months of project inception!

The office setup was a small but adequate enough for our team. We installed long backup UPS (2 hours * 5 computers), A/C, IPS and dedicated internet connection with Wi-Fi. The work environment was full of fun. We were going for an outing to a team event every month and even more often going to delicious buffet places. We played table football and bowling… every time had a record breaking score and a new winner. We went swimming and believe me, Omar is as good a swimmer as he is a master in software technology. He would go to swimming with a flipper and flip like professional swimmers. He can even swim without using his hands/legs at all, lying side-on and in all such actions… I learned swimming keeping heads down and the easy way of breathing from him! Thanks!

Technologically we were maturing as well. Started using XPlanner for managing our project, attended daily standup meetings and started doing TDD. I won’t claim we got everything right at the first try… but, we were trying consistently, improving bit by bit… to this day.

For the most part, I was enjoying my job and became used to the pressure of a job + undergraduate studies. I said, good things happen in close succession. Another proof here! My first term final result with this job was a 4.0/4.0. I never scored 4.0 in a term before this nor had a 20+ hour/week job alongside my studies.

I strongly believe, my job taught me the attitude towards work, “plan, act and retrospect”. After over three years, I would suggest any new entrant in the software industry to start a career with passion. Its fun with passion. Its a win everyday with passion.