Being passionate Vs Making money

Over the last few days I have been having interesting discussions with my friends on being passionate in what we do versus having focus on the money aspect while doing things. Here are my thoughts on the same.
I belive that one needs to be passionate about what one does. There should be an excitement while thinking about what one is doing. What this does to the person is that it makes them enjoy what they are doing and it also ensures that they feel responsible for what they are doing. This automatically leads to a better product and a more caring service. This all sounds so wonderful but there is a downside to this just having passion and doing things may not result in short term monetary rewards but almost always there are long term monetary rewards if the person sticks to their passion right through the ups and the downs. Also during this time the person is enjoying what they are doing and this keeps them motivated and happy.

On the other hand if a person is doing a job only for the monetary aspect of it then this makes it very hard. There are always ups and downs in the monetary side of things. If there is no other motivation other than money in doing a job then the person will find it very hard to navigate through the downs. The downs are inevitable - one cannot try to escape them. Its just inherrent in the monetary cycle. Money also tends to make the person lose focus on the quality aspect of the product and the service. This in turn finally effects the long term monetary gain expected from offering the product or the service.

Its important to have passion in what one does with a focus on ensuring long term monetary gains. Focussing on short term monetary gains and compromising on the passion never works. Having passion while doing things eventually gets noticed and will be rewarded.

Something new to learn always

I believe learning can never ever stop. Everyday there is something new to learn and there are times when you are forced into a situation that drives you to learn even faster. These situations are crisis situations - during this time you always learn at lightning speed and you feel it is the hardest time in your life but the important thing is to stick in there ride out the crisis, do your best and you end up coming out of it a more knowledgeable individual. No amount of make believe scenarios and training can give you the kind of learning a crisis situation gives.

Having significant experience in Software Development and having worked on more than one large project one feels that they have seen pretty much everything. Over the last 15 days I have been through two crisis situations that have made me realise that I have not experienced it all yet.

The first situation involved our servers that were on a public IP located at a data center that hosted our website http://yourschool.in/. I got a call one day from the data center telling me that the bandwidth used by our site was 25 times more than normal in a month. So I immediately went and checked the usage information given by the data center and realised that the only way this kind of traffic can happen is if someone is hacking into the server. So I start investigating this and I sudenly realise that I need to start learning about Firewalls, Ports, IIS Vulnerabilities, IIS Logs, ... to solve the problem.

The second situation involved an application that we built that worked fine in the development environment, Quality Assurance Environment but was crashing in production. We spent more than a week every night in the office trying to debug the problem in production but to no avail. After a lot of persistence and patience and learning from our findings in production we were able to replicate the issue in the development environment. It was related to an issue of deadlocks happening in the database. This time I was forced to learn about SQL Profiling, Deadlocks, SQL Error Logs, CLR Profiling,...

I could have found it very hard to create these two situations in a laboratory environment to be able to learn how to handle it. But after riding through these two difficult situations I have come out feeling like I am a more knowledgeable person now which does make me feel good. So my hope is to never stop learning and the more I learn the more confident and happy I feel.

How life can change in a moment?

I was reading a very deep and touching post today on Subroto Bagchi's blog which is about a young girls life changing in a momment for no fault of hers. Its a very touching story that can happen to any one of us.

There have been 2 devastating earthquakes in the last 1 month one in Peurto Rico and the other in Chile. In just a matter of a minute the lives of millions of people changed. Again something that can happen at any time to anyone.

Life can change in a momment for any one of us and it is important that we enjoy and have fun with every momment that we have.There is no point in thinking about the missed opportunities in life or what life could be if only we did something - you are wasting precious time that can be spent just enjoying life.

Social Web - Does not work for me !

First there was twitter. Everyone seemed to have had a twitter account. So I created one too. Nothing happened for the longest time and I unknowingly followed a lot of people who kept dumping me with a lot of junk information. So I then went and "unfollowed" many of them. I then configured it on my mobile phone thinking OK at least this will make me tweet. I tweeted the first couple of days - i then felt stupid tweeting because i wondered, do the people that are following me really care about what I tweet. What if I am just creating a whole lot of junk information out there with my tweets. So I stopped tweeting when I realised I gave some stupid advise on tweeting that goes like "just tweet what ever is in your head. I'm sure there are enough people that will put up with your nonsense, like me". This is not really true is what i now realised. Tweet only if you have quality information to share which your followers care about.

Then came facebook and orkut - I have accounts with all the three but that's about it. Every once in a while someone friends me which makes me login to accept their invitation for the fear of insulting them if I do not accept their "friendship" and then I friend some more people just for the fun of it.

I was all excited when Google came out with Google Wave. They gave me an account with some invitations and I so excitedly handed them out to everyone hoping that they will "wave" with me, but that was not to be. Very few waved with me because we did not know what to "wave" about. Maybe I'm still not yet far enough into the future to understand how to "wave".

Anyway then came "buzz". I again said OK let me "buzz". But then again I had a whole lot of friends that I thought I could "buzz" with, but again I was wrong - my Google "buzz" is as quiet as quiet can be.

So all this got me thinking. Is real time information not my thing? With so much information readily available all over the place are we complicating our lives with all of this. Well I think I am. The catch is that if you don't use any of these tools you are accused of not changing with the times. You are accused of being stuck in the past. Ive been writing this blog since July 2005 and I still find it the best way to express my thoughts. My thoughts on this blog are written, reviewed, changed, reviewed again and then published. Thoughts and ideas should not be like fast food and I think all of the "tweeting, buzzing, waving, wall(ing), ..." is like fast food - you get a few tit bits of value and the rest is junk !