Manoj Kumar

Tech. Nostalgia

When I looked back and think about sharing the work done in the past, it doesn’t make sense as those technologies has limited relevance today. One may say sad, but I think its the beauty of technology as it keeps evolving. Keeps me on a journey of learning more.

Going back in time when I started my career as software developer. On the first day I was asked to do the data entry for a customer, I was stunned but I did that with full dedication and passion without any complaint resulted. I got a live project the very next day.

After that there was a 3 to 4 year journey from converting existing Foxpro projects to Visual Basic Applications and new development. In that journey I had developed applications for companies in automobile, education, garments, carpets, healthcare and chemical sectors. The software used included Visual Basic, Crystal Reports, MS Access, MS SQL and DTS services.

While working with Futurescape I have done some great projects with industry leaders. If I jog my memory these come to mind…

I feel proud to be a part of one of the first successful CRM implementation in Indian healthcare industry. While the maker of the CRM software hardly bothered to support the implementation, we still did good and it felt good to have learnt so much and also ensured smiles for our client.

I never thought I was creative but I once did something very nice with SCALA. It was just an experiment but I felt good doing it. I had mixed feelings when the client said “Everything went bad in the meeting except the presentation made by you for which I got an award”. It felt nice that my client was appreciated even though the meeting could have been better. I was really happy that i discovered another part of me.

Another time, a concept developed started as a small internal site for a HR department of a company but it got so successful that it was implemented at Global Level.

There are simple joys like developing a concept that allowed a healthcare company to send emails to people and in turn they could interact in the email to calculate their health problems .

To more complicated ones…

Isn’t it great that you have developed an analytics cubes in MS SQL Analytics Services which gives you so much information from various dimensions about business which previously took days to fetch. For the same client you create Drill Down Crystal Reports which starts from Locations -> to -> Gender -> to -> Age Group -> to -> Age -> to -> Department -> to -> Customer -> to -> Single invoice itself, thats so much data was available on the client intranet.

Pivot Table web reports developed using OWC (Office Web Component) for a client which gives information and comparison for various States, Cites, Time Period and so on. It was a challenge as most users was using various version of MS Office and finding help on OWC for Pivot Table was like going through hell.

Two years ago, when i first started my journey with open source, it was with Dot Net Nuke. It was logical since I came from a background of Microsoft tools . As you are aware DNN is based on ASP.NET. It thrills me that we used this ASP.NET based product to develop a portal for a franchisee network. It has everything that the business requires for their day to day operations. I will not bore you with the details except that it has been running successfully for the last two years and is this is also an case study for the client.

Just writing all the good memories made me smile . Wish I had started my blog earlier , because then I would have shared more and learnt even more from all the people around. But I guess it is never too late and technology always evolves.

About two years ago, i discovered Wordpress and it has started a new journey. It is an appropriate time as I write this, the new BuddyPress release came out and it was satisfying and yet a huge surprise to see my name in the credits. Thank You Wordpress and the team and most of all to all the clients I have worked with and helped me learn.