Hello from 2019!

10 Dec 2019

The year 2019 is about to end. I haven't written in this space for over an year. I thought, I will write a short entry to say "hello" to anyone who still visits this blog.

Isn't it shame I got spoiled by twitter and stopped blogging here? You know, the irony? It is that I don't even follow twitter anymore, and only time I tweet is to complain about a product and service :-)

Time dilutes everything -- we can't laugh same way on same joke over and again; hence we can't keep crying over same issues over and again.

I have accepted things -- wrote many entries about hardship of doing software/it business from smaller cities, and made peace with it, perhaps found a way to deal with things. As it's said, necessity is the mother of invention.

Anyway, I have been spending most of my time building a business for a narrow vertical - helping Zendesk customers take their self-service offering (Help Center, Knowledge Base) to next level.

A part of my day goes in talking to customers, and helping them with help of my team. Then rest of time my team and I spend building things using html, css, and javascript with a mix of Zendesk Curlybar (Handlebar derivative) templating language.

Had I ever imagined I would find myself devoting most of my time over years (at least 4 now -- since I got involved) for something that's technologically this trivial compared to what I have done in past, and can still do?

Why do I it then? I do it because I realise that even a simple products (made using a simple recipe and with simpler ingredients) brings smiles and a lot of happiness to thousands of users (mostly non technical) everyday. It's that purpose that drives us, and personally keeps me happier than ever. We walk extra mile to help our customers beyond those lines of thinking if it should cost extra or not; we don't even talk about that most of the time.

We have thousand and thousands of happy customers, and we have got tons of testimonials over the years. When someone is able to build what they envision on top of our product, and then they celebrate by printing the work on cake -- that makes our day.

Customised Diziana Drogo Theme printed on a cake.

Whatever (work) time I am left with, I spend learning and practicing new stuff; managing a fleet of servers and services. Once in a while, there is 1-4 weeks busy time when I am building some (micro) service and integration for other on going projects in the company. I love these short bursts where I push myself to actually deliver things using latest and greatest (stable) tech-stack under a lot of time pressure. I have learnt so much, and helps me feel relevant even when I am aging like my Macbook :-)

It's not about me anymore; it's about them (team, customers, company -- all people who are positively affected).