According to Wordle’s processing of this blog’s text from the last 1 month, here’s what I care about:

Directi has launched its first Treasure Hunt http://th.directi.com/. The target audience for this treasure hunt are the participants of the Great Indian Developer Summit. Hopefully we will come up with many more such contests to help us build a stronger community of software professionals in India.

On similar lines we are planning a series of contests focused on Software Design, UX, Testing, etc.  Watch out the Directi wiki for updates.

Currently I’m suffering from massively over-committing to conferences, community building activities and open source. With one conference every month and commitment on few open source projects, I’m finding it really hard to fulfill my full time job @ Directi. After thinking about this for a couple of weeks, I have decided the following:

• No more conferences for Naresh Jain in 2009 and possible 2010. I might attend may be one conference just to stay in touch with folks. I need to focus on working in the trenches and continue learning and innovating. Right now I feel I’m getting quite hands-off.
• I’m taking a temporary part-time break from Directi for the next 4-5 months. I’ll still continue to be an employee of Directi and I’ll also spend 1.5 to 2 weeks a month working within Directi. But my involvement on their products will be drastically reduced from leading some aspects of the project to consulting on them until these 4-5 months.
• For the next 4-5 months to sustain myself I’ll be open to consulting/training for 3-5 days a month. Hopefully this can fund me for the series of conferences that I’ve signed up for this year.
• In 2008, I’m already over booked, so starting now, I’m refusing all new offers to speaker at conferences.
• Over time, I’ll reduce my commitment on ASCI activities. I’ll try to keep my involvement to a minimum, mostly a coordinator/contact point for some activities.
• I’ll continue contributing to all the open source projects that I’m involved with, but over a period of time I might reduce the number of projects I’m involved with.
• I’ll continue to play customer role for the Penn State project, but hopefully I’ll be done with it in May.

If you have any suggestions or ideas to help me, please feel free to guide this blind man 🙁

Yes I’m talking about Reverse Sourcing and not the tradition outsourcing.

From Wikipedia:

Outsourcing is subcontracting a process, such as product design or manufacturing, to a third-party company.

The decision to outsource is often made in the interest of lowering firm costs, redirecting or conserving energy directed at the competencies of a particular business, or to make more efficient use of labor, capital, technology and resources.

Today when we refer to outsourcing, its common to think about outsourcing to “third world countries”(economically backward) primarily for cost advantages. Esp. in software we all have see a huge wave of outsource development. Companies in US, Europe, Australia, etc outsourcing development of software products to countries like India, China, Philippines, Sweden, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, etc. The customer and business side of people stay onshore while development and testing is offshored.

Even though Reverse Sourcing is actually Outsourcing, it different from the very intent point of view. There is a sense of things being reversed. For example, the customer and product owner is now in India and while the developers and testers are in US.

Slowly I’m seeing a trend of reverse sourcing picking up in India. Companies and Individuals in India are outsourcing development work to US and Europe. This trend is quite opposite to what was happening before where the main driving factor for outsourcing was financial. So far I’ve seen reverse sourcing happening mostly on niche technologies and domains. Cost is no longer the driving factor. Certainly developing in US turns out to be at least 2 times more expensive than developing it here.

I had a few product ideas and I was planning to outsource the development to few folks I know in US. Me being an individual, and not willing to go down the VC route, I was not able to pay them per hour US rates. Instead I was planning to work on an “equity sharing” model. Where the developers in US get some stake in the end product.

While I have not made much progress on this front, I did meet a few companies in India, who were outsourcing development to US and actually paying US rates to them. To improve my understanding of how reverse sourcing works and to get comfortable playing the customer role, I have started a pilot project with Penn State University, where I’ll be the customer and students of Penn State University will be the development team. More details on this project on “Playing Customer for Penn State University Project“.

After spending 22 months in US, finally I’m back in Bangalore, India for good.

Does it not get annoying to be forced to work with different wikis and each wiki having different syntaxes?

Currently I have to work with:
1. fitnesse: for our acceptance testing. Since fitnesse is meant for acceptance testing and has a horrible search functionality it stays in its own space
2. MediaWiki: The current client that I‘m working for uses MediaWiki for the project and cross team wikis. So all the important project stuff goes here. But these have horrible navigation. It also does not support RSS on all the pages.
3. Confluence: At my current company we use Confluence for internal use. It is pretty powerful. But my biggest complain is, it‘s licensed, not open sourced. It is difficult to convince my client to buy confluence.
4. VQWiki: Currently I‘m playing with VQWiki. It uses Lucene as its search engine. I was looking to integrate lucene with Fitnesse and that‘s how I got introduced to vqwiki. Now we use it for our refactoring fest at the Agile Philly User Group.

You will be surprised to see how many different wikis are available out there. List of wiki software

I see a big problem having so many wikis with lack of open standards across these wikis. None of the wikis seem to understand each other‘s format. Right now the only way to avoid information lock down is to write some crazy scripts to port data from one wiki to another. This is certainly not a sustainable model as more and more companies switch to wikis for team collaboration.

Today after the heavy snow storms in Philadelphia, I spent a couple of hours shoveling the snow and removing my car out. Having successfully shoveled the car out, I decided to go for a drive to celebrate. After returning from the drive, the celebration/joy came to a sudden demise when I found my parking slot was taken by another car. Though the slot was assigned to me, probably the other person was too thrilled to see a clean parking slot and parked his/her car without a second thought.

Next couple of hours were spent in agony trying to find the owner of the car. Then I tried calling the towing company, but they were only working for the police tonight. I tried disturbing the neighbors, enquiring if they had any guest. And guess what? Still no clue of the car owner.

Well, luck seems to have deserted me. And now I‘m wondering in search of a parking slot. What a nice way to get rewarded for your hard work.

A few weeks back I went partying with a bunch of ThoughtWorkers from the Chicago office. First we went to club called Sonetheque. Guess what? We had arrived even before the club had opened. To kill time, we headed to a near by Veg restaurant. After a few drinks and some crazy appetizers, we landed at Sonetheque again. To our surprise they did not let me in coz I was not carrying my identity on me. So we had to head back to the hotel to pick up my passport. Remember, if you are going out clubbing in the US, it‘s always better to carry your identity [passport/US driving license].

We soon forgot all this pain and found ourselves swinging to the awesome music. That night was a special Berlin minimal techno or minimal house dubtec music night. The DJ rocked. The party stopped at 2:30 in the morning and we guys headed out for some food.

This is was the best part so far. We guys went to a place called Wiener Circle. This place is very famous for its hotdogs. When we entered this place, there was all kinds of screaming and abusing going on. I thought, there was some dispute between some customers and the restaurant staff. In the next few minutes, I realized that was the culture of this restaurant. And all this screaming and shouting is what really makes this place special.

So if you want to order a hotdog, this is how it works:
Customer: “Hey you f**king bi*ch, give me a hotdog right now or I will chop off your head“
Staff: “What kind of a hotdog you want, son of a bi*ch”
And this screaming would continue for a while till they get the hotdog and they pay…

It was amazing to watch the energy levels in this place. At 3:00 in the morning, people were really screaming and enjoying. This place reminds of the Fish book. It‘s all about how to make your work interesting and satisfy your customers.

Organizations like this creates a place in the customers mind without trying too hard. They are different and they rock.

Today I looked at my blog and I was thrilled. Guess why? I had the second highest number of hits on my page.

But the ice melted soon. To my surprise most of the hits were from some very interesting sites. Below is the list

Today‘s Page Hits: 517

• weightloss.klub-tit. (79)
• learning.klub-tit.co (78)
• breast.klub-tit.com/ (64)
• acyclovir.klub-tit.c (63)
• weightloss.klub-tit. (63)
• freecard.klub-tit.co (62)
• airline-travel.grem- (47)
• www.jroller.com/ (8)
• direct (7)
• www.homeloanssecrets (2)
• www.netdebtconsolida (2)
• www.vioxxattorneyhel (2)
• www.toselltimeshare. (2)
• www.goldlifeinsuranc (2)
• www.ridewebhosting.c (2)
• www.networksecuritya (2)
• www.finalcrmsoftware (2)
• www.getcarinsurance. (2)
• wap.google.com/searc (1)
• www.google.co.in/sea (1)
• nandury.blogspot.com (1)
• www.google.nl/search (1)
• www.payer.net (1)
• www.highriskcreditca (1)
• www.google.com/searc (1)
• jroller.org/ (1)
• www.google.com/searc (1)
• www.google.co.in/sea (1)
• www.google.co.in/sea (1)
• www.google.co.in/sea (1)

I‘m still wondering how people can get such creative ideas.