Still Blogging. Yes, I am

I know I have been away from this blog for quite a long time. It's been just over 6 months since I've blogged. There are reasons and other stories. But apart from all of those, I'm glad I am writing here again. I don't know how often I'll be writing again, certainly not once a day (like I ever did that). However I'm hoping now I'll have freedom to write whenever I feel like. But the best way to keep in touch with me is to follow me on Twitter.

Here's a brief account of how my life's been during the past few months which saw me transform significantly.


Microblogging

First thing which slowed down my blogging is microbloggin. Yes, I got in to Twitter early last year and since then never look back. I'm an avid Tweeter and it has become a part of my daily routine. One cool thing I like about Twitter is it's no nonsense and does just one thing, and one thing properly. It lets me keep in touch with like minded people and share information as a side benefit. It's the one social network service which I found non-obtrusive. Another thing Twitter did was killing my dilemma about write or not about every interesting thing I came across. It's a good thing. Now I can write here only the things I feel like.


Employment

My professional life has not been so good. I got to learn a few important lessons about how *not* to do things. I'm glad I got to learn those things but I'm really disappointed about a certain few people, whom I thought had the guts to walk the talk. I'm not without error in this interest. So I am not blaming anyone for taking my own enthusiasm about FOSS (and computing in general) and hanging myself with it. I did that to myself. Those people just gave me a place to do just that. :)

To be concise, I left one place and joined a new place hoping that there's much to do and gain. Unfortunately it was not so to be. If it hadn't been my parents, that patch was enough to see me to financial oblivion. I'm all grateful to my family including my love and my good friends for helping me to hold up. Being said all that, today I'm doing as well as any time else. Life's good. There's a lot of challenges to be faced, but I'm up to it.


Education

I've been an undergraduate from the beginning of the recorded history I guess. When some of my friends have achieved their masters I was still in my bachelors. To my justification I've been working and doing my studies part time.

This year, finally, I finished my undergraduate studies by completing Business Computing program of the University of Wolverhampton. The lecturers were wonderful and they flew all the way from UK to deliver the lectures. Academic staff at IDM did a very good job coordinating the process.

Unfortunately I missed this years graduation ceremony. No worries, I can wait for the ceremony.


Maturity

I assure you that I've seen a a lot of maturity in the last few months. A lot of people close to me might beg to differ. ;) But hey, I know how I think better.

I used to be this guy who went with the flow and thought everything would be more or less OK (in life). Maybe not exactly in the way it sounds like, but there were certain things I thought I took serious. But really I had no idea how serious they were. And I always felt a little shy/awkward to discuss about my girlfriend with my parents, even when they've known her for a long time and considered her to be one of their own. :)

From that I went on to being the guy who sat down and had 5.5 hour discussions with family about marriage, wedding, career, and etc, etc. It might not sound convincing, but I know who I am now.


New Computer

Just last Friday, I bought a new computer. Which reminds me that I have to get my old laptop into repair. I didn't feel like buying a new laptop because I hope I can get the old one working and because I can get a lot of power for a low cost if I bought a desktop. Core i7 is still a little pricey, so my bargain was a Core 2 Duo.

I got a machine with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz processor, 4 GB memory, 320 GB SATA disk, DVD burner, Intel motherboard, 17" widescreen LCD display, Foxconn casing, etc. all under 60k rupees.


My Main OS

If you are reading this anyway the chances are, you already know that I use Linux 100%. Sometimes I've dual booted with FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, but I'm mainly a Linux user. I have long given up using Windows. I've been running Red Hat (until version 9), then Fedora, then completely Debian, then Ubuntu for a while and finally Mint until recently.

I still run Mint at home where my father, brother, cousins, etc. all who are not Linux folks are happily using Linux Mint. Kudos to the Mint team for making a very new / convert user friendly distribution of Linux. Whenever a new Linux user asks for a first distro I hand out Mint these days. It's very good. Their latest version (7), named Gloria gives a superb 1st impression.

However my personal favourite distro now is Fedora. I've run Fedora 9 alone with Mint and it was solid. So I switched to Fedora as my main OS when Fedora 10 was released. It didn't disappoint. To me Fedora has the perfect balance between use friendliness and power user convenience. It doesn't stay on my way and in the same time it makes a lot of things I regularly do (coding, documenting) really convenient. Fedora is a solid distribution of Linux and probably the one who's riding the innovation / cutting edge tide at the foremost. So I installed Fedora 11 on my shiny new desktop PC, and I'm loving it.


Contribution

I've always been contributing to FOSS projects whenever I could via bug reports, mailing lists, forums, helping out new users, public events, etc. Now I'm comfortable enough reading code (remember, I'm a SysAdmin) so I might take more active roles in near future.

I've also started lurking more in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channels at Freenode.net. My nick on Freenode is "gaveen".

I also started contributing to the monthly, free, online IT magazine, diGIT. I'm writing a Linux basics article there. It's good to see a free magazine with good content. Gihan Fernando is leading and coordinating this effort. It should be much commended how much he takes with his crew to get diGIT out by the 1st day of every month.


Professional Transformation

From the regular System Administrator, I've gone into become more coding loving (thanks to Ruby) and more cloud aware, agile aware. I'm so glad that I looked into Ruby programming a few years ago. For the record Ruby has a great assortment of system administration / infrastructure related projects in its ecosystem.

As they say, I came for Rails and stayed for Ruby. The attraction which caught me was Ruby on Rails web application framework. But what kept me all interested was the language behind it.

I'm much interested in following things these days: Puppet (configuration management), Hudson (continuous integration), RabbitMQ (AMQP/message queuing) among many others as usual. As you can see, I've taken quite an interest in the next generation of system infrastructure. ;)

About version controlling systems, there's been no hiding how much I like Git. There's no need to repeat it. My stance haven't changed. Again for the record I started using Git before the Ruby crowd changed from Subversion (seemingly over one night) into Git users. :) I've used Mercurial, and also closed a repo using Bazaar ;) but Git is still my favourite.

My main text editor was gedit (with a few plugins) for a while. I always used vi/vim on a terminal, but on a desktop, gedit did well for me. Then a few months ago I had the opportunity to use Vim for things other than just basic editing. I used, I witnessed and now I am a believer. :)

In fact, I'm loving Vim so much that my next blog post will be about the Vim configuration I'm using. To be fair gedit is a very good editor and I also have good expectation from the new Redcar editor. However I don't see myself switching away from Vim in the foreseeable future.


That's all for this post. I'm not going to say I'm back (because I've done that before). But I'm saying I'm blogging again. I'll be back soon with a post about my Vim configuration. If you like to keep more in touch follow me on Twitter.