I used to be a Nerd since a child, meddling with mechanical components, spares of motors, circuits and bulbs always fascinated me. I still remeber the excitement after accidentally fixing a Radio Transistor as they were named in the 90’s. Many Christmas holidays were fun since my neigbour always invites me for fixing the decoration lights and lets me DJ his vinyl player. And he also had Computers that runs with a series of 5-1/4″ disks. I remebered playing dave, prince of persia, and pac man in his computers. That was my first introduction to computers, though at that age I didn’t understand that computers could do greater things than gaming and I got stuck to it since then. At that time computers were not so popular and were not introduced in my school then.
May be at mid school computer science was introduced in our curriculum, Those were times when computers had those big CRT monitors and were kept above the rectangular CPU, the bulky keyboard and mouse with a heavy ball. Teachers had a tough time controlling kids playing with it like marbles. I guess the first operating system we were introduced to was windows 95 and the first Programming Language we were taught was Logo – the turtle and GW BASIC. Logo has a turtle that draws as per the instructions given to them on basis of the number of steps, directions and  x & y axis. Whereas, the GW Basic was more for some simple games and business calculations. So that’s the inception of my Computer Journey.

At high school computer science was one of the subjects i chose to study and that was the only subject that made me survive. I was good in subjects that were logical, practical or mathematical but was drowned in theoretical subjects. We were introduced to HTML, Visual Basic and Java. I did some cool web pages with a lot of colors and animations. I did a cool slot machine game in Visual Basic that was not included in the curriculum. I was very good in Visual Basic and HTML, I loved them so much.  But then I couldn’t process Java so much. My computer teacher inspired and motivated me. The computer lab was my wonderland then, the only class the time goes fast and was never enough for me.

In the summer holidays of high school, I found a computer institute and tried to learn some advanced courses and learnt oracle database 7, but i couldn’t connect well then. I made up my mind that I am not good in programming or in databases hence my interest died there. My dad bought me a computer then. It had Windows ME, I more used it for entertainment and games like Road rash, Age of empires, quake 3, commando, fifa etc,.

I got into a college, enrolled into Bachelors of Commerce. Yes, it was a blunder. It was so difficult for me grasp and to be attentive for me being a nerd and I spaced out all the time. Luckily,  my classmate and friend was working as a part time trainee in a computer training institue. He Inspired and helped me to study the Computer Hardware and Networking, I learnt Windows NT 3.5 and 4.0 Server and client then. I was so good at it that i was confident that i chose my path. I also learnt Redhat linux, Suse Linux and VMware workstation then. I realised that I was able to work on all platforms but I was naturally excellent in windows and quickly self learnt windows server 2003. i realised that i was not comfortable with linux but was still able to do the job. I focused more on the enhancing my Skills on Windows server 2003 and was good at all Infrastructure services. I partnered with few colleagues and kept on learning, building solutions in our lab and enhanced our skill across platforms and versions.

I stumbled upon being a Citrix Administrator for a few years and for enforcing and customising applications and experience at registry level as well as GPO in AD, automation of tasks, builds, and troubleshooting issues… I self learnt programming using batch files and VB Scripts and was able to do a lot of optimization and save time in my work. Once i wrote a large program with HTML front end to check the status of the servers, across the datacenters and clear users profiles stuck and locked in the registry.

After moving into a Technical Architect role with end to end IT, implementations from Hetrogenous Compute, SAN, Networking, Virtualization “VMware, Hyper V, Linux KVM, Power VM, XenServer” and Private cloud “OpenStack”, the need for automation and integration revealed the necessity of a programming language to “tie them all”. I had few interns working for me for automating cloud build and services. the outcome was a variety of solutions for deploying openstack and services from a simple graphical user interface with simple questions and options. which enabled a non-technical person to have his own Private cloud on any hardware on any scale. All the programming was done using Python coupled with automation tools like Ansible, Chef and Puppet.

These success of these projects were an eye opener, I am convinced that Programming is very essential for me to align myself to the cloud and devops era.

Thanks and respects to those uncredited Gurus and Friends who helped and supported me in my journey.