Jaygovind Sahu

Dis­claimer : The con­tent below does not aim at mak­ing any state­ment about any­thing liv­ing or dead. Any­thing like that merely is a coin­ci­dence. This post is more like an entry in a per­sonal diary. I am writ­ing more for myself now.

It’s me… or per­haps You too

My lec­turer who was teach­ing me ‘Pro­gram­ming in C’ had made one thing very clear to me — that I will never be com­fort­able with pro­gram­ming and it would be very dif­fi­cult for me to pass the final exam­i­na­tion keep­ing in view the knowl­edge and atti­tude I have towards pro­gram­ming. Any­ways, those words gave me a kick on my back and some­how I was able to get a ‘C’ in ‘Pro­gram­ming in C’. It needed the com­bined effort of me and my room-mate Mahesh.

I was very com­fort­able in C++. I got an ‘O’ in my lab. I liked study­ing RDBMS and some­how found it very inter­est­ing. Don’t take me oth­er­wise, but it really is . Again I got an ‘O’. Then I took my first out-of-curriculum lan­guage course in sum­mer, 2007. It was for Java. At that time, eight peo­ple (includ­ing me) were shar­ing a sin­gle PC to prac­tice pro­gram­ming after the classes. I was catch­ing up with things very eas­ily. While study­ing the advanced Java part, I learned HTML and I liked work­ing with it. My friends made me believe that I am really good with these things.

After six months I was the one who was sup­posed to design the web­site for the tech-fest of my col­lege. I tried apply­ing JSP for this but things did not come out to be so easy. Then came one of my bro — Piyush who helped me learn PHP-MySQL and helped me fin­ish the work of the web­site. I found PHP a very easy lan­guage, to code, to under­stand and to com­mu­ni­cate with the data­base. After the first web­site, per­haps I was wrongly taken as a good web­site designer by the peo­ple around me (I am try­ing to put things in sim­pler lan­guage). I got a lot of work to do and all the time I chose PHP. I used it in my curriculum-project and then after the col­lege, I used Word­Press for my web­site. So, until my join­ing at job, I con­tin­ued work­ing with PHP although I knew that it is hardly going to be my career. The chances of work­ing in PHP in my job were very less but my inter­est was not.

In my job, my stream train­ing was on MS .Net. We were using Visual Stu­dio 2008. I had never used such a friendly IDE before. I did not know what COBOL was but I remem­ber say­ing this line to one of my friends — “.Net is so easy. Thank God we are not cod­ing with COBOL or any­thing.”. Cod­ing was never dif­fi­cult. We had a very good and able facil­i­ta­tor with us. I was very happy with I was going through the web devel­op­ment part using ASP .Net. I was very relaxed think­ing that I am in a stream like this.

When we got our offices, I was informed that I would be work­ing with some Main­frame tech­nol­ogy. I laughed at myself when I came to know the pro­gram­ming is done with COBOL. I nei­ther had a choice nor do I have now. I am now try­ing to find out some­thing in it which would seem inter­est­ing to me. Logic and algo­rithm have always fas­ci­nated me and that is why I still have hope that some­day I will really love work­ing with some­thing which would earn me my salary.

I under­stand that in a soft­ware indus­try we have to respect our work… I really under­stand this. I also under­stand that so far as Career-building is con­cerned, I am in a very good field to work in. Within 2–3 years I may get a chance to go abroad and earn lit­tle big­ger. But I still feel like I am miss­ing something…