On Jan 7th, 2009 I completed a year at Amazon and Seattle!

What a year it has been! At first I had some doubts about leaving all the people I know (at NYC) and coming over to a new far away place and to a radically different organization. But, now that I look back on it, and I hope I am not speaking too soon, it looks like it was one of the best decisions in my life!

Thanks to Amazon and my colleagues (special thanks goes to Ali Rizvi) and the awesome community of brilliant engineers at Amazon I have gained a totally new view of technology in the large, programming to be concise.

It’s a world I am loving and living every moment. And the Stocks that you get after a year helps too

And I met Ujwala here! Bet you’ll be hearing a lot about that!

So what do you think? Hasn’t it been an awesome year?

People have always been telling me to get move away from blogger. In late 2008, I read a few really good articles on why – and I was convinced. Sorry – but it seems I did not bookmark(delicious them). Tried to look for them now, but I get a few business oriented results only.

Anyway, I always wanted to get my own domain. And play around with Rails, Capistrano etc. to launch it. So here it is. I did spend a lot of time creating it. But finally, I think I am going the low-hanging-fruit (agile?) way – so right now it’s the simple, easy and open source Wordpress running on my host.

I am planning to add some dynamic mashup content (like my activity list from all the services I use, and some news that I feed in all mashed up). Let’s see where it goes.

A few of my early 2009 goals were to learn Dvorak, master vim and Rails and then use all that to prototype my site. Status

• Dvorak – home row + 4 top row keys done – progress is slow – but it’s good
• vim – well I have been using it for a couple of years now. But now I am really learning it. I really like Swaroop C H’s A Byte of Vim. And with some snazzy plugins (rails.vim, project.vim, surround.vim and fuzzyfind.vim it is really becoming the best editor ever)
• Rails – I have been using it for a year now. And I can do the “good stuff” – but now I am learning in-depth. Feels great to learn the details of the various components

Along the way, git came. And I got hooked to that too. But anyway, things are moving along and I am happy about that.

So one of my goals (getting my site working) is done. Here it is – www.arnab-deka.com (bye bye blogger – will miss you)

Now it’s up to improving it. Will keep you updated!

You know I play cricket in the summer regularly? Yeah – we all play in the Eagles Team.

We did well in the 2008 Summer season. We won 6 out of 9 league matches (and the first was a very thrilling tie). In the last league match we even scored 102 for 1 wicket (the highest and only 100+ opening partnership) – and I scored 47 there. So we came out 3rd in the league and got promoted to the next level for 2009.

See my earlier post regarding this.

So last Saturday, Jan 24th, we had the ARCL prize distribution ceremony (at Microsoft Cafe #43)


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It was good. But
1) we reached late – so didn’t get food
2) we came third – and got a nice team trophy. But the 1st and the 2nd spots get personal trophies with names engraved! Well next year!Here’s the link to the ARCL site 2008 Summer league – it’s one of those sites that work well only on IE (or IE tab, for hardcore FFox-ers).

BTW, is the site screaming for a scrapping-goodness?

Update on 02-Feb-2009 – Bharat took an iPhone pic of the trophy – it looks damn good!

ARCL Summer 2008 3rd Place Trophy (Eagles)