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?

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)

So I have not blogged for the 2-3 months now… That consistently keeps going the other way of my resolution to blog more frequently. Twitter has not helped either – http://twitter.com/arnab_deka

I find that twitter adequately satisfies my urge to burp out bits of info effectively… and thousands of other excuses… So lets stop that thread right there and concentrate on how the year was instead.

At the start of the year, I had just moved into a new city. Another 2000-3000 miles away from home. And at least another 1500 miles away from anyone I could call a friend with an honest face (so that takes out Social Networking Online pals). Agreed I knew Diganta (from college) here – and he was a cool guy to hang with. But he lived in Bellevue (10 miles from Seattle) – I did not have a car and we probably met once in 2 weeks. And he moved back to India in Feb! I had moved from the safety and security of an Indian company into an entirely different kind of organization (I moved from Infosys to Amazon.com in Dec/Jan).

Looking back – it wasn’t a such a bad decision after all -

1) By now I have made a group of good friends – ok – you can’t make college buddies after starting work – but these are a cool bunch of guys. Apart from other things, playing cricket with this lot will be a memory to treasure. The feeling of doing consistently good in a sport is cool (our team, Eagles, finished 3rd in the Cricket league this year – and got promoted to the next division for the next season starting in Feb. And (to a bit of my surprize) I did really well!

2) No regrets about my job – actually with each passing day, I am liking it more and more. I think Amazon and the bunch of incredible enginners have opened me up to a new world. I always knew I loved tech – but not how much. It is definitely an experience to work in such an energetic company and work with such geeky (no offense at all) brilliant people.

3) Got exposed to Ruby! For me, getting exposed to Ruby was by pure chance. The group that I joined was heavily into Ruby and was probably in a handful of Ruby-pro teams in the company at that time. I was open to experiencing a new technology while joining but did not know that it will change how I think about programming. Ruby is now mainstream and by no means I am an early adopter – but I am thankful that I joined the boat early. I was thrilled when I had started to play with Java and all the cool stuff with it (Unit testing, Continous build/integration etc.) – but Ruby has fundamentally changed the way I think about Programming. It is a joy for me now – I think I am a better coder now and I am making the right moves in my career.

4) And most of all – I met this beautiful person – Ujwala. If there is such a thing, she definitely fits me! And the happiness is doubled when she also gives back as much as you do… (We are getting married in summer’09)

I could probably come up with a few other things – but these are the highlights. So, all in all, not a bad year at all. In fact, it could be the turning point of my career/life – time will tell when I revisit this in 5/10/15 years from now!

So -signing off on 2008 for now!