My Schedule for the rest of the year

- Starting tomorrow hack 12 hours a day as part of my current project. ( C & Haskell, Machine Learning, if anyone is interested). Will be traveling to places without Internet connectivity. So expect to be mostly offline.

- Oct end / Beginning of Nov: Back in Bangalore . Back online. Yay!

- Nov end: complete paperwork/documentation/training blah blah, Project handover.

- Nov end. This (phase of this) project done. Whew.

- December - somewhat free. I hope to release some Open Source code before EOY. Fairly old Scala code (so needs to be updated to Scala 2.8, add some comments and so on) but should be useful to others. Paperwork for Open Source release should come through before then.

Jan 1, 2010. New Year. No definite plans but lots of nice opportunities. Problems of plenty. Touch Wood. (Update: "No definite plans" is no longer true. A couple of VERY interesting opportunities in the air. Life is good.)

The Secret of Professional Happiness

I was talking to Prakash Swaminathan the other day and he said something that I thought encapsulated the essence of having a great professional life.

(a) Work with people you admire, (b) on interesting projects and (c) work from home as much as possible.

I could imagine dropping (c) if the other two criteria were met (though it does make a lot of sense in today's networked world) but whenever I've compromised on (a) or (b) life has sucked, without exception.

So children,learn from your elders. Always work with great people on great projects and avoid the corporate politics bullshit and you'll be happy professionally.

Of course this assumes you are skilled enough (or are willing to work to get there) that awesome people want you on awesome projects but that is a different post altogether.