Time To Move On And Start a New Journey

It has been a wonderful and amazing experience to work at Xebia India office. I have learned and matured a lot in last 2.5 years I spent at Xebia. I was referred to Xebia by Rajneesh Namta who has worked with me at GlobalLogic. I have enjoyed working on lot of technologies at Xebia including NoSQL datatores, various PaaS solutions, BigData technologies like Hadoop, and various Spring portfolio projects. This blog is a retrospective of why I joined Xebia, What I did at Xebia and What lies ahead for me.

Why I Joined Xebia?

I had lot of other Job offers at the time when I was planning to leave GlobalLogic. I joined Xebia because of following reasons :

1. Anurag Shrivastava  : My first interaction with Anurag was during my interview. He took final round in the interview process and I was very impressed by him. He asked questions which nobody has ever asked me in any other interview like what are your thoughts on Open source, what you want to be 5 years down the line, do you blog etc. I liked the fact that he was not only focussing on project work but talking about things which are also important for building a successful career as a Software developer.
2. I wanted to work for a company which will give me  a platform to discover myself. From GlobalLogic time I had interest in writing and speaking but because of lack of support and mentorship was not able to do much.
3. I wanted to work for small organisation which values quality over quantity.
4. Go beyond the conventional project work and do much beyond that and make my name in community.
5. Xebia Values : I joined Xebia because I believed in Xebia values.

What I did at Xebia?

The three main things that I did at Xebia are :

1. For most part of my 2.5 year stint at Xebia I worked on building a scalable de-duplication engine. I worked with some wonderful and knowledge people(in no particular order) — Guneet, Rahul, Sameer, Karan, Nancy, Rajneesh, Richa and Paritosh. I would like to thank all of them for their help and support.
2. Writing : At Xebia I discovered my interest in writing and I have written at lot of technical or developers oriented portals like IBM DeveloperWorks, Developer.com, JavaLobby and Xebee and my blog. Recently a publisher has approached me to write a book. Lets see how it goes.
3. Speaking : I discovered my passion for speaking while giving XKE’s at Xebia India office. XKE is Xebia Knowledge Exchange where in on every alternate Wednesday we have three hours of technical or non-technical sessions followed by dinner. I have spoken at most of developer oriented conference in India and have also spoken at RedHat Summit 2012 in Boston.

What lies ahead for me?

I am joining RedHat as OpenShift Evangelist on 21st September. I will be travelling around the world speaking at various conferences, writing about OpenShift, building cool applications and building active and vibrant community around OpenShift. I might also think considering about writing a book if time permits. Let see how things unfold in future.

My Advice to fellow Xebians

Although I am nobody to advice anybody but will still give my advice. Xebia is one of very few IT organisation in India which gives platform to do lot of other things apart from project work; please do make use of them and build an exciting and wonderful career.
Best of luck to everyone and stay connected!