From now on you will see more and more family related postings on that site and this site to be more individual and technical stuff.

Here is a snippet from the writeup:

Road Trip 2008 – Pictures Online

In November 2008 Shaily and myself drove cross country from Arlington VA to Seattle WA.  The trip took us slightly over four weeks.  We started on Thursday October 30, 2008 and arrived in Seattle on Sunday November 29, 2008.

Along the way we saw and stayed with friends and relatives.  After we ran out of friends and relatives we stayed at numerous Days Inn hotels (I can still taste the free breakfast) and one EconoLodge (wouldn’t recommend it).

We drove and drove, here is a rough map of our route:

View Rajat and Shaily’s Roadtrip 2008 in a larger map

The cities we covered are all marked on the map, but here they are in order: Philadelphia PA, New York City NY, Zanesville OH, Kent State OH, Ann Arbor MI, Chicago IL, Minneapolis MN, Bend SD (Badlands National Park), Mount Rushmore SD, Chugwater WY, Cheyenne WY, Park City UT, Portland OR, Seattle WA.

We stayed with friends or family in: Philadelphia, Zanesville, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Portland, Seattle.

Though it is past April 15th and I missed my “taxes” deadline for this post, I still wanted a chance to share some of the events from 2008.  It was another big year, so I’m sticking to the ordered/chronological list like last year.

1. Continue working for Clearspring
   The job had me working day and night, with frenetic pace that only a startup can impose.  Back then I thought I was thriving in it – somehow having convinced myself that the “world” would end if I didn’t crank out whatever feature I was working on.  Unfortunately it was wreaking my health.  My weight has skyrocketed and I was eating badly.  I also developed a lesion on my face, around my chin.  More on that later.
2. Shaily arrives on March 20th
   We waited for four long months after our marriage for Shaily’s visa to come through (it was 11 months after we filed for it).  In many ways our marriage didn’t really start until Shaily got here and we were living under one roof for the first time.
3. Clearspring gets more funding (read more here and here)
   My life and my work are inextricably connected.  I somehow feel like “I” got more funding when Clearspring did.  Again, only the koolaid a startup can offer. My health is still in decline but I’m gung-ho about the company, my future, and our lives in Arlington VA.  When I am at work I am feeling guilty about not being at home with Shaily; when I am at home I feel guilty I am not working harder at work.  This is a recipe for disaster, I just didn’t know it then.
4. Wedding Reception in Portland OR
   My parents throw us a wedding reception in Portland.  It was a great ceremony and we were so happy so many family members could attend. Took one week off from work (the maximum allowed at one time – yay startups) for the reception and for a really fun road trip down the west coast from Portland to LA with my cousins.  I had to leave from LA to get back to work, but Shaily got to enjoy LA, Las Vegas, and more.
5. The Bit Flipped
   If you know me then you’ve probably heard of me talk about this moment before – it has happened to me before in other teams, at other jobs, in relationships.  It is the moment of clarity that has been brewing in your subconscious for weeks or months that finally comes to the conscious. The picture becomes clear. I no longer want to work for Clearspring.The new funding had raised my hopes for a chance at more equity in the company – especially considering what it was taking out of me.  For twelve Tuesdays in a row during the summer I was at work at 4am to deploy software.  For example, on my birthday, I worked from 4am to 9pm. It had become increasingly clear that more stock options were not being issued to anyone in light of the new funding.

   The work environment that once seemed electric seemed strained and unnecessary.  The constant “fire drill” of chasing after immature web 2.0 APIs with hopefully slightly less immature technology seemed like a cruel joke.  Though in my first professional leadership role I was struggling to find vision/direction/focus in the engineering organization.  I felt strongly that the executive engineering management was not providing  leadership to the organization and was not nurturing the growth of the team.

   Before finalizing my desire to leave I asked to be moved to a different team in engineering – to work on the advertising platform work Clearspring was doing.  I have a lot of respect for the lead of the advertising team and felt I could learn a lot by being on his team – both technically and from him.  My request was not granted with an explanation from my boss (the VP of engineering – not the one that hired me – Clearspring was on its 3rd VP of engineering during my tenure at this point) that my knowledge in my current team was too valuable to be lost.  I was done learning new things on the current team, tired of the work environment and the lack of leadership, and disappointed that no more stock options were going to be available. I decided it was time to leave.

6. Clearspring Acquires AddThis (read more here and here)
   Another opportunity for Hooman and the Board to issue options comes and goes.  No options are issued.  My mind is already made up about leaving.  I ask to no longer lead a team and am quietly being a developer that works much closer to 50 hours a week instead of what I was doing earlier in the year.  This gives me the time I need to begin the job search and do phone interviews.  Shaily and I decide to relocate back to Seattle WA.  My parents had decided at the same time to spend more time in Portland OR so Shaily and I moving back to Seattle seems natural (moving back for me, moving for the first time for Shaily).
7. Accepted a position at University of Washington
   To my pleasant surprise the university worked very quickly from cover letter to phone screen to phone interview.  I had already scheduled a trip to interview with other companies in the area and my team was able to work me into a spare day I had on that trip to interview me in person.  I accepted the day the offer was presented.  Since we had an open workspace in Clearspring where very few of us had office phones I had to walk out to my car to negotiate my offer. I wanted to make sure Shaily and I got a break between jobs (something I didn’t do between Microsoft and Clearspring) so I asked for a start date of December 1.  This gave Shaily and me the month of November to drive cross country.
8. Road Trip Cross Country in November 2008
   I will write separately about the road trip – here I’ll just mention that it was memorable, enjoyable, and worth doing. We got to see: Philadelphia, New York, relatives in Zanesville OH, Kent State, UMich Ann Arbor, Chicago, Minneapolis (well really Mall of America), Bend SD, Mt Rushmore, got stuck in a snow storm and spent the night at a rest area in Chugwater WY, Park City UT, and finally Salt Lake City UT.
9. Started work at University of Washington
   I’m a senior software systems engineer working on migrating a paper certification process to an electronic one (read more here and here).  This means retiring the mainframe that has been used since 1970s and building a new enterprise system.  The team is just finishing the first major milestone of the project – migrating folks off of the mainframe.  Part of an excited team that is nothing like the stereotypical professional staff team at a university.  Ramp up in ASP .NET development and designing the next major milestone of the project. Lots of learning, and 40 hour weeks. I am visibly more relaxed every day – Shaily notices immediately.

   As a note, Cleaspring had their first major layoffs in December (see here).  I was sad to hear this happened because many of the guys I worked with there were underutilized and overall I felt the team could have produced so much more under the right leadership.  I was glad to find out that many of the team members I knew who were laid off landed okay, some in situations far better for them than Clearspring.

10. Relocated to Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle
    Shaily and I rented an apartment below our friends Brian and Miriam (and Cam) in Capitol Hill.  Brian and Miriam were scheduled to move to Hawaii in January so being right next door meant we got to hang out every day in December and until they left.  The snow storms in Seattle around Christmas were fun – everyone’s travel plans changed and we all spent Christmas together.  Brian and Cam made a turkey. (Shaily and I made ginger cookies from scratch.)  We all partied on New Years together, ringing in 2009 with fake confetti while watching fireworks and dancing till 3am on tunes spun by Cam.

The year brought several significant changes to my life. I changed jobs and moved cross country – AGAIN.  I started living with my wife.  I learned first hand what it was like to work at a startup.  The year ended with me in a very different mental place than when it started.  Maybe it’s maturing, maybe it’s living a married life, whatever it is I am glad it happened.

To check out our wedding pictures online (working correctly finally): go here.  Also notice there is a fancy slideshow plugin enabled now.

Check them out here, and leave us comments on the ones you like.

So, in classic, boring, corporate style, here is an ordered list of events in my life since my last post (maybe someday I will get to expand on any of these items, but we’ll see):

1. Worked on Windows Live FolderShare
   Worked on some infrastructure to facilitate refactoring the backend FolderShare code – still waiting to hear an official announcement from my old team regarding a release of FolderShare.
2. Worked on Windows Live Messenger (my work released in v8.5 and whatever next version turns out to be)
   Worked on the existing Sharing Folders feature, worked on implementing major changes for the next version of Messenger, hopefully this will be released soon. My v8.5 changes were mostly bug fixes.
3. Resigned from Microsoft
   So this might seem like a shock, but it fell quite cleanly into my five year plan. Yep, I had one when I graduated from college. Having never imagined I would work for Microsoft when I was in college and after getting a lot of flack from my classmates for accepting a job at Microsoft I made up a five year plan in terms of things I wanted to learn from Microsoft before leaving. Aw hell I’m just left-brained like that anyway, I make goals for just about everything (ask me how long my car is supposed to last before I consider it a good “reasonable” purchase).Over the summer I started evaluated where I was against my goals, and I realized I had accomplished everything I had set out to learn from Microsoft. The decision to leave was made doubly difficult since I could not imagine a better team to be a part of anywhere. Written another way, I loved my team. There were so many competent, talented, smart, and experienced people who I could learn from and had learned from. My lead was my advocate, knowledgeable, and fully-focused on unblocking me from my goals.

   The team’s philosophy on quality was completely inline with how I believe software should be engineered, and the process and focus on infrastructure in place is truly enviable, in any commercial environment. An incredibly small example – my team was able to go from 0 to shipping at scale (at Microsoft scale that is – meaning localized, distributed data centers, redundancy, etc) a storage-in-the-sky solution in 3 months.

   However, even though everything at my team in Microsoft was going so well, I realized I was at a critical junction in my young career. Knowing that I would be getting married over Thanksgiving (see point 6 later on) I realized that I may not have another opportunity to dramatically change my career without impacting at least one other person. Not that my fiance was not a part of my decision to resign, but at least I wasn’t asking her to change jobs and/or relocate with me. And I also realized that if I stayed at Microsoft I may never leave. Many people would love to be in that situation, but having never worked in another company full-time I felt it would be remiss to limit my entire professional experience in software to one company. Plus there was an element of me wanting to keep my word with my own personal goals.

   And finally, things don’t happen in a vacuum. A couple recruiters called me, coincidentally, at the same time. I was not overly excited by the kool-aid they were trying to preach (I had been drinking large public-company kool-aid for five years already). Far more importantly my friend Hooman Radfar called me to catch up.

   My last day with Microsoft was my five year anniversary exactly, September 17, 2007. Take that five year plan.

4. Accepted a position at Clearspring Technologies
   So Hooman started talking to me about what Clearspring has been up to (one could argue that he had been trying to recruit me to join him since when I visited Clearspring in 2004 when it as two guys in one office). Well, as I always told him I had a five year plan at Microsoft. Except this time, my five years was up and the things Hooman was telling me about sounded really exciting. I think the salient quote from that first call, “If you want things to be neat at clean don’t join us, but if you want to bring order to the chaos of a startup then we could use your help”. Or something close to that – at least that is how I remember it, so that is how it happened.Within three weeks I had: spoken with the VP of Engineering, gone to VA to interview, negotiated the offer, and accepted the offer. So the fun of the speed of a startup had begun even from before starting full-time.
5. Relocated to Washington DC area
   Moved to Arlington VA and found a sublet on craigslist for three months while I was trying to sell my townhouse in Redmond. Realized that there are worse rental markets than Seattle (namely around DC). I also first-hand got to experience why they say moving is one the ten more stressful things in a person’s life. My advice from the situation – live simply until you get married so you don’t have to do something like a cross-country relocation by yourself, or negotiate a personal assistant into your new job’s contract to help with the relocation part.
6. Started working at Clearspring
   Rapid-dynamic team going through lots of changes – like any startup. I was immediately impressed with the quality of the folks around me, and the changes we were making were highly needed and smart decisions. The ramp up was rough, as it always is, but the fun and satisfaction was immediate. Still is.
   
   
7. Shipped my first product at Clearspring – Launchpad
   Within two months of starting at Clearspring I shipped my first product there. I joined part way into this project and helped guide it to through release. In the interim I had become a lead at Clearspring. I’m trying my best to follow my lead’s example from Microsoft in how I operate at Clearspring, and I guess time will tell how well I am doing.I am incredibly proud of our first release in this space, providing an embeddable HTML/JS menu to facilitate sharing widgets using Clearspring’s platform. There is still lots of work ahead of us, but it is overwhelmingly exciting and I can’t wait to dig in further.
   
   
8. Sold my townhouse in Redmond
   With a great sigh of relief my townhouse in Redmond finally sold. The realization of paying mortgage in WA and rent in VA was starting to creep in and in the knick of time a great offer came in with a very accommodating closing date. I was able to close and settle the sale the week before I left to get married – a giant burden removed from my shoulders.
   
   
9. Traveled to India to get married and enjoyed a brief honeymoon
   Had a very enjoyable wedding and honeymoon over a three week trip to India. I have not gotten or seen many pictures from the trip yet (apparently when you are the groom you don’t get to take or see many pictures) – as soon as I have them they will be published here.A group of close friends came to India to participate in the celebrations along with Shaily, myself, and our families. I am pretty sure they all had a great trip and I certainly loved introducing them to Shaily and sharing my wedding with them.

   Went to an awesome lake resort in Kerala for a short four day honeymoon. It really was a unique experience – nothing like anything I have seen in India, US, Jamaica, or any other tropical place I’ve been to. Really something special. If you are looking for a way to vacation at the end of your vacation, you want to stay in a resort like this one (check out slh.com for the listing of similar small luxury hotels).

   Unfortunately my wife’s visa isn’t ready yet, so I had to return to the US without her. Hopefully she will be joining me soon.
   

If you’ve made it this far then I think you understand why I have not been able to post more often. 2007 has brought more dramatic changes in my life than any other since I turned eighteen (it is hard to quantify the magnitude of each change before that). This year I tackled three of the ten most stressful life events at the same time, and I triumphed: switching jobs, relocating cities, and getting married.

(If anyone is wondering how come I made time to write this post, it is entirely because I am at the JetBlue free WiFi zone in JFK on a long layover and the wifi connection isn’t strong enough for VPN support – so after catching up on Google Reader this was next on the list.)

Month long trip to India. Attended two weddings, met my fiance, got engaged, and had a jolly time seeing friends and family too.

This album is broken into four sub-albums, which breaks down my trip based on my engagement. There are lots of pictures, but overall I think the Engagement sub-album is the best to look at. Feel free to leave comments on the pictures, I always enjoy seeing them.

The pictures can be found here.

Note: Wrote this on the trip in November 2007, never bothered to post it.  Originally written to be an email to my friends, but makes perfect sense as a blog post instead.

My arrival in India was eventful and annoying.  Since I was lazy about packing on Tuesday night, I didn’t actually get to start packing until about midnight, so I didn’t get a chance to fall asleep.  That seemed fine to me, since I could sleep on the flight to DC (first leg of my journey).

After boarding the plane around 7am for a 7:30am departure, I promptly fell asleep.  The next time I woke up was 9am, and the captain was announcing a hydraulic problem on the plane that was being worked on (we were still on the ground in Seattle), and update in 15-20m.  20m later (another short siesta for me) the captain announced that the problem could not be fixed, we had to deplane (what a great word, btw) and make other arrangements.  Fast forward another two hours, and I have a boarding pass for a flight from Seattle to San Francisco that then leaves from SFO to get me to Frankfurt Germany two hours before my connection to India.  Yay, this is good because I met up with my mom in Germany and we flew together to India.  I could help carry her luggage etc this way.

Bad news, my flight to SFO was a middle seat.  I was seated between two military folks, both heading to the middle east.  That made things fun as I was reading “The New Yorker” (hardcore antiwar) and the Gandhi biography.  The plane turned out to be mostly empty so my neighbors spread out and I got the aisle seat I like with plenty of legroom.  I slept the majority of the flight, catching up from the night before.

Land in SFO, get some lunch, get on my international flight to Frankfurt (have to love how in SFO for United you have to take a shuttle to the International terminal, go up and down all these ghetto looking stairs and such – very classy).  Get on my plane to Frankfurt.  Get my aisle seat.  On this flight I watch “Cinderella Man” (really is Ron Howard’s best work), almost cried twice (somehow I am on a VERY heightened state of emotions here), and finished the Gandhi biography (almost cried several times while reading this).

Meet up with my mom in Frankfurt, go to get my boarding pass for my Lufthansa flight (United couldn’t issue me a boarding pass from Seattle – go figure).  Find out my ticket is now considered on STANDBY, and I need to go to the Destination Gate before I can be issued a boarding pass.  Weirded out, I walk to the destination gate, and when I get there I am told that the flight is overbooked and I won’t get a seat.  I try to keep my calm and explain that I have already been traveling for 20 hours, so it makes limited sense to consider me a standby passenger since my itinerary is already in motion, etc etc.  In my explaining the woman checks again, and suddenly I have a seat.  Not the reserved seat I had before, but an aisle seat nonetheless.  My thinking is that when my flight in Seattle was cancelled, my entire itinerary was cancelled, and the new itinerary had me on standby for everything since it was made last minute.  Don’t know how I suddenly got a seat, but I wasn’t complaining.

After switching seats with this kid traveling that got the seat next to my mom, I got my aisle seat and the flight was reasonably smooth.  Lots of sleeping, reading, music, reading, sleeping – rinse, lather, repeat.  Ten plus hours later (around 32-34 total hours of travel later) my mom and I wait for ALL luggage to be delivered in the International Baggage Terminal in Bangalore.  My mom gets her suitcases, though they take forever.  Customs and Immigration was breezy, but my luggage didn’t show up.  Great.  Two hours wasted in the airport waiting for my luggage.  Filled out the missing luggage paperwork, borrowed cell phones from folks there to call my cousins that were picking us up – and got them to know what the situation was.  So, my hunch is that my luggage probably never left Seattle.  Finally met up with my cousins and drove home, getting home at 3:30am.  We had a flight at 6am, so took a shower and repacked slightly, and then left.  I am still wearing the same clothes I started my travels on, over 30 hours ago.

Our flight from Bangalore to Delhi was delayed by two hours, more time to kill in the airport.  After finally flying, our flight from Delhi to Lucknow was delayed by three hours.  So, we made the flight, but more waiting in the airport.  Finally got to Lucknow, and found my uncle, we got into the big rented car, and drove the two hours to Kanpur.  Goodness, didn’t finally get to Kanpur until 8pm.  Now, I had no clothing, whatsoever, so immediately after saying hello to everyone, went with my cousin to the mall nearby and bought a few pairs of underwear and sleeping clothes, so I could get through the night.

That was my arrival to India.  In a nutshell.

Sorry it took me so long to get pictures online. I still haven’t put captions on these and I haven’t had the time to rename them correctly (sorry about that). I will fix it soon, I hope.

The pictures can be found here.

I had a great time meeting up with old friends that I had not kept in touch with.  There was so much fun being in Florida at that time of the year, I got to escape the dreary weather of Seattle at the time.

Pictures from the week long event are here. (Sorry for no captions, I’ll try to add them later).

Pictures from the trip can be found here.