Caged Butterflies
Posted by Guhan | Filed under thoughts
I am right now in Delhi, to participate in the Techshare India 2010 Conference at Habitat center. Today I gave a talk for the Technology and Accessibility track titled “Fixing the Developer Mindset“.
On my flight from Bangalore to Delhi, for some reason I was remembering the first time I went on stage and faced a big audience. This was during my 11th Standard annual day celebrations. My mom use to tell me that the actual first time I went on stage was to perform in a play for Christmas during my kindergarten, but I have only seen videos of that, dont remember anything. My mom tells me that I was to play a different character, but had to be changed because I was too scared to deliver the dialog. In the annual day event, I was chosen to be the Master of ceremonies, and even there I was not the first choice. I never wanted to face the huge audience. But as it turned out, I did compeer that year. I remember I had stage fright. I was petrified with the idea of standing up and uttering words in front of a massive crowd. The butterflies in my stomach were going berserk, and I clearly remember that there were times when a chill ran down my spine and blew over the stomach butterflies rattling them even more.
A week before the annual day, a friend who was originally suppose to go up on stage backed out because he was shorter than the female co-anchor and that felt awkward to him. So the teacher in charge forced me to step in and I reluctantly agreed. In retrospect I completely enjoyed the experience, the various nights spent with 5 of my close friends, memorizing the lines, editing it, changing the script, fighting over lines, confusions, extremely long Kannada words and chaos. I was popular in school ( ahem ahem :-) ) because I was part of the very successful cricket team. I was standing behind the curtain, sweating in anxiety. The curtain went up and I froze. It was a auditorium filled with screaming school kids, shouting out my name. My Classmates and made it a point to go up on the balcony and shout out my name even louder. I could not believe I volunteered to do this. I forgot everything we worked on for the whole week, I had the script in my hand, but that was just a moist lump of paper by then. My co-anchor nudged me to speak up, and I frankly dont remember a word I said.
Later, In college, there were a few college events I participated in, and like always was really nervous to speak into a mic. I had this strange thing in my head that my voice did not suit the way I look. I always wanted to be one of those great speakers, people who were clear and insightful in their talks, people who could handle the crowd really well. I use to admire how easy the lecturers found it to teach in a class. The very thought of standing in front of an unruly engineering student group gave me the shivers. I attended a few conferences and a few pre placement talks from various IT companies coming for campus hiring. I always noted how well those guys presented and the confidence with which they spoke. I had almost made up my mind that it was a talent that cannot be acquired, but one that you have to be born with.
I started working in Sify Ltd, Chennai. One always hears how the corporate industry is cruel to people who are not all rounders and have bad communication skills. I never considered my self to be bad with communication, so I decided to force myself to get over the stage fear. The first opportunity I got at work was to present a project design to senior executives in the company. Even when making the slides for the presentation, I kept re-assuring my self that it was just a small crowd and I should not be worrying. The presentation went off well, and for the first time, a senior exec told me that I have good communication skills. So I decided then that what ever chance I get or where ever I saw an opportunity, I would push myself to present. In quick succession, I got another opportunity to be part of the Freshers Induction team, which meant that I had to deliver a couple of orientation classes. I remember me actually being excited to present to freshers because I knew that I know more than they do about Sify. I started being a regular in these orientation sessions, and I was getting more confident.
When I joined Yahoo!, I had a lot of real geeky colleagues who were all into attending and speaking at conferences. I went with them to many conferences and Bar camps. In a Computer Society of India conference, I once again got a chance to present to a big audience. This was a first for me because I had never spoken at a public conference. In that conference, a junior student from the college I passed out from, NIE Mysore heard my talk and contacted me to be a guest speaker at the NIE technology festival. I was really excited to be able to go back to college and speak in front of my lecturers and juniors. It was such a rush getting on the main college auditorium stage and speaking. I had a couple of friends sitting in the audience to listen to my talk, and they told me that I had presented really well.
The other big presentation landmark for me was the time I had to speak in the Frontend Engineers Conference in Yahoo! Head quarters in Sunnyvale. This was the first time that I had to travel abroad to make a presentation. This was a dream come true of sorts. On the day of the presentation, it was both a sense of excitement and butterflies in the stomach. But I remember being confident of doing well. Since then, I have been making a lot of presentations in conferences and have been conducting a lot of technical training inside Yahoo!. After 5 years at Yahoo! I am informally called a Yahoo! developer Network Evangelist, constantly trying to evangelize Yahoo! technology in the IT industry. I have been part of Yahoo! Hack Day program as well, and this has given me the opportunity to speak in leading educational institutions. Yahoo! has been great because it has given me these opportunities over the years, and using the brand-name I have been able to get more attention as well.
I continue to be anxious and some time nervous before a Talk or presentation, the metaphorical butterflies fluttering wings still tickle my abdomen walls, but I dont feel them as much, making me a lot more confident and willing to get up on stage and deliver a talk. This is perhaps what I want to call “Caged Butterflies in my stomach“.
Yahoo! University Hack day gets Bangalored!
Posted by Guhan | Filed under thoughts
This was my 3rd University hack day, this time in my home town, Bangalore. Earlier this year I was at IIT Delhi and IIT Mumbai for the other 2 Hack U’s
Its amazing how much the students think Hacking is a negative thing. In every college we first had to establish the difference between Hacking and cracking.
Bangalore has always been a place where you expect students to be technically savy and modern, and sure that was the case in IIIT Bangalore. They have an amazing campus and it was a good thing that they offered only computer science and Information science courses. Their education system is more industry driven and being in electronic city, close to Infosys, the equipment and infrastructure in the college was very good. They had every thing from well organized projectors in class rooms to smart boards and comfortable seating.
The Hack U in Bangalore in terms of student response was much greater than the other 2 IITs. Enthusiastic students turned out in large numbers for our initial kick off sessions and the DJ night. This was not the case in IITs where the Rock night had a very poor response. But again, its expected from a Bangalore crowd :-)
More details about the event on my YDN blog post.
I spoke about YQL, Pipes, YUI and how every resource in the internet can be considered a Data source. My presentation can be found on slideshare, and is titled Get me my data!
Over all for Yahoo! it was a successful event. The hack demos were not as great as we wanted it to be, but there were some bright students who had crazy ideas. Guess given little more opportunity, some even greater ideas will come up. There was one idea which particularly caught my attention. Couple of students wanted to pull video data from cameras on the street and identify patterns in vehicle movement and crimes if any. Their idea was to gather information about a vehicle in one camera and then to see if the same vehicle shows up in a different camera. Using this information, they wanted to predict traffic flow, congestion etc. Interesting idea I thought
Next year have a couple more Hack U’s, first in IIIT Hyderabad .
