Abdul Qabiz on Web Technologies, Flash Platform, RIA, India

Paul Graham wrote a nice essay titled “Cities and Ambition”. When I read it, I had already returned to Kanpur (my hometown), I took the essay slightly different manner i.e. I challenged it and motivated myself by thinking, I can do great stuff from this city.

Just after one year or little more, I am in agreement with that essay. I realize, how a good city (and people there) matter in whatever you do.

At work, I ended spending most of time dealing with personnel issues and trying to mentor about obvious things (in development and programming).

Outside of work, I don’t feel like going out anywhere, not even walking on streets. I just don’t like the attitude, psyche and habits of people here. I have, slowly, stopped doing all activities – photography, bike-rides, blogging, participation-in-events, exercising, etc. I am trying to understand the reason, I imagine it could be because of lack of motivation or I am too busy trying to do a few things.

Another important thing, it doesn’t matter, who is holding what position, or how much rich one is, or what is someone’s background – most of them don’t know the basic etiquette and manners (traffic, talking, respecting, eating, etc). Everyone appears to be selfish, who just cares about himself and his things (house, car, job, etc). No one seems to be bother to care about other people and city.I don’t know, I can change others but I have kept myself the way I was – still avoid throwing garbage on streets, spitting anywhere and other bad things.

Unfortunately, kids inherit all these, and are not able to figure out that most of inherited values are not good.

The worst thing in this city is the kind of attention a girl/woman gets from males (from 7 yrs to 80+ yrs). It’s weird to see the bad treatment given by males to females almost anywhere (roads, shops, cafe, etc). One could easily notice these things. Hard to imagine, how much a female-of-kanpur has to go through and tolerate.

It’s sad, but true, today whatever Kanpur is because of it’s people. I am not complaining here, I am just writing what I notice – Kanpur is not a good city. It could have been better or remained better (as it was some decades back), if people were better. We (Kanpurites) deserve whatever (bad culture, bad public infrastructure, etc) we have now.

The day, we start changing our attitude and habits, we would see the change.

Meanwhile, I am going to work hard to be what I am, if I can’t get better. Things said above, are trying hard to change me, directly and indirectly. Everyone moment of the day reminds me of my ambition and vision, I would not let anything stop me from doing it. If It takes me to move out of the city, I am now ready to do that too.

In India, Apple service doesn’t work well. As far as I know, most of Apple customers in India end up paying more to purchase the same products than someone in USA or other countries.

Why are we treated as second class citizens?

Anyway, the current Apple support process in India seems to be:-

1. Register service-request with Apple India over phone
2. Take your Apple device to nearest apple-authorised service-provider (AASP)
3. Give the case-id given by Apple India Support(in step #1 above) to AASP
4. AASP would run the diagnostic tests, if required, get the parts and fix things.

You might think, that’s a nice process and should work fine?

There are some issues in above process:-

• Apple India might not register your request and can get away by saying your hardware is overused and not covered in warranty anymore. Unless you are confident and technical enough to explain them things. Not everyone can do that.
• Not all cities have any authorised service-providers
• AASP might not be trained enough to deal things as per Apple standards.
• AASP might have broken process within their organisations, i.e. it takes them days to get details/approvals from their own headquarters and bosses.
• AASP might miss a step or two required before they can order the parts. If they do it, later Apple makes their life miserable by asking many questions. Eventually a customer suffers.

My recent experience with Apple support process has not been good. Read more…

I still remember the day, when Jon Boutelle shared his idea of organizing first BarCamp in India (i.e. New Delhi) and wanted to know, if we (Manish Jethani and I) can connect him to someone at Adobe Noida for venue. Then the first BarCampBangalore, how idea started and how some of us met initially to plan, though I had to drop out just before event due to health reasons.

I must say, I have been fortunate to be part of some of the first events in India, be it Bangalore or Pune.

I really miss events like BarCamp in Kanpur, hence been planning to organize BarCampKanpur, if I can find more like-minded people and collaborate with them. Last year, I sent an email to couple of mailing-lists (including BarCampBangalore) to share the idea and request contacts, if any, who can help us.

Thanks to all those who sent me offline emails and shared the contacts from their connections. I tried to reach out couple of those but it didn’t work out. I couldn’t really follow up a lot.

Today, I decided to create wiki-page for BarCampKanpur and a google-group (mostly for mailing-list purpose for planners and volunteers). Following are the details:

• BarCampKanpur – Wiki
• barcamp-kanpur – Mailing List

I am very positive, we would soon have some volunteers to plan and organize the event. Venue should not be problem, I can manage to get one easily for first event and perhaps later.

Once we have some volunteers, we plan to have some meetup in local cafes or anywhere to talk about things (get to know each other, plan the event, share the responsibilities, etc).

Please spread the word and participate, if you can.

We are looking for some smart Flash Platform Developers who can be part of our team in Allies Interactive Services Pvt. Ltd., Kanpur, U.P.

We are a design and development company in Kanpur, though we are small but we are ambitious and have a great vision.

I posted the details on Flex-India sometimes back, pasting the same (edited the typos and formatted) over here:-

I have been meaning to post this for sometime but thought would it be appropriate to do that here?

I am part of a small design and development shop in Kanpur, U.P. Where, we mostly do web development using FOSS, mainly LAMP.

I moved to kanpur around 10 months back with a desire to build a great Flash Platform Team that would work on non-trivial type service projects and some great product ideas.

I could now start doing it, after we have managed to fix a lot of issues mostly a nice office, a good culture and some projects and a product in pipeline.

I need an experienced Flash Platform developer in my team, who can help us to make our vision, desire and dreams a reality.

Since Kanpur is not a metro or fancy place to live, it takes more than just technical aptitude to be here. That is some more strong reason f.ex. A desire to be part of a growing team, desire to be close to family, desire to contribute in the development of IT ecosystem in North and/or a desire to prove, hell yeah we can do great stuff from anywhere, even cities like Kanpur

If you think, you want to help me by being part of my team and understand what I meant above, please don’t hesitate to contact me on [abdul dot qabiz at gmail dot com] off-list i.e. Direct email to me, please don’t reply here on this list.

As far as job description goes, I have already given an idea. However, we are looking for someone who understands web very well that is HTTP and other standards. Fundamentally good at problem solving, the real world ones, ActionScript, Flex Framework, Adobe Flash Player and AIR fundamentals and APIs.

Of course, good experience that says about in your behalf. We would also talk to you so things would get clear, i.e. If we are match for each other.

If you want to know more about company, please check out http://www.alliesinteractive.com

I feel like posting, what I have been doing, actually a lots of things on business side – hiring, finance, business-development, etc.

We are doing good in business, I believe, it’s because of our diversified service offerings and our team of talented designers and developers, who are agile, quick and fast learner.

A great culture is an important thing, in fact, it’s very important. That’s why, we have been very focused on building the same in our office here. When I look back, I see we have achieved things but there is a long way to go.

We are not perfect, for that matter, no one is. The good thing, we are aware of our limitations and strengths, hence, we are constantly working on it. I hope, a constant effort would improve things day by day.

We are planning to have some more people in our team, so I have been interviewing developers from different parts of country. We acknowledge, it’s hard to get smart guys stay in Kanpur or get developers from outside of city. But we think, if we share our vision and what we want to do and have been doing, a lot of developers do see things differently, then location becomes secondary thing.

BTW! Kanpur is not as great place to live as Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, etc are. But it does have good things – less hectic life, earning/expenses ratio is higher here, etc.

According to Paul Graham’s essay, bad-location is/could-be one of reasons for startups’ failure. It is true, location does matter for many things (not just hiring), but we have chosen to be where we are now, and I think, we have figured out how to achieve things here, we are just getting better at it day by day. But yeah, we do miss things – events, barcamps, apple-store, crowd, talent, etc. Who knows, someday Kanpur would have all that and who knows, we might have played a good role in that process

A lot of people have asked me, why I am not active lately in Adobe Flash Platform (i.e. Flash/Flex/AIR) stuff? Well, it’s different phase of life, where I am focusing on other things that would enable us to do a lot of great things that include stuff for Adobe Flash Platform.

I am also busy doing a good project, which does have some challenging work (web dev + flash platform). Also busy doing some hacking once in a while, which is trying to use technology to improve my productivity – like home media/filer server, vpn at office, boxee, etc.

We are looking for some smart guys – interaction-designers, flash-platform-developer and web-developer. If you know someone, who doesn’t not mind working from Kanpur, want to work on cool stuff, want to part of our team and help us achieving the visions/goals we have. Please let us know (abdul dot qabiz at gmail dot com). Thanks.

My macbook has started having problems now, after 29 months. It had some problems around an year back but I got it fixed at a local reseller more on personal terms than professional (via Apple Support).

Apple has great products but any great product without good service is of no use. Specially, now I am in a city where I would not find any Apple reseller or service-provider. I don’t want to travel to New Delhi or even Lucknow, there is no certainty that things would be done in time or would be done at all. I am not sure, if local service-providers are trained enough to do quality service?

Apple needs it’s own centers.

Anyway, it seems Apple is yet to grow in India. Perhaps, they would, since their products are quite competitive with other brands in India.
BTW! My macbook might qualify for battery-extension program, but Apple tech support and customer relationship deny that. They say, your macbook is too old (29 months) and battery should be replaced, oh that means I am going to pay at least 4-5 K (INR)?

BTW! I am quite impressed to see HP’s support in Kanpur, if not India. They are amazing, we have got some 4-5 HP notebooks and it’s really impressive to see how HP has been good to us. They don’t even keep our notebooks, if hardware procurement is required and it might take days, they would rather call us as soon as hardware is available and replace things on spot. That’s nice thing, they really understand how important a notebook is to it’s owner.

I was avoiding to write about Apple Service, but I couldn’t resist specially after being denied to the support I am supposed to get, even when I explained them how hard it is to get service done here.

I am available for consultancy, training and development services. Following is the rough list of things, I can provide consultancy, training or development services for:-

• ActionScript 1.0, 2.0, 3.0
• Adobe Flash/Flex
• Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)
• Training on Adobe RIA technologies
• Architecture for RIA
• Web Application Development

• Design and Architecture
• Development for LAMP
• Integration Services for Flex/AIR with existing Web Apps

• Subversion Version Control
• Bug Tracking System (Trac, Wiki)
• Training on Development Life Cycle
• Backup Strategies
• Development Sandbox Setup for RIA development

JFYI! You can check out my linkedin profile to know more about me. I am based in India and have around ten (10) years of experience, during this period I have worked for Macromedia/Adobe, Yahoo!, Mixercast and TIS and worked as independent-consultant, freelancer, trainer and co-founder. I have been working on various technologies/platforms (some listed above).

I am a programmer who enjoys solving users’ problems whatever it takes (technology is no constrain). Having said that, I am passionate about ActionScript/Flash/Flex/AIR and Web (in general) which happen to be my core competencies.

PS: Do you think, this is a shameless sales pitch

Technorati tags: consultancy, development, services, lamp, actionscript, flash, flex, adobe, AIR, architecture,training, ria

It’s almost two months, I have not posted anything here as well as on mailing-lists (flex and others).

In case you are wondering, where am I? What I am up to? First of all, thanks for being concerned. I am doing well and currently taking a break while spending time with my family. This is the only such a long (a month or perhaps more) break in last five years, where I am taking time to be with my family. Even in summer of North India, which is not that pleasant compared to that of Pune/Bangalore, I am feeling good.

I think, I need some more time to relax, but I wish I could do that. I have to get back to work and resume things.

During this break, I am not away from programming, I am reading and sometimes writing code. I took break from IMs and emails, I would need to catch up with emails and online buddies when I get back.

If you have sent an email to me and still waiting for response, hope you understand now and don’t mind the delay or no response from my side. Please accept my apologies.

In the end, I would like to share my excitement about Adobe Flash Player 10, which would have some kick-ass features, that it rocks.