Creating win-win situation

Let me start by sharing my new year resolution because its a tradition :)
All passionate people like me fight at work, at home and when we fight, someone looses. Looser may not be the two persons fighting but the cause itself. Project suffers, your colleague looses morale and business does not achieve results. So I am going to find ways to create situations where everybody wins. I am working on how part and will share when I have concrete ideas.

For now, the reflections on the past year. Professionally, 2015 was exciting, fast, and fruitful. At work, I led and drove many major initiatives for transforming our data and analytics business into cloud. dashDB has been a huge success. Seeing it grow in terms of values it provide to data analysts and data scientists and the customer base, it always reminds me the day 0 when few of us created this cloud offering focusing completely on users. R analytics always has been the value for both quick productive use and long term machine learning models and being part of the team who brought this is very satisfying.
Bluemix itself has surpassed the user base beyond 1 million and I am extremely proud of being part of the eco system. We fueled the growth of Bluemix by providing what I call "engine of PaaS". These engines include Relational and NOSQL databases as service, modern analytic compute engine like Spark; our leaders call it an Analytic Operating system and BigData analytic services such as EHaaS.
In order to bring these services in Bluemix, there were tons of internal projects which I designed and created from scratch. These projects include developing a continuous integration and deployment tool for our cloud delivery, reliability and resiliency framework for change management and tools for managing outages and root cause analysis. I started to foster a culture within the team to think about resiliency as a big picture and focused on all 4 aspects of it shown below.

2015 was a great year for my own learning and technical vitality. I learnt the very important characteristics of the cloud services, expectations of our customers and pain points in operating the services at scale. It was a year to lay the foundation for bringing services into cloud quickly and improve rapidly while reducing the cost of operation. Few skills that I acquired/enhanced stand out such as ELK stack for log analysis, of course my favorite R and R-studio for statistical analysis and machine learning, Docker for containerization, Ansible for change management, Jupyter notebook for data analysis and Spark for analytic computing.

2015 was a great year for my teaching profession at San Jose State. I was able to update the syllabus for my students so that they get exposed to the skills and technology required by innovative companies in the bay area. Spark, Docker and Reactive programming using Typesafe technology were great additions. Students greatly benefited from this class being part of IBM university relations for Bluemix. They used Bluemix to understand the cloud technology and used to implement good ideas they had. I am very confident that the experience they acquired in the class will give them tools and confidence to succeed. The projects they did to analyze data using Spark (take a look at some profiled here) will help them at their next job. In addition to teaching this class, I supervised more than 20 students in 2015 for their Masters projects. 

2015 was also a great year for my speaking and presenting experiences. Starting the year with presenting at IBM Interconnect (our premier cloud conference) and continued with presenting at more than 10 conferences. Silicon Valley Code camp was one of my favorites as it attracts students and developers all across bay area and also the two day events are free to attend. Presenting at Oreilly Velocity conference was a privilege and I learnt a lot from listening to some of the best speakers in the industry. Sharing my own ideas and work on Predictive monitoring and analytics was a very enriching experience.  In addition to many Hackathons and coding camps, the year ended well with presenting at Insight conference. This is where we learn in great detail, what our enterprise customer wants from us. The very nature of hybrid cloud topology of their evolving businesses teaches us a lot. 

On career front, I am very thankful for the opportunities that were provided to me. 2015 was also rewarding as new title and responsibilities allowed me to understand myself more. Leading a big team, aligning the business goals of the organization to people's day job and fostering the culture where everyone is intrinsically motivated and passionate is fun but challenging. I believe in high performance culture and self driven team and being surrounded by highly smart people is something I was fortunate to have. I am also fortunate to have leaders and mentors at work who are as passionate as me and make our day job fun and challenging. 

On personal front, 2015 was an interesting year as well. My mom retired after teaching at high school in my home town in India for last 34 years. We all were relieved that she got break but I figured out she was sad leaving the community that she served for so long. I was able to spend time with my kids as much as I wanted in spite of the chaotic nature of work. I will never forget the poster on the door of my great mentor Bala Iyer's IBM office - "Good fathers and good men". I consider myself successful in seeding the engineering(making) concept in my daughter's brain. She was able to take a burning problem and come up on a technological solution in the form of her school science project and achieved good heights. She surprised me when she kept winning school, county, state and went up to national semi final. We were able to take a couple of major vacations in Europe and North east USA which were very memorable and relaxing.

Last but not least, ended the year with reading a book - Without their permission by Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian. I love this guy not just because he was able to make millions of dollars at very young age, but because he explained in clear terms how internet allows all of us to contribute to the society and bring the changes that we all want to see. While relaxing at home at the end of the year, I was fortunate to meet one of my home town friend and mentor after 17 years (even though he lives in Indiana, we somehow missed seeing each other all these years) He had a huge impact on my early stage career and I always admired him for his attitude and passion towards life. 

Everything happens at right time and we must be optimistic. I would like to end this post with wishing all my readers, friends and mentors a very resilient new year!