In this episode, Bhaktha Muralidhran, AVP, Unified Communications at Sompo International shares:His first job to develop electronics solutions for use in the Indian Navy, for data collectionGetting an exposure to software towards the end of his course and liking itAfter masters, getting a job at Digital and getting an opportunity to work on ethernet that was just becoming more widely adoptedCreating an ethernet with existing hardware and infrastructure, in the lab - to connect computersExploring client server approaches in the early days, understanding the close relationship between computers and networkingDeveloping a print server and later working on frame relay technology and network managementLearning SNMP [Simple Network Management Protocol] that opened up new opportunities for his careerMoving to Lucent, when AT&T was split upWorking on MIB - Management Information Base - for knobs that could be manipulated to change the behavior of networksHow DSL technology enabled having multiple phones [numbers] in a homeMoving to Cisco, when the company was acquiredPreferring to work more with technology and interfacing with people - read customers - and so, taking up roles in service, over software developmentWhy one needs appropriate technology and not necessarily the latest technology, when IT is an enabler for the core businessOver three decades of experience in software development in computer networking technologies and support. Experienced in managing a team of engineers. Led several projects from concept to delivery. Specialization: VoIP, Cisco Collaboration technologies, UNIX, Embedded Programming, TCP/IP, QoS, SNMP, Wireless, ATM, Frame Relay

In this episode, the conversation continues with Maha Mahadevan, CEO of BOSS Solutions - a company providing technology solutions for ITSM, Help desk and 811 ticket management for the damage prevention industry. Maha talks aboutHow he built and kept the team together and stay motivatedHow he bridges the gap between developers and actual usersHow they sharpened the positioning and chose industry segments to operate inHow to handle scale and stay current, as the # customers and team size growsHis secret sauce about acquiring and retaining new customers and growthThe importance of new member selection, onboarding and cultural integration for building a high performing teamMotivating team membersHis career guidance tips for mid career transitions as well as entry level Domain expertise and experience in industry segmentsMaha Mahadevan is the founder CEO of BOSS Solutions, an Atlanta GA based company providing SaaS solutions BOSSDesk for service management and BOSS811 for Onecall ticket management for the damage prevention industry. The company started off as an IT staff augmentation business and transformed into developing innovative solutions providing SaaS solutions to a sizable customer base across the US. Maha has a bachelors in engineering from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and Masters from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is a regular tennis player and practices yoga. He enjoys traveling and spending time with family and friends.

In this episode, Shiv is in conversation with Maha Mahadevan, CEO of BOSS Solutions - a company providing technology solutions for ITSM, Help desk and 811 ticket management for the damage prevention industry. Maha sharesHis origin story of getting into IT after graduating in electrical engineeringGetting a call from a friend asking if he would like to start a businessWanting to create IT solutionsHow he approached a selling role, that was needed for the startupProviding staff augmentation services to start and developing a solution to help with Windows NT migrationExtending the solutions with additional products, some based on suggestions or requests from customersHow a ticket management solution could be enhanced to manage a solution for utilities and serving many customers for over seven yearsIn hindsight, learning that drastic steps and dropping the old could be very risky - and happy that his bets have proven successful in the longer runThe context when he chose to become an entrepreneur, and the risks he faced at that timeHis advice: do it as if there is no other option, network and tap into your networkHow to retain confidence, when things may not appear to go the way one would like toBeing ready to adapt and change, when in uncertain situationsHis personal practices to stay calm under all circumstancesHow to communicate the value of IT solutions - in terms of benefits and not featuresWhom to engage in a customer organization, not just what to communicateHow he built and kept the team together and stay motivatedMaha Mahadevan is the founder CEO of BOSS Solutions, an Atlanta GA based company providing SaaS solutions BOSSDesk for service management and BOSS811 for Onecall ticket management for the damage prevention industry. The company started off as an IT staff augmentation business and transformed into developing innovative solutions providing SaaS solutions to a sizable customer base across the US. Maha has a bachelors in engineering from the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and Masters from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is a regular tennis player and practices yoga. He enjoys traveling and spending time with family and friends.

In this episode, the conversation continues with Jutta Eckstein, an independent coach, consultant and trainer, based in Germany. In the first part, she shares-Her origin story as a product engineerTransition from an engineer to a coachThe importance of listeningWe continue the conversation with: In her initial explorations with organizations, one pattern she found isThe understanding for leaders to introspect and understand their own responsibilitiesThat it is not always only technical aspects, but also the social aspectsHow having a common purpose helps in aligning team members togetherAlso creates a better buy-in and the work she had done with Diana Larsen on the book liftoffHow she finds and manages time to do so many things - liking her job and what she does!Doing what she feels is importantThe advice she got from Alistair Cockburn - what is the maximum money you want to make in a year?Making time to help others, not for money, at least immediatelyHow she reconciles different perspectives she gets from her network - by keeping some ME time, doing yoga, exercises etc and not forgetting self careHer thoughts on sustainability - that is her current passion as the planet is on fireSocial, environmental and economic pillars Diversity, inclusion, accessibility, equity Carbon footprint, wasteHolistic picture of the product: is or product improving lives everywhere or in a limited areaThe carbon impact of products during their lifecycle is more during the usageHow to find a balance between consuming more computing resources and the carbon footprintSome career tips in the area of IT and sustainabilityJutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. Jutta has recently pair-written with John Buck a book entitled Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy (dubbed BOSSA nova). Besides that, she has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.Jutta is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian, and European conferences, where she has also presented her work. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. (MSc.) in Product-Engineering, a B.A. in Education, and is trained as pollution control commissioner on ecological environmentalism.links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juttaeckstein/ https://www.jeckstein.com/https://www.agilebossanova.org https://jeckstein.com/sustainability

In this episode, Jutta Eckstein, an independent coach, consultant and trainer, based in Germany, shares Her origin story of starting as a product engineer, with an interest in software developmentStarted as a trained teacher and when the need for teachers dropped, went on to study product engineering and studying Pascal - and completely falling in love with software developmentAlso getting trained as pollution control commissioner, when she could move from street protests to actually working to keep pollution under controlHer early experience with Pascal and Assembler, and Smalltalk being her all time favoriteBeing part of the professional communities such as OOPSLA, and getting an orientation on the techniques and practices that got crystallized as Agile practicesHer transition from an engineer to a coach : discovering her strength based on a trigger by her project managerMoving into areas of architecture and design and becoming a team coachThe difference between a consultant and coach rolesStudying business coaching and change management, to get a formal understanding and foundationHow that enabled developing connections with people across various industriesMy task is not to create the right mindset, my task is coming with the right mindset myselfThe importance of listening, coming with experience, and working with expertsStarting with a retrospectiveStarting with a few questions: clients having prior experience with changeWhy do you think it will be successful this timeWhat hinders you from starting nowIf she discovered anything surprising in these initial explorations… her response of a pattern she sees.. In the next episodeJutta Eckstein works as an independent coach, consultant, and trainer. She has helped many teams and organizations worldwide to make an Agile transition. She has a unique experience in applying Agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects. Jutta has recently pair-written with John Buck a book entitled Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy (dubbed BOSSA nova). Besides that, she has published her experience in her books Agile Software Development in the Large, Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Retrospectives for Organizational Change, and together with Johanna Rothman Diving for Hidden Treasures: Uncovering the Cost of Delay in your Project Portfolio.Jutta is a member of the Agile Alliance (having served the board of directors from 2003-2007) and a member of the program committee of many different American, Asian, and European conferences, where she has also presented her work. She holds a M.A. in Business Coaching & Change Management, a Dipl.Eng. (MSc.) in Product-Engineering, a B.A. in Education, and is trained as pollution control commissioner on ecological environmentalism.links: @JuttaEckstein | https://www.linkedin.com/in/juttaeckstein/ | https://www.jeckstein.com/| https://www.agilebossanova.org | https://jeckstein.com/sustainability

In the previous episode, Scott Ford, the co-founder and CTO of Corgibytes, a company focused on modernizing legacy code, sharedHis interest in legacy codePatterns he has seen evolve in solution development over the yearsUsing metaphors of archeology and home renovation in the context of understanding and breathing new life into old softwareAnd moreThis is the second part of the conversation with Scott Ford, where he sharesThe origins of his company corgibytes, with a focus on helping companies take something that already exists and make it betterThis includes analyzing the structure of the code, test suites etc or the way the teams are structured and workflows, to help address a business needHow his team focuses on the craft more than the urgency to ship something out quicklyHe talks of the mindsets for makers and menders in the software development spaceThat it is no a binary, but more of a spectrum that one can and may need to move inMany makers may want to move on after 80%, when they may be bored; the menders can step in and help complete the remaining 20%Why he felt the need to have a co-founder and how he found the ideal partner, in business and lifeHow he started with developing websites and small apps, and then pivoted to the current focusThe process they have evolved over the years for the inspection and understanding existing codeUsing Cyclomatic complexity, duplication of code, coverage, churn etc, to identify hotspotsHis career tipsM. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & CTO of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade. Where most people find nothing but frustration, shame, and bugs in legacy code, Scott has centered his work around his genuine love of software modernization and helping others use joy, empathy, and technical excellence to make their systems more stable, scalable, and secure. Scott’s ideas have been featured in books such as The Innovation Delusion and as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Scott is the author of three courses on LinkedIn Learning and he is the host of the Legacy Code Rocks! Podcast.https://www.linkedin.com/in/mscottford/ 

In this conversation with Shiv, Scott Ford, the co-founder and CTO of Corgibytes, a company focused on modernizing legacy code, sharedHow he found his interest in legacy code after about 10 years of working in various roles and organizationsBeing given bugs to fix, in his early career - and after addressing them well, taking on more responsibilitiesDeriving joy in fixing code or refactoring more than just writing new featuresHaving a trigger moment while watching a PBS show on home improvement ‘This old house’, that gave due credit to the earlier architects and designers and respect their decisions, rather than calling the old work as bad or stupidWanted to add new functionality to something that may not have been thought of in the original design - and apply the same principles to modernizing old softwareHow he navigates and understands documentation or lack of it - for the old codeHow documentation is best recorded after an experiment is concluded, when writing code experimentally and incrementallyLikening modernization of code to an archeologist’s way of workingWhen boredom might make the code more complex, to keep oneself challenged, even to solve simple problemsSeeing flips back and forth between static and dynamically typed languages influencing styles of coding over the yearsSimilarly, centralization and decentralization themes also keep switching from time to time over the yearsHow he leverages his strength of being a polyglot - among computer languages, by actually working on real world problems using these languagesScott’s experience and thoughts on being an entrepreneur will be covered in the next episode.M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & CTO of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade. Where most people find nothing but frustration, shame, and bugs in legacy code, Scott has centered his work around his genuine love of software modernization and helping others use joy, empathy, and technical excellence to make their systems more stable, scalable, and secure. Scott’s ideas have been featured in books such as The Innovation Delusion and as a guest lecturer at Harvard University. Scott is the author of three courses on LinkedIn Learning and he is the host of the Legacy Code Rocks! Podcast.https://www.linkedin.com/in/mscottford/ 

This is part 2 of a repeat episode of one of my conversations, first published in 2019. Since then, we have crossed 200 episodes and the listenership has also grown.Some of you have been asking how you can know more about some of the topics covered in recent episodes.We felt that there could be related points shared by other guests in earlier episodes, but for new subscribers, it may not be easily discoverable.So, we thought that we would bring you select past episodes from time to time, to discover more people and their stories.Also, over time, the formats of the intro and show notes have also changed.This conversation with Dorai Thodla is the second of two parts. The first part was published last week and Dorai spoke about his serial entrepreneurship experience and how he innovatively finds problems to solve etc. In this part he continues to share his thoughts and experience on:Helping students learn to code by starting with codingThe joy of achievement when creating software that worksAnd how reuse and other software engineering concepts may be introduced gradually to build larger solutionsHow a solution such as a bookstore can be used as an example to learn breaking the larger solution to smaller pieces that can be implemented incrementallyUsing the KWAC architecture - essentially, learning by watching someone - as an apprentice, where the instructor also shares the thought process behind what is being doneLeveraging learning patterns among students, to learn in groups and each person guiding othersAbout his experience from organizing hackathons and activating communitiesHow he finds and manages time to do so many things and where he derives his energy and inspiration fromDorai is the founder and CTO of Technology Strategies LLC, based in the United States. He is a mentor at KCG College of Technology Chennai. He is passionate about teaching students and mentors product startups. Dorai also gives talks on emerging technologies and their impact while consulting with companies on how to build tech communities. He believes in the paradigm of “building to learn” by encouraging teaching via “doing” so students see their learning transform into a product that extends around a complete stack.Dorai lives in Chennai and spends time in the Bay Area and Seattle outside of India. He is currently involved with the following initiatives : Build2Learn ( http://www.build2learn.in/ )  andInfoAssitants ( http://infoassistants.com/ ) – a set of tools for collecting and analyzing information.Dorai can be reached via [LinkedIn]( https://www.linkedin.com/in/doraithodla/ ) [@dorait]( https://twitter.com/dorait ) 

This is a repeat episode of one of my conversations, first published in 2019. Since then, we have crossed 200 episodes and the listenership has also grown. Some of you have been asking how you can know more about some of the topics covered in recent episodes.I felt that there could be related points shared by other guests in earlier episodes, but for new subscribers, it may not be easily discoverable.So, we thought that we would bring you select past episodes from time to time, to discover more people and their stories. Also, over time, the formats of the intro and show notes have also changed.This conversation with Dorai Thodla will be published in two parts, to keep the episode length to around 30 minutes.In this first part, Dorai sharesHis serial entrepreneurship journeyHis definition of a microproduct and how one can build very small things and still be very successfulHow he identifies problems to solve, by soaking in the problem spaceHis experience of concepts associated with a lean startup - to validate ideas quicklyA story of one of his products that has been innovatively repurposed by users to create a vertical applications to make their work easier, beyond what the product was originally intended to doHow he builds in quality in horizontal products that may be used by various personas of usersThe answer to this question and more stories from Dorai, do not miss the next episode.In part 2 of my conversation with Dorai Thodla, he shares more details about his Build to Learn concept, to help students learn programming by doing. Do not miss next week.Dorai is the founder and CTO of Technology Strategies LLC, based in the United States. He is a mentor at KCG College of Technology Chennai. He is passionate about teaching students and mentors product startups. Dorai also gives talks on emerging technologies and their impact while consulting with companies on how to build tech communities. He believes in the paradigm of “building to learn” by encouraging teaching via “doing” so students see their learning transform into a product that extends around a complete stack.Dorai lives in Chennai and spends time in the Bay Area and Seattle outside of India. He is currently involved with the following initiatives :Build2Learn ( http://www.build2learn.in/ )InfoAssitants ( http://infoassistants.com/ )a set of tools for collecting and analyzing information.Dorai can be reached@https://www.linkedin.com/in/doraithodla/[@dorait] https://twitter.com/dorait

In part 2 of my conversation with, Yev Khessin, CTO and founder of DIMO (Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects) - with a goal to ‘build something disruptive’,  continues to share his story and shares his thoughts and experiences related toHow he decided to startup DIMOFinding a partner and picking a few use cases in the automotive space that need to be addressedThe experience of launching a company as a team - and why that was needed to address a large problem spaceGetting together during Covid, taking up a couple of consulting assignments to validate their assumptionsThe role of a chief architect, particularly in a close team of foundersHow the founders defined their individual roles to ensure that there is little overlap, but address different parts of the roadmapHis personal style of being a servant leader and the need for various teams to come togetherHow he keeps track of evolving technologies and identify the right ones for DIMOThe tech stack they are usingLeaving things with the persons closest to the code or the customersHow consistency of user experience is ensured, with multiple teamsLeveraging the large community with testing, validation to help rapid iterationThe implication of personal and shared data preferences in making a connected system effectiveAnd, how DIMO addresses this challenge, with fine grained options to the usersThe role of smart contracts in the DIMO ecosystemHis views on Electric Vehicles or alternative fuel vehicles and the implication of complex software that may be energy guzzlingThe implication of recycling for battery powered vehiclesHis career tips related to entering the automotive solutions spaceYev is the CTO and founder of DIMO (Digital Infrastructure for Moving Objects) - with a goal to ‘build something disruptive’.Yev has spent 10 years working in lead engineering and technical product with automotive manufacturers and suppliers on IoT connectivity, embedded software, self driving and electric vehicles. As a car lover through and through, he believes that we are at a crossroads similar to the moment when we went from horses to cars. Creating a better connected device protocol, governed by the people who use it, is the only sane way to advance how we get around.