Software People Stories

In this episode, we invite you to listen to Dorai Thodla, serial tech entrepreneur, in conversation with Sivaguru from PM Power. 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 via [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/doraithodla/) or [@dorait](https://twitter.com/dorait) Dorai shares his experience and perspectives on • Identifying opportunities and building micro products • Some creative applications of one of his products • Looking at effective ways to learn software development, by building under guidance • He also examines and offers solutions to questions on “how to make your product discoverable and useful”

In this conversation Paramu Kurumathur, Principal Consultant with PM Power Consulting shares his views and experiences, in conversation with Sivaguru, related to * His experiences with nimble practices to more formal waterfall approaches to agile. * The impact of technology on the way software is developed.  * How global architectures evolve.  * Contrasting character development in writing and feature development for software.  * Future for the CIO role and if it can be a career option  And some more...

In this episode, Sivaguru and Vishweshwar Hegde from PM Power, are in conversation to discover interesting facets of Vishu’s journey through his career. Vishu shares several interesting nuggets that range across – • How he maps his learnings from his passion for trekking, to work life and big differences one can make by being a pathfinder or a herder. • Yoga, meditation and managing outside by mastering inside • Knowledge era paradigms • How to influence others to achieve outcomes in terms of quality • Having meaningful professional conversations with hardware professionals • Facilitative leadership and influencing styles

In this episode tune into conversations between Sivaguru from PM Power Consulting & Sandeep Dasgupta, Vice President R&D - Gaming Systems at Scientific Games.  In this conversation Sandeep talks about some of his world views that have shaped his work style as well as professional practices. Among other points, they cover * The change in mindset needed when moving from a number crunching oriented language like FORTRAN to object orientation  * How Sandeep learnt the differences in perspective between a techie and a business user, when working with data  * How his experience led him to formulate the idea of natural software engineering  * His views on Agile practices His views on Edge AI  Sandeep is a passionate technologist with varied and deep experience in Product Development, Technical and Solution Architecture, Emerging technologies, Engineering methodology and process, Agile methodologies, Innovation and IP Development.  He played various interesting roles in Engineering and Technology, ranging from building India's first online Stock Exchange, designing and developing Platform-Independent products in the early 90s, architecting and developing "Zero Latency Enterprise" products at the HP Advanced Technology Labs, being Lead Architect for one of the world's top-selling retail banking products, heading engineering for Industry-leading Online Real-timeTrading Products to designing best-of-breed frameworks for Agile Engineering.  Sandeep has an excellent track record of leadership in Product Development, Platform Development, R&D, Custom Application Development, Technical and Solutions Architecture, Systems Design, Performance Engineering and Product Engineering Process.  Read some of his blogs at  [Theories I am developing](Theories I am developing - http://www.naturalsoftwareengineering.com My thoughts on technology - http://sandeep-dasgupta-technology.blogspot.in/) [My Thoughts on Technology](http://sandeep-dasgupta-technology.blogspot.in/)

In this episode, I would like to share with you two incidents that helped me refine my own understanding of user needs and experience. From two different projects at different times, how I learnt:  * That the purpose of a developer is to solve others’ problems [and not just look for the next personal challenge to solve]  * Distinguishing user needs and wants  * The power of conversations with users  * The need and importance of empathy for the user ways of working and work environment, when designing solutions  * The power of iterative development, with frequent user experience based feedback

Agile transformations, like any other are challenging for most organizations. This episode engages experts from PM Power Consulting J Veeraraaghavan, Vishveshwar Hegde and Anand Natarajan in dialogue, sharing their agile leadership coaching and consulting insights. The dialogue also explores common challenges and approaches to agile transformations for leaders and geographically distributed teams with diverse view points of the experts. The case study reads as follows : **Trailblazers Inc. have decided to embark on an Agile transformation journey with their SVP of Engineering. Mike Simpson, personally kicking off an initiative targeted at improving predictability, reducing cycle time and improving customer responsiveness. Mike wants Neeraj who is the VP of Engineering at their Bangalore development center to drive this initiative with Scrum as the primary approach and complete the transformation within the next one and a half years.** **Neeraj approaches you as an Agile coach to help him with defining and implementing a program that will ensure the success of this initiative.   ** To Summarize key aspects from the dialogue: 1. Define specific objectives for this initiative based on senior leadership directive. 2. Use a wholistic approach (rather than just training) that considers where the organization and teams are currently with respect to the objectives and specific interventions such as training and coaching targeted at addressing the gaps identified . 3. Ensure senior leadership team at both locations has bought into the initiative and is fully committed to it. 4. Use of constructs such as different levels of planning, scrum of scrums, meta scrums etc. for effective cross-team collaboration.

In this episode, Shiv will be talking to Gopalan, the Managing director of Global Automation, India. Gopal, as he is also called, has been in the international IT products and services industry since 1979. Listen to Gopal sharing some personal stories that touch upon various points including: * Attitude of working for someone  * Culture aspects, when working in various cultures  * Arrogance of a fresher - or how one can miss out the real user needs  * A tough situation he faced, caused by the differences in implementation of a standard protocol in the Airline industry, which, in hindsight - appears funny  * Cyclic Redundancy Check – CRC  * His views on Agile  * His views on technology / architecture patterns  * Some suggestions for Skill / capability development for those entering software field now

My name is Sivaguru. I have been in the IT industry since 1980 - and started my association initially with hardware - building a single board microcomputer - and them switched to software. Over the years, working with multiple technologies to create solutions across various domains - and working in multiple countries, I gained a lot of experience by doing myself as well as learning from others. I share two specific learnings in this episode. 1\. The importance of DevOps for every developer 2\. The importance of user experience or designing with the user in mind Do join me and share your thoughts as well.. .