As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.Today, my guest is Paramu Kurumathur, a colleague and a published serial author.He talks aboutTwo types of books he writesHow he motivates himself to make progress, even when there is no deadlineHow he plans and prioritizes time across projectsThe significance of a calendarHis thoughts on year end reflections and analogies from astronomyAnd the repeating cycles in calendars and their relevanceThe usefulness of year end reflections and new year resolutionsYou can reach him onhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/paramu-kurumathur-01489a6/

As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.Today, I am in conversation with S Gopalan, my colleague from PM Power and an industry veteran. He prefers to be called Gopal.In this conversation he sharesThat reflections are goodHow his own perspective on annual cycles of appraisal [and feedback] have changed over timeThat he is not fond of setting goals such as losing weight within a fixed timeline, as effective, but rather prefers to take up things that would help make changes in his daily routinesHow taking micro goals per day, could possibly be accumulated and sometimes ‘binge’ completedThe benefit of making commitments publicHow his approaches are different when reflecting on two different contexts that he is actively associated with: a loosely structured team and a more structured team with tight timelinesWhat we, as coaches, need to think about differently - about tools to help us deliver more impactful engagementsThe value of reflections - to make one feel more secure and confident of the futureYou should have a plan, but be open to modifying that to adapt dynamically

As we approach the end of a calendar year, many of us have the practice of looking back on the year that was, reflecting on the highs and lows of the year - and shape our dreams and aspirations for the coming year.At Software People Stories, we are running a special series of conversations with people on their own approaches as well as practices and stories of how their thinking has changed over the years.Today, I am in conversation with Anantha Natarajan, my colleague from PM Power and an accomplished coach. He prefers to be called Anand.In this conversation he sharesHow his approach has evolved over the years, influenced by the context and environment he grew up in and moving to a larger city for studies and on to professional lifeA question he was asked by one of his mentors, about 25 years ago, about his aspirations for the futureHis practice of writing things down in his dream bookA model that has evolved and worked for him, that he calls i-fi; moving from the present I, to the future IThe importance of the role of a mentorWhether discipline is essential for these resolutionsHow considering some responsibilities as chores, obligations or blessings changes ones complete perspectiveThe high level overview of his i-fi modelAbout improving the quality of the inner mirrorThe relevance of choosing timelines for future plansFor more details on the i-fi model, check out Anand’s blog post.Accessible at: https://pm-powerconsulting.com/blog/i-fi-a-model-for-designing-your-future-and-personal-change/I hope you got some ideas to help you reflect and plan for the coming year.If some other practices have worked for you - or possibly not worked for you, would you like to share your story?Reach us on podcasts@pm-powerconsulting.com  and please do share with your networks to spread the word.

In this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Bharath Kumar who is a Marketeer from a Technologist, Head Of Marketing & Cx - Zoho Creator and he’s a Marketing and Content Specialist.In his career spanning over two decades, he shares very interesting stories –Started his career in Infosys as a software engineerFound that his interests was in organizing events, quizzes and packaging and presenting the ideas were his strengthsDuring his career as a mainframe engineer, Bharath found that he was the most approachable and decided to approach a career in marketingHe talks about creating every day a great day and understanding what according to him made him feel greatShares his stories on what led him to choose marketing in MBABharath shares his dichotomy of experience in Madura Micro Finance LtdEndearing stories on being a communication - content management and head of circle communication for airtelBharath shares some of the data orientation and how to wear the data hat and keep visibility of the brand Identifying the patterns of data using clarity and ethical values. Bharath also shares how he always has the analytical mind and the eye for color/ patterns at the same time. In fact Bharath recommends that all of us need to keep this modelBharath considers himself as an entrepreneurial marketeer. Bharath has 14+ years of professional work experience that helped him develop expertise in the areas of Lead Generation, Marketing communications, Brand management, Marketing strategy & Content marketing. Bharath is the marketing head for Zoho Creators for the last 5 years. Prior to that, Bharath was in the product marketing team for Ramco system and TinyOwl. He was the head of communication of Tamil Nadu Circle for Airtel where he was responsible for the content delivery and creating the brand promise for Airtel. Bharath was a software engineering in Infosys for 3 years. Bharath graduated from College of Engineering Guindy in Mining Engineering and Great Lakes Institute of management. Bharath can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bharathkumarb-marketer/ 

In this episode, I asked Tom Pierce, the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S) responds to my question on how the ‘integrated’ in his company name is internalized by his clients. He responded to that question and shared many more interesting thoughts in this episode. He shared:How their weekly 5 hour workshops for clients, to get vibrant conversations goingHow he uses music in some of his interactionsHis belief in segmentation and appropriate responses, rather than fragmentationHis experience with music, when practicing first base alone and getting the big picture when the full team came togetherHis metaphor from baseball, on being present and aware of the other players and take decisionsWhy preparation and practice trumps planning aloneHow Covid had a negative impact on collaborationAbout drawing from how children learn music to make software teams more effectiveHow the artistry of code can be better when a team member ‘listens’ to the rest of the team membersHow children are very perceptive, while AI [alexa] is notHis career tips for those considering a career in IT and those considering a switch mid-career, from non-tech to tech rolesHe also draws from his experience of holding his first grand child in his hands the first time.. Beautiful!, in responding to a question of patience and a sense of urgency or rushing through lifeHow he finds time for being interested and engaged in multiple activitiesTom Pierce is the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S) of Louisville, Kentucky. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Wake Forest University (1981) and a Master’s in Divinity (1993) from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. After serving as an officer in the US Army, Tom has been immersed in the design and support of manufacturing software, as well as in the data-driven analysis of business and financial systems, primarily in large manufacturing facilities within the Aerospace Defense sector. A self-described MRP philosopher and ERP contrarian, Tom is a passionate advocate of simple approaches to complex problems. As a stubbornly resolute moderate, his company seeks to promote intelligent integrity by avoiding the opposing traps of overly simplistic naivety and overly complicated sophistication. For roughly four decades, Tom has focused his career and his company on the pursuit of trustworthy clarity and practical understanding of information, which is the light of all human pursuits. 

In this episode, Tom Pierce, the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S), shares:Many in his family had been in military serviceIn his first assignment, being assigned to the analysis team because he has a background in math and computersGrabbing an opportunity to use a computer that was unusedDoing some simulation modeling solutionsLeaving the army in good terms and going back to schoolWorking for a defense contractor and then starting his own defense contracting firmLeveraging his experience in the military to solve civilian problemsSome generational differences in the approach to merge technology and processesHis experience of the rules and hierarchical models of working in the military, where, on the lighter side, ‘you cannot do anything without breaking some rule’Some examples of streaks of entrepreneurship that ran in his familyThe last straw that pushed him into entrepreneurship: a sense of frustration about how businesses were run and having his own values and ideas of how to run a companyNot compromising on the value of working with end usersHow tech fluency is more important than tech savvinessTom Pierce is the president and founder of Integrated Information Systems (I2S) of Louisville, Kentucky. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Wake Forest University (1981) and a Master’s in Divinity (1993) from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. After serving as an officer in the US Army, Tom has been immersed in the design and support of manufacturing software, as well as in the data-driven analysis of business and financial systems, primarily in large manufacturing facilities within the Aerospace Defense sector. A self-described MRP philosopher and ERP contrarian, Tom is a passionate advocate of simple approaches to complex problems. As a stubbornly resolute moderate, his company seeks to promote intelligent integrity by avoiding the opposing traps of overly simplistic naivety and overly complicated sophistication. For roughly four decades, Tom has focused his career and his company on the pursuit of trustworthy clarity and practical understanding of information, which is the light of all human pursuits

I continue my conversation with Jeremy Snyder, the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Towards the end of the first part, I asked Jerermy ‘how a developer should think, when using APIS - with so many moving parts - from security and performance aspects’He answers that and continues to share his story relating to:The extensive experience his co-founder has with API based architectures and implementationsHow APIs can implement business functions or offer specific extracts of data held in applicationsFirst, understanding how APIs could be compromised, to pick the scope for what their company firetail should be addressingHow many breaches are related to authentication and authorizationWhy a zero-trust approach is very critical and the good practice of sharing only minimum data that needs to be sharedThe importance of central loggingHow he manages to get a good night’s sleep, while playing a very crucial role in the chain of enterprise security in an API based solutionHis personal practices to handle pressure at work and stay calmThe story behind naming their company firetailHow he developed an interest in learning many languagesJeremy asked me about my linguistic interestsHis career tipsSocial media: https://twitter.com/halffinn , https://www.linkedin.com/company/77663520 , https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremysnyder/ Jeremy is the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Prior to FireTail, Jeremy worked in M&A at Rapid7, a global cyber leader, where he worked on the acquisitions of 3 companies during the pandemic. Jeremy previously led sales at DivvyCloud, one of the earliest cloud security posture management companies, and also led AWS sales in southeast Asia. Jeremy started his career with 13 years in cyber and IT operations. Jeremy has an MBA from Mason, a BA in computational linguistics from UNC, and has completed additional studies in Finland at Aalto University. Jeremy speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 countries. Jeremy was once kicked off a train in central Sweden, and another time went several days without seeing another human, but did see lots of reindeer.Link to my podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-a-ciso/id1596056884

In this conversation, Jeremy Snyder, the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup, shares his professional journey and perspectives. Specifically, How he got into IT in the late 90s, when technology was coming into businessesEarly experience in Linux, VAX and Unix and implementing solutions for a translation agencyBeing responsible to evaluate, implement and integrate with various systems and thereby increasing the empathy for users and their situationsMoving to work with one of the solution providers and taking up tech support roles and trying his hand at software developmentGetting into and liking the infrastructure related rolesHis experience, as an IT infrastructure professional, of working with software developersThe ‘healthy’ struggle between the two roles and how IT teams would specify the environments to develop and deploy intoIT teams wanting to conserve resources and giving very limited capacities for developersDays when 98% availability was taken as acceptable and when crashes occurred, devs and IT teams would work overtime to find fault with the other teamStarting with Amazon AWS in 2010 when cloud computing was just evolvingUnderstanding the power of virtualized environments and why that needs a different way of thinking about data centers, getting away from the server-hugger mentalityThe need for users to develop trust in the cloud model of workingThe experience with gaining customer confidence in the cloud model in terms of stability, security etcThe harder aspect of addressing cultural issues triggered by fear of losing jobs by IT personnelTaking up other roles in smaller companies and understanding the security and vulnerability risks that companies could get exposed toPerimeter controls, endpoint protection, logging and monitoring etcFrom replicating data center structures to auto scaling infrastructure using containers and serverless architecturesThese resulting in more and more API based architecturesSocial media: https://twitter.com/halffinn https://www.linkedin.com/company/77663520 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremysnyder/ Jeremy is the founder and CEO of FireTail.io, an end-to-end API security startup. Prior to FireTail, Jeremy worked in M&A at Rapid7, a global cyber leader, where he worked on the acquisitions of 3 companies during the pandemic. Jeremy previously led sales at DivvyCloud, one of the earliest cloud security posture management companies, and also led AWS sales in southeast Asia. Jeremy started his career with 13 years in cyber and IT operations. Jeremy has an MBA from Mason, a BA in computational linguistics from UNC, and has completed additional studies in Finland at Aalto University. Jeremy speaks 5 languages and has lived in 5 countries. Jeremy was once kicked off a train in central Sweden, and another time went several days without seeing another human, but did see lots of reindeer. Link to my podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ask-a-ciso/id1596056884

In this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Nanthakumar Arumugam who is a Technologist, Delivery Lead at ThoughtWorks and he’s a Quality Engineer and Financial Expert.In his career spanning over two decades, he shares very interesting stories –Nantha started his career as an instrumentation engineer within Polyester firm. His interest gravitated towards the PLC programming and that led him to join the software engineering full timeNantha joined Ready Test Go as a Quality engineer where he got his skill in the world of startup and certification worldNantha shares how the waterfall way of working had provided different domains and worked in 20 different programs in a very short period of timeHe also covers how he and his team ramped up on the domain and program rapidly Automation as a practice he gravitated to reduce the manual regression suite Nantha talks about the background on how Selenium tool came in as an antidote to the mercury tools (winrunner / loadrunner)Nantha shares his expertise on the passage of Automation CoE and a separate teamNantha talks about several hats he has worn in ThoughtWorks and shares the changes on how business interactions within TechnologyHe further shares the distance that’s reduced between business leads and access to leads to identify solution optionsNantha talks about the availability of tools that has made the business outcomes come out as soon as possibleNantha shares some of the key wisdom on how one has to build expertise in different facets of experience Nantha is the delivery lead and project manager in ThoughtWorks. He has been working with ThoughtWorks for a decade. He has played several roles including Quality Analyst, Quality Lead, Architect and Chennai Chapter lead prior to taking the current role. Nantha has done his PG in BITS Pilani and B.E. in University of Madras Nanthakumar can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nanthakumara/

In this episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Saikat Chakrabarty who is a Technologist, Director, Engineering at Mihup and he’s a AI/ML and Computer Vision Enthusiast.In his career spanning over a decade, he has been a Telecom engineer, prompt engineering, Interaction designer and conversational AI. Saikat is working in the pioneering world of building AI tools that map the man machine and the personHe’s working in the contact center engineering by understanding the questions and asks from our customersSaikat started his career in creating software for LTE within 4G Telecom providers and says that he has not looked back from thereSaikat’s team in Mihup creates the analysis of the several thousand conversations between the customer and contact center and understand the sentiment of the userListen to the conversation on how the vernacular language support is being created in the AI platform to build accuracyUnderstand that initial days you have to choose the right place to work and always stay invested in oneselfSaikat also talks about his mantra of “Don't choose an easy path and continue to learn”Saikat talks about his interests in Medical and Computer science and Brain networks are working. Saikat believes that the future bet is lying on medical access across the globeSaikat says that software changes in months not years - you have to keep yourself updated daily and that’s the only way to stay relevant He’s also deep believer of the growth of the technology in Tier 3 cities within India given the organizations changing to remote first or HybridSaikat has been instrumental in Mihup's success as one of the leading Conversational AI companies in India. He leads the entire tech organisation at Mihup, with a team of almost 20 people working under him, ranging from Devops to MLEs, overseeing the end to end development and shipping of the Mihup products.Saikat Chakrabarty is a dynamic leader and Senior Engineering Manager at Mihup, a pioneering conversational AI platform founded in 2016. Mihup's revolutionary approach empowers individuals to seamlessly interact with the digital world while prioritizing inclusivity and accessibility, regardless of language, accent, or dialect.Technical Leadership:At Mihup, Saikat has successfully managed and mentored cross-functional teams in machine learning, R&D, product development and DevOps. His expertise in managing the development of Mihup's conversational AI products has positioned him as a trusted leader in the industry. With a deep understanding of a wide range of technologies, including Java (Spring Boot), NodeJs, Golang, Angular, Python, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, and more, Saikat has played a pivotal role in building highly scalable cloud microservices and optimizing premise-based applications.Diverse Experience:Saikat's wealth of experience extends beyond his role at Mihup. He has previously worked with renowned companies like Lexmark and Polaris Network Inc., where he honed his skills and passion for AI/ML and computer vision. His contributions to these cutting-edge fields have resulted in 2 patents and 6 paper publications, consolidating his exceptional knowledge and expertise.Recognition and Awards:Saikat's exceptional contributions and dedication to his craft have earned him notable accolades throughout his career. Notably, he was awarded the prestigious Digital Transformation Award at Lexmark Focus-2-Future, alongside the Manager Appreciation Award and several other commendations. At Mihup, he has regularly been the recipient of special rewards for his undying passion and dedication towards delivering products that customers love to use.Saikat can be contacted at Saikat Chakrabarty: