Software People Stories

Kishore Kumar is a software professional turned youtuber. He shares his career journey with SivaguruStarting career as system engineer later moved to programing on mainframes Moving to the USA and feeling the need of studies did his Masters in computer science . Learning AI way back in 1989 to 1991. How this helped later in his careerHow his career mirrors the Indian software industry which has changed shapes over years. How things changed from convincing the US for jobs to how later their trust on Indians helped increase workflow.Moving from service to product companyHis views on handling ambiguous requirements in old and new software development cyclesInfluencing teams with his systematic approach/processTalks about his personal transition while transitioning professionallyKishore Kumar is a youtuber with a unique youtube channel called @ahargana. This channel has the singular purpose of explaining the astronomical basis of the Hindu panchanga using custom-built planetary orbital simulations.Kishore was not always a youtuber. In his previous avatar, Kishore was a software professional for over thirty five years playing a variety of roles from programmer to program manager, general manager and vice president in leading companies such as Tata Unisys, Cognizant and Siemens. He has earned a masters degree in computer science from SUNY at Buffalo, USA and a bachelors degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from NIT Trichy. A lifelong self-learner, Kishore has leveraged all his learnings from his education and professional experience in the making of @Ahargana and contrary to appearance, considers it an entirely logical continuation of his life journey.Kishore may be reached at:Email: kishore.kumar@counterpointconsultants.comYoutube: youtube.com/@aharganaLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kishoresridharakumar

In the second part of the podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Mathan Ramanujam, Product Influencer and Hardware Designer and Director at SiMa.ai, shares his career journeyMathan shares on values on why would you work in a startup - Working for today’s salary or invest in tomorrow’s growth He also shares matching personal believes in the firm and extracting learning from failures and failure in itself Talks about each person needs to think of themselves as an IC irrespective of product or service worldMathan shares his customer to customer philosophy - Ensuring that customer need from marketing to end product launch - Development and productisation and sales & customer desk to the customerPutting onself in the fray in the various roles - shares learning to put oneself in the same role Shares his experience in doing a verification in two different decadesMathan shares how his Contacts have helped in getting Contracts Creating your own psychological safety and how one can create that in the team with 8-15 yearsHow can you build high potential people by building safe environment for failure as well as skill buildingMathan shares how he relates to being system centric and hence able to manage community between hardware and software and thus being successful in the embedded industry Mathan Ramanujam is the director in SIMa.ai. SiMa.ai™ is a machine learning company delivering the industry’s first software-centric purpose-built MLSoC™ platform. Mathan is a front-runner, growing high performance team ground-up! He’s is using his versatile nature and cross-functional experience to to build CoE for Infrastructure IPs for ML SoC, while Challenging himself to learn ML/AI.Mathan has over 27 years of total industry experience with 17+ years of Team responsibilities. Mathan has taken multiple Si from concept to production, specialized in Digital design, with FPGA in the semiconductor industry. Mathan started his career in Atlaz Telecom and moved to the bay area for Arasan Chip Systems Inc.in the role of USB Device, Ethernet controller and XGMII IP development - RTL. Mathan later moved back to India took up team leadership roles in Nokia, Texas Instruments, QualComm, Western Digital and STMicroelectronics. Mathan Ramanujam has done his B.Tech in Bharathidasan University in Electronics and Communication Engineering.  Mathan can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathan-ramanujam-4495082/ 

In the first part of the podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Mathan Ramanujam, Product Influencer and Hardware Designer and Director at SiMa.ai , shares his career journeyMathan started his journey as a hardware engineer at Atlaz Telecom and identified that creating Mathan’s growth can be traced very similar to Moore’s law - shares experiences on how tools, circuitry and semiconductor industry has exponential world and how he has adapted himselfSystem on the chip  or SoC is the trend that’s making hardware Mathan realised his skill in building relationship and ability to deliver in the operational and later strategic rolesHe shares a few stories on being a product influencer and being invited to be part of panels on SoC and verificationHarnessing the team members strength and learning from them and ensure that the value is being always deliveredMathan shares stories on enabling people not different from learning to swim by giving a moving target and in the end people recognizing themselvesMathan talks about how he has ability to tell stories and discovered it Mathan shares a crumple zone as a story - End zone in view Story on moving from US to India and shares his experiencing of supporting his familyMathan shares India’s cities that are opening up for the embedded and hardware design Mathan Ramanujam is the director in SIMa.ai. SiMa.ai™ is a machine learning company delivering the industry’s first software-centric purpose-built MLSoC™ platform. Mathan is a front-runner, growing high performance team ground-up! He’s is using his versatile nature and cross-functional experience to to build CoE for Infrastructure IPs for ML SoC, while Challenging himself to learn ML/AI.Mathan has over 27 years of total industry experience with 17+ years of Team responsibilities. Mathan has taken multiple Si from concept to production, specialized in Digital design, with FPGA in the semiconductor industry. Mathan started his career in Atlaz Telecom and moved to the bay area for Arasan Chip Systems Inc.in the role of USB Device, Ethernet controller and XGMII IP development - RTL. Mathan later moved back to India took up team leadership roles in Nokia, Texas Instruments, QualComm, Western Digital and STMicroelectronics. Mathan Ramanujam has done his B.Tech in Bharathidasan University in Electronics and Communication Engineering.  Mathan can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mathan-ramanujam-4495082/ 

Matt Genovese Founder and CEO of Planorama Design continues his conversation with Chitra and shares his thoughts on-Writing effective stories or work behind defining the requirements Working in collaboration with the development team, discussing the challenges of an APIIssues working with IOT projects and hardware have synchronous issues and different hardware failuresWhat failures to take care of and what can be ignoredImportance of functional verificationAlong with writing user stories, discovery and thinking is also importantWhole process of discovering problems, asking questions, naturally brings the right people in How diagrams help all the stakeholders understand/Visualize the flow togetherHow and when a design sprint happensHis message to someone who is aspiring hardware or software careers –Matt Genovese is the founder and CEO of Planorama Design, bringing over 25 years of career experience in high-tech, spanning semiconductors, hardware, IoT, IT, and software product development. He has a strong track record of planning, launching, and shipping products that work. Matt’s company, Planorama Design, is a software user experience design professional services company, designing complex, technical software that is simple and intuitive to use. Staffed with seasoned engineers and user experience (UX) designers, the company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA.Matt earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He began his career at Motorola-Freescale Semiconductor in product & test engineering and moved into design verification of RISC processors and SoCs. Matt has also held product leadership roles for complex and technical software development. As a result of his deep professional experience, Matt strives to “get it right the first time” starting with the software application’s user experience design, down to the hardware at the bottom of the stack. Planorama helps drive product development processes that create products that work out of the gate. Social Media Handles:Way to reach Matt : https://planorama.design/podcast/Join AI Product Hive – an AI-focused Community for Product Managers, Designers, and Development Teams (Slack)  https://aiproducthive.com/

Matt Genovese Founder and CEO of Planorama Design shares how he -Started learning programming as a kid on 8-bit computersFounding Planorama Design, software experimentsImpact of dinner table conversations around trigonometry, tinkering and electronics projectsNeed to know “why”, diving inside the black box, having the freedom to take things apart to learnWorking at Motorola, from fabrication to production, moving into functional design and verification for SoC for Power PC based RISC processorsPoints of view on the cost of releasing bugsBringing design into software engineering, getting requirements right to build the right productFocus on delivering hi-fidelity requirements for software engineers to do a great job, reduce time to deliver a quality productMatt Genovese is the founder and CEO of Planorama Design, bringing over 25 years of career experience in high-tech, spanning semiconductors, hardware, IoT, IT, and software product development. He has a strong track record of planning, launching, and shipping products that work. Matt’s company, Planorama Design, is a software user experience design professional services company, designing complex, technical software that is simple and intuitive to use. Staffed with seasoned engineers and user experience (UX) designers, the company is headquartered in Austin, Texas, USA.Matt earned a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the Rochester Institute of Technology and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. He began his career at Motorola-Freescale Semiconductor in product & test engineering and moved into design verification of RISC processors and SoCs. Matt has also held product leadership roles for complex and technical software development. As a result of his deep professional experience, Matt strives to “get it right the first time” starting with the software application’s user experience design, down to the hardware at the bottom of the stack. Planorama helps drive product development processes that create products that work out of the gate.Social Media Handles:Way to reach Matt : https://planorama.design/podcast/Join AI Product Hive - an AI-focused Community for Product Managers, Designers, and Development Teams (Slack)URL:  https://aiproducthive.com/

This is part 2 of the conversation celebrating the milestone of 250 episodes, with our guest host Gopalan.Gopalan was the first guest on the show and agreed to play host and have the hosts as guests!In part 1, he was exploring aspects related to how the hosts prepare for an episode and how different formats worked for the Software People Stories.In this part, he continues to explore his curiosity of how the minds of podcast hosts work, in handling planned and unplanned situations.He asksSome things that went wrong and what went right.. About similarities of podcast editing and movie makingSome difficult guests, who would veer off topicHow does one stay in the conversation, but stay detachedHandling situations when known persons say things that you do not feel the same way about or know it may not be completely factualHow one would resist the temptation to not get into arguments or negating something that a guest saysSome of the podcasts that Gopal listens toWe hope you enjoyed some of our experiences in bringing you 250 episodes of stories of software people.We believe that everyone has a story to tell that will inspire or educate others.When would you like to tell your story?Or, if you would like to submit somebody else’s story, and be a guest host, please record a sample or the full conversation and share it with us.

This a very special episode for all us, hosts - and assume, for you, our listener as well.This is the 250th episode of the Software People Stories.About 5 years ago, A desire to learn something new and leverage that learning to pay it forward to the community, led to the launch of this podcast.What started as Software Lifecycle Stories pivoted to Software People Stories and thanks to all your encouragement and love, we are at 250.This episode is a little different from the usual episodes in that we have reversed the roles.The very first guest on the show, Goplan, plays the host and the three co-hosts, me, Chitra and Gayatri are the guests.In a freewheeling conversation, Gopal had many questions about what happens behind the scenes and inside our minds in the context of being associated with the podcast.The topics covered include:What the experience has been for the hosts to have a consistent and regular scheduleHow was the experience of discovering new aspects of people that you have known for long, through the podcast conversationIf the hosts had a structure in mind for the conversationsHow such structures work when there are multiple guestsGopal asked for some examples of things that went right and some things that did not go as per plan.The answers to that questions and more interesting questions, listen to the next episode, which is part 2 of this special conversation, to celebrate the milestone of 250 episodes.

In the second part of the podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Woody Zuill, Expert Coach and co-author of Mob Programming, shares his career journeyBalancing the speeches and consulting with consulting engagementsWoody shares tips and tricks of being in the speaking networksWoody talks about joy of creating his own businesses - Almost 16 of them is creating Woody shares early experiments on signs and making new thingsHe shares his passion of making his day productive by avoiding repeated steps and automateWoody shares his deep inflection points in his career that has positioned him today Woody also shares his ideal places to work and attracting like minded people to work Instead of Doing what others are expecting of us and always uplifting to oneself alsoWoody also shares deep views on how one needs to contribute for a better tomorrowWoody has been programming computers for almost 40 years, and have 20+ years of experience as an Extreme Programmer, and 15+ years as an Agile Guide of some sort. He truly believes that code must be simple, clean, and maintainable so that we can realize the Agile promise of Responding to Change, and that we must constantly "Inspect and Adapt".Woody is a co-author with Kevin Meadows of the book "Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach". He’s a prolific speaker on this topic at conferences, user groups, and meet-ups all over the world.More generally, I've delivered workshops, trainings, and coaching sessions on Agile Software Development, Mob Programming, and Software Development Practices for a number of firms including Ericsson, Schneider Electric, Qualcomm, Intel, H & M, King Games, Capital One, Twitter, and Spotify.Woody can be connected at https://www.linkedin.com/in/woodyzuill/ 

In the first part of the podcast episode, Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Woody Zuill, Expert Coach and co-author of Mob Programming, shares his career journeyShares how he joined software development after he created tools to improve his day-to-day lifeJokingly Woody mentions how he didn’t have to clean up(unlike doing carpentry) after a hard day at writing codeEarly experimentation on pair programming and having fun and how he found that explaining ideas, listening each other and accepting each others opinions - most importantly stop interrupting othersTalks about the story of using pair programming for knowledge transfer in a rapid mannerShares his principle on how experimenting is the fastest way to build cultural nuancesPaying attention to others emotions and deeply listening enables - Listen as if the next sentence is the most important thing we are going to listenHis motto - Be the best team member that you can be Woody shares tips and tricks on deep listening skill and staying curiousAha moments Woody has had how “Teams” have evolvedHow can you lead from without any of the influence and how that led him to become a speaker and teacherWoody has been programming computers for almost 40 years, and have 20+ years of experience as an Extreme Programmer, and 15+ years as an Agile Guide of some sort. He truly believes that code must be simple, clean, and maintainable so that we can realize the Agile promise of Responding to Change, and that we must constantly "Inspect and Adapt".Woody is a co-author with Kevin Meadows of the book "Mob Programming, A Whole Team Approach". He’s a prolific speaker on this topic at conferences, user groups, and meet-ups all over the world.More generally, I've delivered workshops, trainings, and coaching sessions on Agile Software Development, Mob Programming, and Software Development Practices for a number of firms including Ericsson, Schneider Electric, Qualcomm, Intel, H & M, King Games, Capital One, Twitter, and Spotify.Woody can be connected at https://www.linkedin.com/in/woodyzuill/ 

In the second part of the podcast episode, Shiv Sivaguru continues his conversation with Mohan RamMohan talks aboutThe challenges in working with details as well as abstractionsThe cost of not understanding implicit requirements and the importance of progressive elicitation of requirementsHow coaching and observations of people who were doing well in these aspectsWhy crossing the initial hurdle of winning the confidence of your clients / users is extremely critical for the success of a projectHis personal philosophy in working under contractual constraints - of cost or timelinesHow Agile approaches are suitable to work more effectively under dynamic scope conditionsHow individuals can find a balance between having or not having an aptitude for technical or managerial flavors of workHow he developed an interest in philosophy and constant learningWhat he would like to do with the ancient wisdom, in applying them to day-to-day contextsHis thoughts and tips for career questionsMohan Ram is a Principal Consultant at PM Power Consulting, he works with Clients in their Agile Transformation initiatives, Digital Innovation and Transformation journey and helping build Individuals and Teams that are capable of effectively Delivering outcomes and Managing these Transformations in a Confident and Sustained manner.