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Cambridge and London – Winter 2014

I’m sitting in the lobby of Clink 261, a hostel near King’s Cross, hearing so many languages that my brain hurts trying to identify them (Nope, I can’t). To complicate matters, the reduced sunshine is confusing. The week has consisted of meetings, plotting (to take over the world, of course), drinks, ranting, and generally fun things. It’s been a tiring but spectacular week with my team at the OKF. As a remote employee, I enjoy meeting my colleagues in person and spending time together.

As always, my trips are more about people than places. In Cambridge, once I was properly awake, I met a colleague for lunch at Cambridge Blue, where we had deer pie for lunch. My Twitter followers seemed a bit mad that I ate Bambi. From there, we went to his friends’ and had tea with them, while enjoying watching their kids play and chatting about books, trains, and comics. Later in the evening, I caught up with an old roommate and his family.

I walked everywhere in Cambridge except when I had luggage or if I was, cough, otherwise unable to walk. Our hotel was a 40-minute walk away from the venue of our meetings. I took a taxi on a few mornings, but when I could, I walked. The cold manages to wake me up, and in a few minutes, I’m nice and warm (weather hacking?!). There are other advantages too, like a lovely pastry shop on way 😉

I spent 3 days with my team plotting to take over the world with CKAN and then 2 days with the rest of the team. An extremely produtive time during the day and a good time chatting with everyone afterward, especially people from other teams. We had a “Cheese Off”, which France won, closely followed by Brazil. The close of the summit involved a puppy and cake!

I’m in London now, taking a day off for myself. I might head out and grab some lunch or take a walk. No plans for today and I’m leaving it that way.

2014-01-19
Quick Tip: Ansible Debugging
Today I learned something about Ansible debugging from benno on #ansible. Occasionally, commands can get stuck, especially if it’s waiting for input. You can’t fix this until you recognize what’s going on and see the prompt. In other words, you want to see the stdout and stderr on the target machine. Here’s what you do:
- Run ansible with -vvv.
- Login to the remote host where the command is being executed.
- Find the ansible process executing the command and kill them.
- The stdout and stderr should be printed to the console where ansible was running.
2014-01-07
2013 – The good and the bad
2013 has been good fun and terrible, at the same time.

The Good
- Moved to my own apartment. I’ve been longing to do this for ages. An apartment with a wall full of books. I think I’ve managed to achieve that 😉
- Cooked for myself for nearly most of the year. There were occasions where I burned food, but it’s overall been a joyful experience.
- Last year involved quite a bit of travel: 3 trips to London, a trip to San Francisco, and a trip to Kenya.
- Met lots of people I’ve wanted to meet for ages. The Mozilla summit and the London trips helped particularly.
- I bought a Kobo in 2013 and according to it, I’ve read 37 books. I don’t even know how many physical books I’ve read.
- Work has been great with nearly 100 commits on CKAN. Lots of new features and bug fixes on which I’ve taken the initiative. I say this constantly, but I’ll reiterate: I work with the most amazing people.
- Usually, I’m shy and not very talkative. I started with meeting people I know but hadn’t met, to meeting completely new people.
- Writing. My blog was mostly ignored since end of 2012. Managed to pick it up and I wrote 15 posts.
The Bad
- Health-wise, 2013 has been an absolute disaster. I’ve been admitted to the hospital at least 3 times. As I write this, I have a cough from a throat infection. Sigh.
- The sedentary lifestyle has affected my overall fitness, Instead of losing weight, I’ve gained weight. Staying at my parents’ for 2 months probably contributed to it as well.
- Despite the fact that I like writing, I couldn’t even start NaNoWriMo.
- Frontend development. Still ashamed of my skills with Javascript and CSS.
Before I read this post I read, I read Sean Ogle’s excellent post about resolutions. With that in mind, I’ve set some for 2014. I’m going to be tracking them month-by-month and posting updates every quarter (I even have calender reminders!).

2014
- An exercise habit, tracked by number of days in a month I did not exercise.
- Learn to write C. I’m going to work through Learn C the Hard Way which has 52 exercise and seems perfect for a year-long project.
- Read more non-fiction. I thoroughly enjoyed the non-fiction books I read last year (Quiet by Susan Cain and Bad Science by Dr. Ben Goldacre. I recommend them both!). My goal is to read 6 non-fiction books by the end of the year.
- Write! Blog posts or perhaps a short story. I still don’t have a particularly good idea about writing a book, but sitting down and writing a book, even if it’s terrible, seems like a good way to start getting better.
- JavaScript. We have a complicated relationship that needs to be sorted out 😉
- Cut down on the unnecessary from my online life. I started this by the end of 2013 and this is going to continue into 2014. I’ve been deleting accounts from sites I don’t use anymore, killing servers that I pay for but don’t use, cutting down IRC channels significantly (went from 150 channels to 35), and more.
2014-01-05
A Week In Nairobi

Last week this time, I was packing for a trip to Nairobi, Kenya. The preparations for this trip started 2 weeks ago with a Yellow Fever shot. You need the shot and the WHO’s International Certificate of Vaccination if you want to get in and out of the country. If you ever need one in Cochin, the place to go is Port Health Organization. They do it twice a week on Wednesdays and Fridays starting from 10:00. They only give 100 shots a day, so be there a bit early.

It was a work trip and our client booked my tickets. My flights were booked via DOH and I was to fly out of COK at 04:25. Kenya has visa on arrival for Indian citizens. On all the trips I’ve been on so far, I’ve had a visa before traveling. When I got to the check-in counter, the lady didn’t know which country Nairobi was in. I guess there isn’t a lot of Indians traveling to Kenya. I had to explain that Kenya has visa on arrival for Indians and all I would need was 50 USD and Yellow Fever shots. She took a few minutes to confirm that and finally handed me my boarding pass. When I went to the Immigration counter, I had to go through the exact same process again. It made me smile 🙂

The Cochin airport seems to have had a lot of renovation from the last time I flew through here (well, that was 9.5 years ago). The flights were okay, except I got the middle seat on the flight to Nairobi. All my worries about the immigration process was unnecessary. It was an extremely quick process. There were forms to fill up when we landed and I think I missed one. The customs officer asked me for a particular form, when I didn’t have it, he just waved me through.

As soon as I got out of the airport, I found a representative from the taxi company who were to take me to the ILRI campus. I had an extremely friendly driver and he pointed out places of interest along our route. When we got to the campus, I was taken away by how pretty it looked! After spending about 9 hours in planes and 4 hours in airports, I was exhausted and wanted to crash as soon as I got to my room. My hunger won out the exhaustion, I walked to the bar on campus, which doubles up as the restaurant in the evening. There were a few people already there watching a football match and I became friends with them quickly. We were talking about cricket as I ate dinner.

The next morning, I woke to the sound of rain. It was raining pretty hard and it was cold, surprising after the hot afternoon the previous day. Managed to find breakfast and I met my contact who guided me to the conference room where I’d spend most of my afternoons for the next 5 days. I’ve never done a training before and I’m not very confident about my public speaking skills. Over the course of the week, I got more confident and more friendly with the team I’d been training. We were joking around and they were helping each other by the end of the 5 days which nearly brought a tear of happiness to my eyes. Oh, a note of warning. If you ever have to train people all day, remember, it’s a very exhausting experience.

Every evening was spent at the bar, having dinner, and sometimes a glass of wine. I took my Kobo to the bar, and amusingly, I was reading Quiet by Susan Cain, a book about introversion. I became good friends with everyone as the days went on and had interesting conversations. We talked about African politics, Swahili, research, and a few more things which I should probably not mention for the privacy of the people involved 😉 Kenya celebrated their 50th Independence day while I was there. The night before Independence day, the bar was extremely busy and I happened to sit next to the Director General of the institute. He was friendly and we had a nice chat about the Caribbeans. Later, he bought the house and drink and we had a big cheer for Kenya!

The week went by quickly and I was sad when Friday arrived. My biggest regret is not having had a chance to spend some time outside of the campus. I’ll leave that for next time. Yes, there will one, a personal one 🙂

And the other regret is that I didn’t take a camera.

2013-12-21
Mozilla Summit 2013 – Connections

There already have been several excellent blog posts about the Summit. I want to talk about the biggest opportunity that the Summit provided – in-person connections. I’ve been involved with Mozilla since 2011 and this is the third Mozilla event I’ve attended. Compared to the previous events, Mozilla Summit 2013 was a sensory overload, in a pleasant way of course.

On Wednesday, I met pleia2 at Union Square. We walked around and had dinner at her favorite burger place, which had a beautiful view of the Union Square. The next day, I was at the Mozilla Space in San Francisco. I spent most of the day working on HTML parsing for “Who Owns What”. It turned out that Rob was headed to Santa Clara via Caltrain and stopped by the office to say hi. I love trains, and I joined Rob. We had a great conversation going all the way until the hotel.

At the hotel, I was excited to say hi to Ben, we’ve known each other from Ubuntu and Mozilla communities. I accidentally got into the wrong elevator and I met Wes on it. That evening, a hilarious confusion happened, which is now a running joke among those who know Ashish and me. Jen and a few others walked up to Ashish and asked if he was Nigel. When I finally did meet Jen, Sole, and jbuck; sole amended my nametag to say “The real nigelb”. I believe Ashish later had “Nigel Babu*” written on one side of name tag, with the * expanded below to “*Not”. That evening, I met Jessica Ledbetter and James Tantum, who I know primarily from the Ubuntu community, for dinner at a nice Greek restaurant.

Over the course of the Summit, I met glob, bhearsum, dolske, edmorely, Dino, Gen, sid0, peterbe, Kaitlin, Kate, Hilary, Ludovic, and lots of Mozillians from the Asian and especially Indian community who were familiar from the Mozcamps. On Friday evening, after the Firefox OS dinner, I met morgamic for the first time! It was definitely an exciting moment for me. Later, philikon was talking to morgamic and he looked familiar. I asked him his IRC nick name and I had an Aha! moment. I’m grateful to have met all the folks from Mozilla Webdev who were in Santa Clara – Ben, Erik Rose, Luke, David Walsh, Jen, Sole, Owen, James, Craig, Peter, Lars, Rob, zalun, and others who I don’t even remember names to make a proper list. After the Summit, I went to the Pinterest office to meet Dave Dash. He was my mentor when I first started contributing to Mozilla and again, it was great to meet him in person. As I think back to the summit, all the people I’ve met are my most treasured memory.

Note: If I haven’t mentioned your name, it’s because I’ve forgotten it. These few weeks have been a bit stressful and it’s been more then 2 months since the Summit.

2013-12-04