Whats up with Hatim!

These are interesting times to be an open source developer. Google Sumer of code enters its third year in 2007 and this time the process has started earlier than previous years. As I am registered as part time certificate course student at Virtual university of Pakistan, I can take part in this competition. I have used open source for around seven years now and have yet to give back some thing solid to the open source community (occasional irc help secessions and little bit of wiki editing is good but not a very big contribution in my opinion). I feel that if I am able to be a part of Google summer of code this year, not only I would be giving back to the community in a structured way, but I would also be learning a lot from seasoned hackers and developers who would be mentoring me.

I am not certain what mentoring organizations are expecting in an application. I don't think the mentors should be expecting the participants to know a lot about their project as the whole point of SOC is to make new people come into open source development. But at the same time if some one has worked with the project in question in the past (s/he may be part of code project team and a student as well), that person would be a better catch. As for me I am applying to the projects which are of technical/intellectual interest to me or solve some important problem that I have encountered.

I will be posting a few apps within next 24 hours. I will try to supplement them with web pages on this site. I hope at least this application process will be a good experience for me to polish my writing skills.

My new job has brought me to lahore to a major cellular comany Network Operations Center in Lahore for testing and deployment of our solution. I am currently working with XML-RPC using GNU C. Its been long since I have worked with C. The elegance simplicity and beauty of C code is refreshing. It takes me back to my early days in programming when we used to work with Turbo C++.

Initially I had planned to stay for only one day, but things changed and I got stuck here. I will hopefully get home by friday and take the weekend off.One side effect of staying in Lahore has been the dining out part. I had the chance to go to food street and Lakshmi chowk with colleuges. And I was able to eat falloda after a very long time. I had been trying to find a nice place for falloda in pindi for 2-3 months now

I have recently resigned from my job at the small databases company I was working. It was a nice company and I learned a lot about myself. The work was not very exciting, but then in this country you don't get to work on exciting things any ways. The primary reason I left my job was that I got another offer which is more suited to my interests. The job is closer to home and pays a bit more. On top of that I would be working with current technologies.

I also had the opportunity to give interviews to few more places. It seems that US based companies are increasingly outsourcing their work to Pakistan, especially in last few months lots of work has pumped into Islamabad. I have come to realize that I desperately need to revise my OOP and Java concepts as I am getting rust after 4 months of structured programming