Hello from Hyderabad

Hi - My name is Manav and I’m Program Manager in Microsoft India. I’m in Visual Studio for Devices team that makes it possible to write your cool apps on Windows Mobile platform.

The very thought of working for Microsoft was kinda scary. I always hated the company for no good reasons, maybe I was hanging out a lot on Slashdot or recompiling Linux kernel all the time or just got emotionally involved with Java, J2EE and all the goodness. In my heart though I always admired how Microsoft pull such great products together. Maybe I dreamt a bit about working for Microsoft.

Back in 2000 I was leading development of a complex product using J2EE technology and we burnt ourselves solving core issues that we thought we should get it for free. We followed Sun’s Blueprint, read J2EE specs and when it came down to tuning Weblogic server, we were in for a surprise. Many of the recommendations were implemented differently by the container and in the end our application was creating too many transactions and was not performant the way we wanted. Maybe the technology wasn’t mature but I was heart broken - I realized that if technology can not solve my problem than what’s the use of being religious about it? .NET Beta was out around this time and I started attending various seminars, started playing with C# and inspite of its closeness with Java I immediately fell in love with the language. .NET solved many of the core issues and it continues to do so.

In Oct 2002 I left Enamics and started my own consulting company TQuist along with Dan Hoogterp. We grew to about 14 customers in span of 2 years and had the honor of doing consulting and projects for Financial Times, Associated Press, Canadian Press, Industry Canada, US Navy, CalPeak LLC and others. In TQuist I realized that technology is a vehicle to solve the business problem. None of our customers were passionate about using a technology v/s another. They all were interested in how we can solve their problem. It was an eye-opener.

In 2005 I decided to return to India, got married to Meenu and took five months break. The break was very refreshing as it allowed me to clear my head, rethink my prioities and spend time with my parents, wife, relatives and friends. In Dec of 2005 I decided to join Microsoft India Center in Hyderabad and now blogging from Hyderabad. Checkout my MSDN Blog and Smart Device Forums

Manav Gaur | मानव गौड़

This entry was posted on August 16, 2006 at 10:33 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.