Much Deserved Update

It's been an eternity since I wrote to this blog, so an update is in order. I fear this update will seem very similar to a pervious post. Also, please bear with me if this post seems too long.

• Much in the vein of that previous post, I've quit my job again. Iventa was a great place to work at (Notice, I didn't say that about my employer before Iventa), and it has let me learn, explore and part with (and thus expand) my knowledge more than any other place I've worked at before.

• I'm now with Cleartrip.com. One of the top travel portals today in India, Cleartrip could easily be mistaken to be just a travel thing out there. Truth is, outside of the IITs - an organization I used to interact with regularly - this is one place where I've seen more innovations happen more frequently than any other place. All the people you meet at Cleartrip are gurus in their areas of work. I can only consider myself to be lucky to be in the company of such a congregation of sheer genius.

• I've joined Cleartrip as a JavaScript developer guy. If you look at that from a organizational chart perspective, this is a slight demotion in rank for me. But that was completely intentional. I was starting to move towards managing people at Iventa, and I think I had still not had enough of playing with technology. I guess that only means that I want to grow some more in the area of technology, and not in the area of management. Tech is where I get my kicks from, and I don't see that changing at least for some time.

• The management at Cleartrip was kind enough to allow me a short vacation between jobs. I took the opportunity to go to Kerala - this time not because it's my home town, but because I had never been to a place of such scenic beauty as a tourist. I've got very interesting stories (including one where I'm chased by a wild elephant trying to protect her kid from me, since I was armed with a camera), but I've got even more interesting photographs. I shall be uploading them soon. Which brings me on nicely to the next two points.

• The reason I've not uploaded any pics so far is because my beloved Hangy is dead. Again. This time, it seems that the moisture from the Mumbai rains got to her chipset on the motherboard, and AFAIK there's no one who can fix that. So, my only option is to replace the board, but I'm reconsidering that in favor of a huge upgrade. I've meanwhile asked my computer-fixit-guy to come up with an alternative - probably a second-hand motherboard I can buy from him. Let's see what he comes up with.

• So, assuming I get ready to post pics online to share, which service is really the better? I like Google, so Picassa seems to be an interesting option, but I've not found that to be reason enough to change from Flickr yet. Any opinions for or against either of these? Please enlighten me.

This post would be incomplete without some more important information.

• This blog is NOT dead. I really mean to post much more. In fact, since Hangy's dead, I got my MacBook Pro from work home today so that I can compose this post. (Which incidentally makes this the first post on this blog written on a Mac. I wouldn't be surprised if the next one is written in Emacs on Ubuntu, or something!)

• That said, this blog is going to deviate a bit in its direction. So far this blog has largely been about markup and style. However, IMHO, all that had to be said about markup and style has been said, either here or elsewhere. The subject is so beaten now, that a new acronym had to be invented in hopes of reviving interest. (POSH, for God's sake!) Meanwhile, I've decided to move on. I need to give a better explanation of why I'm moving on, and I think that's a topic for another post. I really want to share my thoughts about why I think all the fuss about markup and style is not worth it - at least in the connotations it started to carry. That would be an ironic post, since the most popular post on my blog so far has vehemently promoted XHTML! I guess I had to go through all of it to learn how unimportant it is.

• I've moved on to JavaScript, if you haven't guessed already from my last few posts. I've been hungrily learning so much about JavaScript these days, that I can easily claim to know much more than some of the good JS coders out there. I know that's a tall claim, but on more than one occasion I've realized that some of these gurus' arguments don't make sense. I guess that's a good sign.

• Which nicely brings me on to the last point I want to share. This blog is going to turn from a primarily web standards promotion blog to a primarily JavaScript hacking blog. I shall now discuss lessons I've learned in JavaScript, application architectures from a JavaScript thick-client perspective, interesting hacks and tricks in JavaScript that I've picked up along the way, and occasionally the stupid browser nuances (you know which browser I'm talking about) I come across. Expect posts talking about JavaScript as a language (one of the most modern - old as it is - and among the richest most expressive languages in the entire computer industry IMHO, and already available on your desktop!) for all the cool things it can do, and JavaScript from a more serious application design point of view, being an important part of application architecture design sitting at the top-most layer, ensuring that users have a great experience. This particular topic about JavaScript being a serious thick-client programming language has been of particular interest to me lately, and the few forays I've had are very promising. So, expect me to talk a lot about these kinds of topics now on.