What is life without an achievement? I had always wanted to live by the saying, “Live life, ‘King Size’”. Work, Earn and Enjoy life. I believe that there should be a good Work-Life balance.

But something inside me maybe the ‘gut feeling’ suggest that, my life has a different purpose. And I feel that I am moving closer towards it. A feeling that cannot be described in words, something like being in love. I am not sure about what to do. Everything that I read, look and hear is beautiful. I have not seen a girl yet and so these can’t be taken to be symptoms of love.

I just do whatever work come my way. Just like ‘Tom Hanks’ in ‘Forrest Gump’, putting efforts in whatever comes at me. I just have a feeling that I need to achieve something. Don’t know what? I have always dreamed about going to ‘Berlin’ (Engineering paradise), ‘Rome’ – to see all the churches. And now that feeling to go to these places is more pronounced.

Let me wait and watch!

I was stumbling the web as usual a few days back. I came across a keynote speech by Chris. This has changed my entire perspective of viewing the software business and industry. I have till now just enjoyed life as a programmer, reusing existing code, ‘googling’ what I don’t know and getting the job done by time.

My life as a software engineer has just been concentrated on providing solutions that already exist. But real software engineering is not that. My goal in life is not that. I need to engineer something. A product, that people use in their day to day life. I remember my Engineering Mechanics professor’s definition of an engineer, ‘A person who creates, engineers something so that it is useful to the society in their daily life’. That is what I feel as the soul calling.

This keynote address, http://gist.github.com/6443 was what I have been wanting to inspire me. He tells what a software is all about. It is the passion of a programmer that creates the wonder, a Real Software. What a programmer needs to do? The real joy comes from within and not from materialistic gains.

What in the world can be more inspiring than one’s own creation. I have had moments when I felt this joy, pride and enthusiasm, that comes when I did programming, when a thing that I have been struggling with, at last comes to place, when the very blank mind of mine, finds a solution to a problem, when a client or peer appreciates. But they did not last long.

Open Source is calling me to contribute. I have started out with Ruby and Python. Any suggestions are always welcome.

Google had launched its new browser ‘Google Chrome’. Right now I am typing this post in the Chrome browser. True to how Google had been in the past, ‘Google Chrome’ is simple, clean and does what it was intended to do.

For developers, there is a Javascript debugger. Although I am missing the addons that I had in Firefox, I am sure that we will be having a lot of addons in the coming months.

The interface is simple, loads a lot faster. There is one more feature, that is new in ‘Google Chrome’, the ‘incognito’ mode, wherein no browsing history, cookies are saved. Google had incorporated the best of features in all the browsers in this launch. Tabbed browsing, unintrusive password remembering tools, smooth import of bookmarks from IE and Firefox.

Hope everyone has a happy Surfing!