Confident, Strong willed and calm, a typical Capricorn, that's what I am. Born in 1983, I always was a curious child. I used to open most of the electronic gadgetry available at home, probably with the intention to understand the mechanism, but learnt nothing and eventually ended up destroying it. Hardworking, shrewd and persevering I was, never did I give up. Even the VCR I blew up trying to clean the PCB of which with white petrol was not a discouraging sign to me. By the time I was in the 8th Standard I already had a houseful of electronic junk; electronic junkyard of sorts; which I preferred to call my laboratory. This was the time I was introduced to computers and was equally a passion for me. Since, not everyone could afford a PC then, I used to go to my cousin's place every Sunday to work on his computer and guess what I crashed it 2 times. But after the 10th Standard, I knew that computers would be my first preference and not electronics.
College:
This I would consider as the first step in my journey towards my goal. I set out to earn a Bachelors Degree in Computers and I knew exactly what I should have been doing. Hard-work paid and I secured and admission in the 2nd best college in Delhi, N.S.I.T. (D.I.T. /D.C.E.). It was time for me to own a personal computer and boy what a difference it made. My OS (windows) never ran more than a week and it was a normal practice for me to format my pc once a week. I had to slow down with my experimenting when the HDD crashed within 2 months of buying the PC. The 4 years I spent in college were more of a waste than actually achieving something. Now when I look back at it, I think the 4 years were really necessary, as they made me a student; a student for life; who craves to learn, and not stop learning at any point in life. I was now sure that I would definitely do better in my Job.
Office:
Then came the day when Infosys, one of India's top Software and Software Services exporter came to our campus, and fortunately for me, they made an offer for employment. With countless dreams about my role in the Software Behemoth, I was eagerly waiting to be assigned to an exciting and challenging development project. I Joined Infosys and was trained at Bangalore. This was my formal introduction to the professional world. I always was amongst the top performers in my training and was very happy that I was being prepared for real challenges ahead. Just then lightening struck and I was assigned to a Manual testing project. With my dreams shattered, heart broken, I was thoughtless on what to do next.
Within 2 weeks of frustrating manual testing I thought of leaving the company even if I did not have another job. One day while in office I was surfing the internet while also doing my testing in the background, I saw that my testing IE window was waiting for me to press OK on the saved password window, while I thought that the process was already kicked off. I was really frustrated with that and wrote about 30-40 lines of code in VB to automatically click the "OK" on such save password windows. My frustration had given birth to a new idea, an idea to automate my testing activities. I already knew how to automate some of the windows actions but did not have any insights into web testing. I started out by doing some research on the topic and slowly but steadily came up with a small tool which automated our testing till the first 4 pages. With some extra efforts I created a tool that could be used to do fully automate testing for my application. Suddenly I could sense an opportunity here, an opportunity for improvement of the current processes and to achieve the target with lesser efforts. At last I could see the silver lining; a ray of hope; something that interested me and which also happened to help my work.
It was now time for showcasing what had been done and we presented the tool to other projects. It was an awesome feeling to see others using a tool that I made. They were really amazed with its capability and application to the project. This was a new beginning of sorts for me, in the world of automation and there was no looking back. I started working on analyzing areas of automation in my project and the focus was not to make thousand hours task to a 100 hours task but to cut down the excess time spent on every possible task, however small the task.
To sight an example, I worked on an Automation toolbar which had functionalities like disable/enable proxy, screen capture etc..., Doing this manually takes approximately 1 minute each time. But the toolbar does it in about 2 seconds. Applying some simple mathematics tells us that the task being repeated 40 times in a day per person with a team size of 80 people meant 40 * 80 = nearly 53 hours of time being saved per day. Well if you are reading this line then I am sure you have a lot of patience. Frankly, I would never read such a long page; I would rather make a tool to somehow feed the information into my head without having to read it. But not everything is possible, as is with the case with my journey. I have begun on a positive note and hope to continue to grow with the same enthusiasm and panache throughout my life.
