Ahsanity

• Note: If you are interested to know about my professional details, please check my LinkedIn profile

As I am finding out, one of the hardest thing to do is to write about yourself. After staring at the screen for about 2 minutes, all I did was come up with these few lines. This is totally insane! People should never be encouraged to write about themselves. We should come up with a strict rule where writing about oneself should be totally banned! Why waste the time? Instead, all “about me” pages should be written by friends or others.

Besides, how can I be sure that I know myself? After all, its all about perception. What I perceive about myself may not be the true me. I may think I am smart, but if people around me do not think that way, my whole perception about myself doesn’t have any point. Even if I am actually smart, as long as people do not believe that, its just an unpopular state of my mind.

[20mins later]

After thinking about this for sometime, I realized I missed something. Yes, its mostly perception, but we cannot just ignore facts. Facts, things that we did and that we are doing, are an important factor in describing who we are. No matter how I perceive myself, and no matter what people think about me, what I have been doing so far with my life has a big role to play in finding out what or who I am. So, instead of naming this kind of pages “About Me”, they should be named “What I did”.

[after a cigarette]

Yes! Now everything is fitting fine. Now that this is a “What I did” page, I feel a lot more comfortable. All I have to do is to write about the things that I am doing, and the things that I have done. That shouldn’t be difficult, as long as I don’t start thinking about the reasons for why I did them.

Ok, so here I go. Lets start with what I am doing write now. At the moment I am trying to write “what I did”. I am trying to get this blog ready for my planned blogging renaissance. I spent the last few hours tweaking themes, writing posts, uploading it into the web server, and so on.

Lets write about where I live: I live in the city of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. My apartment is located very close to the boundary of the main airport of the country. Being on the 6th floor, I have a very clear view of the runway, and the airport. Everyday, I see aircrafts taking off and land, successfully. I find it extra-ordinary. I mean the successfull part.

I live with my ever caring Mom, and the best sister ever (damn, I see perceptions are creeping in). My sis just got into North South University(NSU). That is the university from where I (somehow) graduated, with a bachelors degree in computer science. My interest in computers grew at a young age. At the age of 13, I wrote my first computer program, using GW-BASIC. I do not know when it actually happened, but I knew it very early, that I will be doing something related to these amazing machines we call computers. And so, I did.

My first interaction with computers happened when I was in Std. VII (I think it was 1994). The small town, that I lived at the time, just had its first computer school. My dad got excited about it, and enrolled me there. It was actually a school to teach computer skills to business people. First, they didn’t know what to do with me, or which course to enroll me in. As far as I remember they had courses of MS-DOS (windows were still windows of houses that time), Pascal and Fortran. They were almost deciding to get me to the MS-DOS class, when Miss Rama rescued me. She was teacher there. She decided to take special classes for me, and started showing me GW-BASIC. By that time, a few of my other friends joined too. Soon, I learned some new words like statements, variables, IF-ELSE, PRINT, INPUT etc.

By the way, the small town I was referring to was called (still has the same name I guess) Al-Marj. It is a small town in a country called Libya. My dad was a doctor in the town hospital. I spent the first 13 years of my life in this town. Life was happy and simple then. I use to go to the small community run school named “Asian English Medium School”. The word “English” in the name emphasized the fact that it was the only English school in the town. I have happy memories of that time, but I am not going to talk about it here. No perceptions, remember?

Just to clarify, I was not born in Libya. That important “delivery” happened in Rangpur, Bangladesh. Its my “nana bari”. Everytime when I go to Rangpur, and pass the Rangpur Medical College Hospital, my mama (uncle) never forgets to remind me that I was born there.

Anyway, we came back to Bangladesh in 1995. Just to keep it short, it was a cultural shock to me! The Bangladesh I was taught to perceive did not exist, and what I found was very different indeed. It was very hard for me to fit it, and that feeling of not fitting in never really left me I think. Damn, perceptions again! Back to facts, I joined a new school named “Manarat Dhaka International College”. As I said, fitting in was hard for me, and I use to be very quite that time. Being quite also meant that I learned alot. I also managed to make some good friends, but I think it took me atleast 2 years to get out of the shell, and be myself again (or someone new). I also learned some more new words that I better not mention here

A quick fast forward here: gave my Os, and then As, and I was out of Manarat! The new mellinium was here by then.

After that, I joined NSU. NSU times were fun, happening, exciting, busy, deppressing and sad, all at the same time. Contrary to what many people may think, I actually learned alot here. There were quite a few courses that I really enjoyed: Beginning Programming with Java, Data Structures, Computer System Architecture, Operating Systems, just to name a few.

During my university years, I started to work in different freelancing projects. I soon found myself developing alot of web applications (that is where the money was). So, after graduation, I joined a local firm as a web application engineer. During this time, I have been using words like PHP, Javascript, AJAX, CakePHP, Prototype, Scriptaculous, JQuery, MVC, Linux, Ubuntu, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, OOP etc, alot in my day-to-day life.

Last year (2007), I joined Trippert Labs, as a web programmer. This gave me the opportunity to use more words and phrases like code manageability, design patterns, scalability, Facebook, Code Standards etc.

I plan to learn and use more words. How far I succeed, will hopefully be documented in this blog.

[after reading through]

Coming back to the idea, about friends and others writing the “About Me” page. I think its actually not a bad idea. Infact, I am ready to start with this page. If you are reading this, and if you have some perception about me, please do not hesitate to comment in this page. This will be a good experiment! After all its all about perceptions.