Busy

I've not been able to post regularly lately due to a couple of reasons.

Office Work

We have been getting a steady trickle of work and the tempo has started rising and I really love it. This means that we are steadily starting to move forward and have been signing up new clients to our platform as well as doing a lot of mini projects. Plus on the development side we have been refactoring and working on improving our 3+ year old codebase. [Refactoring is something that every developer needs to take seriously. The next version of Visual Studio.NET (Whideby) will have have refactoring options built into the IDE.] The bulk of our code is on ASP and VC++ and my goal is to eventually migrate all of them over to C#. I'll be starting to post on the approaches and decisions that we take so that it will be useful to anyone working on migrating.

Car

About two weeks ago I was finally able to buy my car. It's a lovely Honda Civic '98 model which has done about 56,000km. I was lucky enough to get such a low mileage one and it's been maintained well since the previous owner was a Dr., plus the pricing was very good considering that it cost me Rs. 1 million.

Along with the buying the car there are a number of other hassles such as insuring (Rs. 34k), registering it RMV (Rs. 8k), driving license (~8k)  and then I need to get started on servicing and all that. Guess having a car is really a luxury!

Thailand

I will be in Thailand Dec 4-9 to participate in the APICTA software competition as a part of the Gateway group. The School Online product developed by them (me being a consultant on the project) won first place in the Education category at the local BCS awards and will be one of the 12 companies representing Sri Lanka in the APICTA competition. The guys from my earlier company Atlantisone Technologies too will be coming to Thailand (they got Silver awards at the BCS competition).

The actual judging of the competition will be only be on two days so hopefully we'll get to see the cool stuff at the exhibition. I'll keep you all posted.