Who are you ?

First off, I am just another guy. I used to spend all my time in social networking applications and dream about getting a job at Microsoft or Facebook. It was in my second year If I remember correctly, I got my laptop. It was one of the most important event in my life. It was more like magic. I heard inspiring stories about how people used a laptop and created godly applications which can power the world and change the way the it functions. I dream everyday and every night about how I am going to do something awesome in my life. I felt very happy about even smallest of small tweaks that I did with my laptop. I went on customizing my laptop and started to learn how to Google. I felt that it was not enough. I attended a session on Ethical Hacking. I got a script which could get us admin privileges. A new found knowledge about getting more power than usual users. That’s it, I started using it on every computer in the computer labs. I kept a goal of modifying admin passwords in all computers in the computer labs. I was successful for most of them but I faced difficulty in understanding why the same script did not work on all computers. I tried hard and failed to get pass through security system. I remember meeting Sarup on a very random day. It is though him, I got to know about a new name called Richard Stallman. Searching for Stallman connected me to free and open source software. I started exploring through various free and open source projects. That is when I accidentally got to know about hadoop. The fame that hadoop has over the Internet got me amazed. I explore it to realize a bigger picture. A new term called ‘Big Data’. I started exploring through what all things could be possible by using big data. That’s when I realized that the whole world runs on data. I loved the free and open source culture. Simultaneously, I developed slight hatred towards Microsoft when I read about browser wars. As time passed by, I discovered more about how software companies take control over our users computing. How is it fair that I buy software and it controls me instead of me taking control over it? I felt the difficulty in using windows as a development environment. I struggled for over a month on getting started with linux/gnu. I broke my computer’s operating system more time than 25 times. I started learning shell scripting and started writing a few scripts on my own. It was quite challenging for me to dual boot my system. Somehow my interest over data science dominated all other interests. I see data as governing factor in people lives. I saw numerous possibilities of using data science. You could read more about this here 5 months off the grid :

Why did you abandon all closed software ?

I started thinking of scenario’s where I could just abandon all the software which do not provide source code.

I wrote more about it here.

Why I left Facebook :-

For them, I am a product than a user. I keep getting spam posts saying share and like it.

I told them very clearly that I want you to delete all the data that you have about me. I deleted my Facebook account choosing permanent removal.

Beach in amritapuri

I spent most of my summer vacation on Amritapuri building sentiment analysis tool for twitter. I found new interests. I traveled to beach places in Kerala. I met lot of people from Foss club in Amritapuri. I found how living life with passion can give happiness in life.

After coming back to college, I started feeling different. It was a sudden change from place with lot of trees, less lights to lesser tress, more lights . I became confident that I will live my dream. Not that, I will be getting a job in Microsoft or Facebook but the fact that I will be able to work on what I love and the freedom to make it free and open sourced.

Conflicting ideas ‘Freedom’ and ‘Convenience’ put me in a state of confusion for some time. Then I thought of pros and cons. Am I really going to go through source code for all the applications? It is not possible for me to explore through everything. I started taking applications based on features. I still believe that free and open source culture is better than closed culture.

Why I came back to Facebook?

I kind of miss people. I felt a strong urge to get back to social networking sites. But, It happened pretty accidentally. I entered a wrong url which got redirected to Facebook. Just for fun, I entered my deleted account’s log credentials. Then It logs in like nothing on earth has changed over time. I stayed stupendous for a minute or so. They did not delete no data from my account.

I find it reasonable to stay on Facebook. I can use my own profile to collect data. I can stay in touch with good people of Tech{know}logy club.I am in 80 groups. I came out of all groups except tknow. I am pretty careful about posting in Facebook now. I take it for granted that I am giving sensitive data to third party applications.