New Year 2021

 I have a mixed feeling about this year. Not sure why! I'm excited for my new adventure. I'm sad about the pandemic and its implications. I'm happy about my life so far.

Good news first. I have decided to start the business. I mean I was working with non profit organizations and Career Returnship was a new initiative for Colorado's women in tech field. I made a lot of efforts for the members of the program and help them with jobs in these trying times. I was successful considering how many people got job in this program. And sometime I felt people don't appreciate my efforts, like they don't tell me they got job or what kind of job they want, not following up with the job opportunity I forward to them, even fight with other team members on the project. I made this effort sacrificing my job as a project lead. I didn't take any projects last year, fully focused on the program. Someone told me people won't value anything if it is offered as free. So I should monetize my efforts. My time should be valued. Anyways, I had a thought of giving people in the program who are looking for contract/internship jobs, a place in my project team. So they can actually say they worked for me and has an experience recently. This way expand my business of building software projects for non profit and other businesses. So now I have registered a domain name for my business and soon will register my business with state of Colorado. Yay!!

On the other hand, I'm sad because pandemic has kept me going outside freely. Many people in Denver not wearing masks and whining authorities are forcing them to wear mask in public and reduce outdoor activity to curb this virus, had gave me no choice other than be at home as much as possible. I haven't seen or interacted in-person with people outside my household for a year. Only adult talk which I had for the last year was with my women in tech group which is mostly Women Who Code directors, Career Returnship members, some meetups which I had attended. I also had stopped plans for going to India last year. I'm thinking about going this year after I get the vaccine. I wanted to spend sometime with B's family and my family and also I don't want to delay my business process because of the travel. So I'm sad of not been able to make a satisfied decision for my happiness.

When thinking about pandemic and how the last year was for me and others, I'm really happy about my life so far, what I have accomplished and how I have changed. I'm so happy that I got kids and a loving husband who cares about me. B pushes me a lot to go and get what I want. He makes me feel that I'm strong and capable of doing everything I want. I got a mentor who understands me and guiding me in the process of going for the next level of my career. I have parents in law who wants to see me successful in every endeavor. My mom and siblings are always looking at me and they are proud that I'm their eldest daughter and sister and they follow my path. I'm their inspiration in being successful in their life.

I wish all of them happiness, luck and success in this year and coming years!

End of the year!

Update on the year and my new year plans....

I have been focusing on Career Returnship program and trying to get a job as Engineering Manager for the entire year. I learned a lot from both of those events and want to think about changing my career route to succeed in both roles in the coming years.

So Career Returnship was launched in January 2020 as an in person event. It had been going well till March and then pandemic hit. I continued the program virtually since then. I got members joined the event globally. We completed one project and in the verge of completing second one. 2 other projects has been under development. Few things I noticed or I learned from the program that some people have joined the program only for the projects, some felt the project schedule is too much that they discontinued doing the projects, some didn't continue because the projects are not matching their skills or interested role(eg: data science/data analyst), most of them were not interested in doing tech challenges and once joined they almost never showed in the recurring general event.

About my search for job as Engineering Manager, most of the feedbacks or interview questions were based on the doubts of how am I working as a Tech Lead with developers working as a team under me for non profit projects. All the questions gave me the impression that I'm not quite experienced to be an Engineering Manager for their product/team. They are not convinced by explaining details of my past experience at Charter.

My next plan is to have the business focusing on Career Returnship program model and being an Engineering Manager for the project team or much more than that. So I'm gonna start slowly, step by step expansion so I don't have to spend a lot of money and effort to built the business along with the risks. Once I'm sure about how can I make my plan work, I will be considering expansion of business model. 

Summer! Mid year!

We have reached June, officially middle of the year. So far news of pandemic is still the strong one in the world. In US, we saw George Floyd's death and followed by protests for police reform. So it was time of pain and suffering for last few weeks topic and I almost forgot about coronavirus. It seemed like people will loose their life if virus won't take it. So sad........
I lost few people whom I know and it disturbed me and my life little bit. As someone mentioned in my social media, this year's goal is NOT TO DIE. There is no other goals to achieve in this year. If I'm alive by the end of year, I consider myself as a lucky person. This time and uncertainty, fear, pain has got me thinking into more specific priorities in my life. I'm feeling more focussed and have a clear vision and I'm more calm.
Think about the priorities and be calm - that's my mantra of survival in these unfortunate, uncertain times.

Pandemic and year's goals.....

Achieving goals in midst of pandemic!

We are living in time of uncertainty. Anyone thought about this even in their dreams?!!! Today's crazyy trip is to the life in pandemic.....

I'm overwhelmed with things to be done in a day because from beginning of this year onwards I was focusing on restarting my career and was involved in multiple activities to get back into the swing of working. I launched a program called Career Returnship to create a community for those who are facing the same challenges of returning to work like me and support each other. 

Everything was going well. The program got some attraction from different tech companies in Colorado and we were preparing to get started with projects and interview practices. Then came Covid-19. Companies are in hiring freeze or laying off phase and our hope of restarting career has to put on hold now till this pandemic is settled. Anyway I don't want to sit idle and wait for this uncertainty vanish so I decided to work from home by doing video meetings and working remotely on projects. I haven't reached the perfection with the whole process yet but I'm happy with what I had achieved so far.

Under Career Returnship, we started three projects and fourth project is under discussion. Also tried mock interview on soft skills and trying to do another mock interview on technical coding skills. By meeting remotely with the help of Women Who Code global leadership team, I'm getting audiences from other states/countries which is making things little bit difficult for me. Most of the new members are interested in projects with specific tech stack and they are not willing to take the challenge of start a project from scratch. From my personal point of view, this might not be good for them because companies wanted people with risk taking, quick learning, adapt to changes etc attitudes. So if they are focusing only on the tech stack without wanting to take risk of ground up work, return to work might become tougher. 

I'm applying to companies which are still hiring and getting interviews. Hoping to be back to my career soon! Interviews are getting comparatively easier than before. I need to practice more on the interview aspect and need to find what companies are looking in person applying for each roles. It is tough with all the competing people who already have jobs and trying to switch company or role. It will be tougher during this pandemic economy. But I'm not going to stop until my goals are accomplished. Staying positive as always!

New year, New activities!

Today's crazyy trip is to new year and new activities....

Everyone has New Year resolutions. I had till last year and some worked and some didn't. That's okay. So this new year, I didn't take any resolutions, because already I was thinking about lots of things. Last year was a stressful year with family problems, career problems. So I thought this year I'm not stressing myself with resolutions. I will take it nice and slow, and go according to the flow. What an easy and wishful thought!

Then I started to think what should I do this year to keep my life interesting. I have gained a lot of weight and my belly is hanging like an old woman and I felt not pretty. So I decided to work on my health - reduce weight, belly tightening exercise and dance. I love dance! If I have this goal set up then I'm gonna worry about it. So no! I will go to gym, exercise whenever I can. I'm not stress about it. But sure watch my diet, B's diet and kids.

To achieve that, once in a week, probably on Wednesdays, I make a list of dishes that I'm gonna cook for next week. Make a list of things to buy. So Wednesdays are my planning day. Thursday, I go for shopping and buy things needed for the week. This keeps my budget in place. I won't buy unnecessary things. On Friday, after taking kids out, weather dependent, I''ll cook one or two dishes from my list. Saturdays are our family outing day where I don't cook or clean. Go out and be happy!

Sunday is my official cooking day. B can watch kids and so I get some peaceful cooking time with some music. I cook mostly 3 dishes from my list. I'll take a 2 hour nap on Sunday which helps me to catch up on any sleep which was lost in the previous week. I'm happy again!

Monday, kind of chill day where I'll do the laundry and exercise. Tuesday, I'll cook 2 more dishes from the list if possible. Then repeat. In this way, I managed to keep my household in order, clean. This schedule gave me plenty of time to focus on eating, exercise. Thus I reduced 1.7 lbs in 3months. Woohoo!

Now that I have more time in my hand, I started to focus on my career. I decided to get involved in Women Who Code and Code for Denver again and try to build up the career gap by contributing to projects and organizing events. Then I got the idea of starting the Return to work program which I applied in companies outside Colorado and because of that reason they rejected. When I thought about it, did some research, talked to a lot of people, collected data and designed a feasible program which I could be able to organize. Thus I started Career Returnship!

It has been almost 3 months since the launch of Career Returnship. Already the program is getting more attraction and I'm talking to a lot of people. Also I got promoted as a Director of Women Who Code Boulder/Denver. Going to my first tech conference in May in San Francisco, applied for my first tech talk there(waiting for the approval). So excited and proud of my accomplishments so far!

My advice to whoever reading this is, there is nothing that you cannot do if you want to do. But if you put lot of stress on it, then you are ruining yourself and your goal. So don't stress out, plan properly, expect there will be roadblocks and prepare yourself to face it. When roadblocks come, take deep breaths and assure yourself I knew this would come and I can handle it. You can handle it!

Wish you all Happy and Wonderful Year ahead!

Paris Paris Paris!!!

Bonjour!! I'm tired after 10 days of vacation to Paris. Such a beautiful trip!!! I'm soooo happy!! One thing I noticed while in Paris is everything is small when compared to US, like elevator capacity says 4 person still we (me, husband, 4year old,11 months old and a diaper backpack) were so cramped in it, smaller food portions( in US we buy food for 2 and share with my kids). I think there were less Parisien, most were tourists. Maybe because it was their summer time and most of locals went away for vacation. I saw some fashionable dress but I expected more than that.

Eiffel Tower is a huge structure. I was amazed the way elevator pulleys worked. It was crowded at the top and so felt couldn't enjoy as much as I can. The light show at Eiffel Tower was awesome. Eiffel Tower was more beautiful when the lights were on. This is my opinion.

We went to water cruise which also gave a view of most of the buildings around river Seine including Notre Dame Cathedral more closely than on land. There were lots of boats doing cruises and every boat were crowded. 

We waited for more than 2 hours to get ticket to visit top of Eiffel Tower. So we thought it would be more crowded at Louvre museum. We had tickets to get inside but saw a 45minutes to 1 hour line to see Mona Lisa painting. Somehow we were included in some celebrity group and got VIP entry to see Mona Lisa painting. So our time wasn't wasted in line. We took free stroller for my son and so we had to take elevators all the time we saw stairs to get to other side. I felt it helped us to see most of the places in almost every floor because there were so many elevators to visit sub floors and we had to walk to different places and get the elevators to sub floors, thus visiting almost every corner of every floor. 

Sacre Coeur basilica was also huge and crowded. I liked the street near to basilica, called place du tertre. It was packed with artists and tourists. Felt like visited a parisien street. The place also had some play area for kids too, my son enjoyed playing in the slides. 

Orsay museum is filled with paintings and sculptures. Sculptures in the museum has an extra ordinary expressions, very detailed even human sculptures had veins in the hand. It was beautiful. We didn't get enough time to spend and enjoy each and every items as we were there near to closing time. 

Opera Garnier was amazing. I can't believe the time when King and Queen watching performance at theatre. It was so beautiful and felt King and Queen might proud of the place. 

Lafayette galerie was also a different experience. It's ceiling and the building itself is awesome. We spent some time walking different floors and checked out the fashions in the stores. We went to rooftop and watched Paris city.

We tried different croissants, macarons, ice creams, bread, jams. My favorite is Rose jam. All the time we took metro trains and lots of walking. I'm proud of my kids because they were so good in behavior that we didn't have any trouble throughout our Paris visit. Au revoir!

4th of July!!

What is happening today?

So today is 4th of July. My baby girl H is 10 months old and my son Z is 4 years old. Lately I was under immense pressure to solve family problems. Frequently on the phone, trying hard to keep my brother's marriage.

Yeah, It is a crazy story! My brother M was married to a doctor T. At the time of marriage, she had one more year to complete her course. She was staying at the college hostel and occasionally like once in 2 months or so she would come to my parents house and would stay for a day and then she would go to her home which is like a 20-30 minute drive, and from there she would go back to college. At my parents house, my mom R lived alone. My brother M is working abroad.

My mother R never asked her to do any household chores when she come from college. R has certain things like she wanted everyone in the family dress well when go outside even for a shopping. And my sister-in-law T has terrible fashion choice and mom didn't like the way she dresses. So mom always bought dresses for her and also asked her to dress up neatly(T won't even iron the dress). T won't eat beef, won't drink milk or tea/coffee with milk, but she eats ice-cream, drink tea/coffee with milk powder. My mom never asked her to eat or drink things which T doesn't likes. If I was the one who won't eat or drink like T, then my mom would force me to eat or drink because her point of view is we should eat and drink everything that is available, which is good for survival.

M was married for 4years and he has a 9months old son, baby R. They were happily married till two months ago. My mom was happy watching all her kids were happy and peacefully living. She was praying for her daughters and daughter-in-law to get a job soon and also build a house for all her 3 kids. That was her only wishes to come true now and then she just wanted to live her rest of life by watching her grandkids grow.

Two months ago, T got a job in the same hospital where she worked before pregnancy, with the recommendation from my father-in-law. T worked for 11months after her college, my father-in-law recommended her at that time too. She resigned the job to get pregnant. After trying to conceive for like 2 months or so, she couldn't get pregnant and she got worried that won't have kids. Reminding you guys that she studied medical science and she is working as a doctor. Before she even started work, she told my brother that it would be hard for her to travel to and from hospital everyday and that she wanted to move to a rented house nearby place where she would be working. My brother M didn't consider her opinion because she was going to the same place before pregnancy and she didn't have any problems then. Now she wasn't even started the work so he thought it was just emotional, going back to work after having kid. But she was very serious about moving that she got irritated when M said will consider later, after going to work. My mom didn't know the reason for their argument and didn't ask any of them about it but she did know that they arguing.

One day, the day before T started her work, T's parents came to my parents house where my mom, T and baby R lives. T's parents came to the house once in every week to spend time with baby R, if T and baby R are not going to T's parents house in that week. T's parents told my mom that T told it would be hard for her to travel to and from the workplace and they thought it would be a good idea if my mom, T and baby R move to a rented house close to T's workplace. They told it as if it was their idea. My mom said she would think about it and would talk to M and would decide.
Next day, my mom told T, when she came home from work, that she thought about T's parents suggestion about moving to rented house. She think it is not a good idea because she will be alone with baby R during the day at the new place and if she need anything there won't be anyone to help her. At her place, everyone in the neighborhood knew her for years and also they knew that she is alone. If she needs anything she would say to anybody passing by and they will help her. She won't get the same at the new place. 

My mom suggested another solution to arrange a rented vehicle which can drop and pick T daily on time. In that way she won't get tired of finding a transport and travel. This would also help T to get home early. T didn't like the suggestion. M also said the same as my mom and he enquired the feasibility of the rented vehicle on a daily basis. Rented vehicle is cheaper than living in a rented house. They have to pay rent and other expenses on top of their own house's utility fees. T didn't agree with any of the reasonings of rented vehicle and she insisted to move to rented house. M and my mom didn't agree. T argued and fought with M over the phone for about couple of days. T was showing disrespect to my mom. My mom didn't react to T's attitude as she knew T was angry. But my mom told M about T's behavior when T got aggressive and threw chair on mom. M asked about the incident to T and she didn't like the fact that mom told M about it. M told T not to disrespect mom ever again. T fought over the phone and M cut the phone and didn't talk to her on that day. T came home from work with her cousin's husband and took baby R and left home. Mom tried to stop her but she didn't listen and left. 

After knowing that T left home, from mom, M was so angry that he didn't call T on that night and next day. T came home next day with her cousin and told mom that she came to take her clothes and other needed stuff. Her cousin started abusing mom. Mom asked the cousin to leave. Then this cousin stand out on the front yard and yelled and abused mom, T joined her cousin. Neighbors came out to see what's happening. T and her cousin told them that mom was not taking care of her, giving her old food. Then she left. Going back to her home, T and her mom called M's sister's house and told them M's mom is a witch and take care of their son from her. M's sister's parents-in-law called M's sister and told about it. These incidents provoked M and he called T's father and enquired about her behavior. M argued over the phone with T's father and other relatives who were there to support T.

Long story short, T and her family planned to get rid of M's mom from their life. By that they will get full financial support from M and will solve all their debts and every other financial issues. M proved that all the stories told by T about mom was lies and he is not ready to forgive T. T didn't apologize for what she had done so far and M don't want her apology anymore. He wants to know from T what was her plan and why did she do it. 

This whole situation made my life difficult to enjoy. I know M is miserable and in pain and for this reason I'm not happy. Our lives are not supposed to destroyed like this. We came through a lot of sufferings. We deserve some happiness and peace. 

On a positive note, if T decided to plan and execute this after some years then we, especially M and mom would have been ended in prison or something worse could have happened. Now things are under control in the sense no one got harmed and we got to know the real face of T and her family.

Yes, after walking and staying in rain, lightning and thunder, we got to watch fireworks and it was very beautiful!!!