People I admire..

A new habit that I adopted in the past few years is ‘blogging’. I have been reading several blogs, stories from successful people around, learning from mistakes of experienced entrepreneurs, and just like all other people – I also have a list of people who I ‘admire‘ for their healthy contribution in my life. So I thought to share the list of people who helped me become what I am today.

After the limitless support of my family members comes the list of following people:

- Ra[y]za

Muhammad Raza, my school buddy – I was in 8th grade when we became friends and after buying my new PC, we used to share our stories about Need for Speed 3. Raza always used to crack down things, dig them to the deepest. We were once sharing some files for NFS when Raza made a webpage and hosted the file. Later, during lunch hours I asked if it’s possible to make a website and that hour marked the beginning of my web designing era. It was really fun to design personal home pages back in 2000 (I still have one hosted at: http://coolpoint.20m.com). He always helped me in picking up basic html concepts, file/hosting issues etc. And after that, he gave me a vision about web layouts and since then I’ve designed more than thousands of them! Thanks bro!

- TBT

Talha bin Tariq was a 3rd year student at my university when I was a fresher. Fortunately I got a chance to design an illustration for Graduate Profile 2004 and after seeing it he asked me to show him the rest of my portfolio (in Lab-1 of FAST-NU). He was the first person who encouraged me a lot and helped me to discover more in gfx. I was also offered to design illustrations for Online 17th and even after producing not-so-good results; he appreciated me and got the best out of me. I still remember that how with few quick-clicks in Photoshop, TBT used to create impressive outputs! His good quality knowledge about core, amazing after-effects on images and friendly behavior always made me enjoy his company =) There are few extra-ordinary students among each batch, and he was MashAllah one of them. Talha is now a Software Engg. at Microsoft and you can view his complete profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/talhatariq

- AhsanQ

Ahsan Qamar, my group member; my teacher – the one person who pulled me out of the failure curve and helped me to see the potential inside! I really had a poor start at university, although I had interest in web designing and development but never scored well in my exams. I always had a lazy attitude towards my assignments. But this one person dragged me out of darkness and helped me cover all the knowledge that I missed in classrooms. I still remember the Data Structure assignment nights spent at his place which really helped me to get a good grip on programming. Ahsan always used to understand things very quickly, remember each and every concept read just once, and program things in a very efficient manner – MashAllah! Most of the time when we had study sessions, Ahsan took the lead (with Shoaib Hafeez on support ). Today, I feel blessed having such friends, and the experience of failing and then going up really teaches you the importance of success, and this lesson one can not grasp easily by succeeding in one go. Ahsan Qamar recently flew back to his hometown (Rawalpindi) and will be starting his new job this week InshAllah. I’ll really miss him around!

- Asad

Asad Siddiqi, my mentor – yet another senior at FAST-NU but I got to know him after I graduated. I once added him for some freelance project on my IM and today, I chat with him just like my any other friend. During night-shifts at TeraData, I used chat with him and share recent happenings. While seeking new jobs, I used to consult him and he always gave me healthy advices. Although he is currently in NCR, USA but he had good knowledge about local software houses, their products and trends. And he really played a major role in helping me switch my job, in switching to a better place!

- Ammar

Syed Ammar Faheem, the little kid – committee interviews were on the go (during my final year) and I got a chance to interview this kid, both for ‘The Webmasters’ and ‘Interface’. Ammar used to manage PakMarkaz.net, so I visited the site and the colors didn’t appeal me much. Some mishap happened and I proposed not to induct this kid in both committees. But later on, we got him on board and the kid started to prove himself. We’ve worked together in Procom, Interface and even studied together during my last semester at university. And this little kid (not so little now ) is responsible for this space that I hold on the web – yes, my blog! Ammar was the one who pushed me to start blogging although I was reluctant to do so and always used to think: what’s the use?! But after starting it I realized the benefits it holds.  He has been selected as the President of Procom 2009 – proud of you kid! And I am really a fan of the ‘aggressive’ content writing he does.

(and the last one on my list is..)

- STUPEFY

Abdul Basit, just like my elder brother, and a business partner – it was the 1st semester, our group was sitting outside in the lawn (at FAST-NU) when I had a chance to chit chat with this geeky fellow. And our minds clicked on one thing that was “Flixin.tk”, a resource for IPT assignments. Much has happened until now and we’ve spent almost 6 years together. One thing not-so-immediately-noticeable about Basit is, “he is really soft-hearted” and he even agreed to that while we were practicing for MBA interview (5 good things about you) ; ) He always has wise opinion about things, better understanding of issues in life and really takes good care of things and people around! We’ve been running a venture since 1 year now Alhamdulillah and it is really fun working together. Basit has been always interested in core stuff and at times I feel too relaxed to even bother what’s happening on the backend. I believe not every friend of yours can become a business partner but I’m glad that we’ve been able to keep things separate both for our professional as well as friendly lives!

Before I wrap up this note, I would like to mention names of few more people who helped me to grab expertise in PHP/MySQL – Ammar Rafiq, Asim Imtiaz and Fahim Ilyas.

“A student never forgets an encouraging private word, when it is given with sincere respect and admiration.” ~ William Lyon Phelps

Beginning of my designing era

Few days back, while I was trying to recover one of Yahoo accounts for some important document, I came across my initial set of web templates that I designed 8 years back! It was year 2000 after summer vacations when my buddy, ra[y]za, explained me what exactly a web template is, and I felt a little interested too. He showed me one of his submissions that were live on FreeWebTemplates.com and couple of people downloaded/reviewed it too. I was into basic websites since 1999, thanks to ra[y]za again! But the idea of template clicked me as well and I designed 2 web templates.

I submitted the layouts on freewebtemplates.com and was waiting for my templates to appear in their showcase. Few weeks passed, I even re-submitted but no luck! After I had lost all hopes, the templates were just like any other spare file on my hard drive because I had designed them for community and not for any client/website. It was after 2-3 months when my friend told me “hey! your templates are online and they’ve reached 10 most downloaded templates” – I was way too happy to see the output. Not sure about the actual figure but I guess it scored 2500+ in 2-3 weeks.

When I came across my designs recently, it actually reminded me of my old layouts. But nevertheless – I really worked hard to improve my designing skills and MashAllah the result has been quite promising. I have taught Photoshop to more than 10 people, have even conducted workshops. Seeing hopeless faces in designing – I always used to tell people ‘it takes some time to move higher..‘ and same happened with me (:

Let me share my 2 layouts that marked the beginning of my precious skill!

For recent work, freel to visit my online portfolio: http://axdimensions.deviantart.com/gallery/

Em 2007-2008: A year in review

It’s been a year since I started blogging, started doing startups, started going on a daily job after my graduation and a whole calendar year has passed too (2007-2008 as well as 1429 to 1430 Hijrah). Life in university was quite different than it is in industry!

January 1, 2008 was the day when we launched PakMarkaz.net (PMN), my first startup (with Ammar Faheem). PMN was started to unite the voices of our nation – a place where they could share their thoughts. Due to some serious delay in enhancements and lack of features, we couldn’t continue PMN with the same throttle and both of us got busy into daily life leaving PMN a little on the side. Since I couldn’t participate fully, I left the project circle in the second-quarter of 2008.

While PMN was going low, STUPEFY (a close friend of mine) had an idea through which we could enhance his final year project and convert it into a venture that could help people around the country to make free international calls! Unlike any other venture, this project required couple of investment and we had no clue to if we would be able to generate any ROI because the system worked in an odd way – yes, that is what we used to think about it in the start! We started working on it from last week of January 2008 and used to work day and night on the weekends. Finally, after testing up couple of features we were confident that it would work with every other user. Held a usual brain storm session and named the product ‘Connect2Pk‘. Launched its beta version on March 3, 2008 and with no SEM or SEO skills, we started promoting the product through our contacts. MashAllah, it’s been 11 months since the venture is up and running with a user base of more than 13,000 users and counting! We’ve learnt a lot from it – in fact Connect2Pk has been the core part of my every experiment on the web. Improved the layout, applied various SEO techniques, implemented AdSense, generated around 25% traffic from my blog (in the early days), sent invitations through email and the best part is – provided rapid support to our dear users!

Hopes started gathering around when I saw Connect2Pk growing. And guess what? I had another startup fever :$ But this time, I wanted to build up a proper team so I did couple of meetings with my university group. We shared couple of ideas and finalized to work on one – “Qeemat – a community based pricing system!” We had a team of 8, big enough to even build a social network but may be not everyone was motivated or interested. I had been always excited about my ideas and really wanted to see it live but things started getting delayed. My friends selected me as their team-lead but still the deadlines were part of dreams. I soon realized may be it’s a wrong step to start a startup with a bunch of people and I separated out hearing comments ‘un-realistic deadlines’ etc. Anyway, I started working on my own and set up certain deadlines and Alhamdulillah – Qeemat.com was up & running on that specific point of time. The venture did get a good response from the industry but not much from the users due to which I never looked back at it to improve its set of features. (And I know that’s a wrong attitude!)

Connect2Pk was the only venture that was up & running then. Since things were running quite smooth – I had a chance to explore things. I played a lot with WordPress, even ended up developing a plugin for it. And trust me; I’m really a fan of WP today! I don’t care how bad its code might be (as couple of developers commented negative over its architecture) but it really makes our life easy in putting up small content based web sites and/or blogs.

(Oops! There is just one more to list down..) Back in mid-October, STUPEFY felt like testing another project. How about we aggregate news from local sources and put them in one single place? The idea appealed to me and I suggested if we could give user a more reader-friendly interface by the help of AJAX and DIV (I was inspired by the way Google Reader displays all RSS items). On November 4, 2008 – we launched PakHeadlines with a very basic set of features. This little project of ours still needs some pending work to be done and the response on the website has been so far a little below average. However, I hope if we’ll manage to implement the updates before it gets further late – we might get lucky enough to catch some more readers!

Hmm, that was all about my startup experience during 2007-2008. Today, I’m employed in TPS and working on ‘InSight – ATM monitoring and management suite‘ and was earlier employed at TeraData (from 07-01-2008 to 31-07-2008). I did a small post on my blog when I switched the job (you can read it here). Alhamdulillah things have been quite smooth up here. I am really getting to learn a lot. My colleagues are really amazing – at times I feel blessed! And they really appreciate (and respect :$) me about all the venture experience I’ve been through so far. Anyway, I believe a post like this should have been done earlier but I was quite busy with my job and was trying to concentrate totally on it due to some high priority task.

At the end, I would just like to share few main factors that I believe were the major cause of failure:

• Love your product and dedicate yourself 100% on bringing it right
• Keep struggling hard to improve it
• Even if you fail, you can always learn and improve

And for the last one, I would like to give credit to Jehan Ara who recently shared an amazing video on her blog. Thank you ma’am!

Well, that’s about my past year – I would really love to hear some feedback and suggestions from my dear readers especially if they would like to drop their 2 cents to help me improve on the startups. Err..yes, I do have 2-3 ideas in pipeline for this year and InshAllah I hope to bring them in a more better & positive way.

Have a nice day!

My AdSense story

To many people Google Ads might sound annoying but to some, it might be one of their sources of revenue. My AdSense story revolves around my 1st venture with STUPEFY i.e. Connect2Pk.

Back in March 2008, we launched Connect2Pk.com and felt like testing AdSense too. Our business model included free service as well as paid. However, due to some VoIP licensing issues; we dropped the paid idea for some time. Just like any other venture, we started off the project from our own money but wanted the website to generate money so that it can support itself. Trust me; playing around with AdSense is fun! I still remember the early days when we used to get “California Hotel” advertisements on our website. Very soon I realized that we are not going in the right direction and started improving layout and SEO. From few cents in a week, the revenue was enough to support the venture and MashAllah we got much more to expand it! And Alhamdulillah, today Connect2Pk is running 100% on AdSense revenue.

Just like everyone else, I implemented basic techniques like add more pages, blend your ad-units, focus on content and much more. Google does play smart. If you’re not getting much clicks and traffic, don’t expect any revenue. But if you start getting healthy clicks then Google will start displaying more competitive advertisements resulting in more revenue. Yes, that’s the way it is!

Earlier on my blog, I dropped my 2 cents over “Karachi Bloggers Meetup“. Also, somewhere (may be on Green&White) I read that many kids started blogging and put up AdSense to start earning after they heard that two Pakistani bloggers are earning more than $100/day. Well, the key point is that content matters the most to AdSense. Technology blogs usually succeed in making money as compared to personal ramblings. It’s just that, there are many important factors that matter if you really want to earn through AdSense (Google for AdSense tips & go through AdSense blog for basic understanding).

Well, that’s about my 9 months of experience with AdSense. If anyone has an AdSense story to share, I would love to put it up on my blog!

The Re-opening

Yet another WordPress blog? No! I started blogging in November 2007 on wordpress.com after which I tested many self-hosted blogs and even experiemented little dot com ventures using WP. However, I’ve finally planned to merge all my blogs into one so that it gets a little easy for me to manage and blog about technology happenings, web design & development.

Readers who have been following me on axdimensions.wordpress.com and axdimensions.com/pixelnotes can now track me directly through ‘axdimensions.com’..

And yes, twitter freaks can add me at: http://www.twitter.com/axdimensions

Enjoy your stay!

From TeraData to TPS

The journey of 7 months has come to an end. After getting my bachelors degree from FAST-NU (Karachi Campus), I got employed at TeraData. My job role was to re-engineer the PIA Awards Plus system along with the system administration of 8 servers and 72 workstations. I had quite a different time since I was doing little bit of system administration along with my daily tasks of development.

Hmmm, during last few months, I got to know about Genesys, IVR, Nortel PBAX and Symposium server. My overall experience at TeraData was pretty good but since the job timings were not favoring me due to the weekly rotations (morning/evening/night) , I switched to TPS for more professional working environment. Most of my friends from FAST are working over there, therefore I didn’t hesitate even once when the opportunity came. Joined the organization from 01-08-2008, and now inshAllah I would be working with the InSight team. “InSight is a web based monitoring, management and reporting tool for Self Service Terminals, can be the solution for monitoring a bank’s self service network..”, quoting from TPSonline.com.

That was a little about my first job that I felt like sharing!

Which software house should I go to?

At the Annual Dinner 2008 (of FAST-NUCES), couple of students from the graduating batch asked me this question due to which I thought to drop a post on my blog. Well, there are certain factors to be considered. Once you are through all screening process, now is the time to take the right step! You might have few options to select from but do not just make random selections because switching job isn’t easy either. If career really matters to you, do give following points a little thought that I am sharing as per my experience:

• Target organizations that have a good reputation in the market
• Always clear up all policies during your package discussion (*appraisals, leave, overtime etc.)
• If it’s your first job and you have no experience, demand what is being offered in other organizations, a high demand might make you lose the opportunity
• Make sure you get a proper/official job-offer before you may join because many organizations might say ABC in the interview and will offer you XYZ in the offer (especially in case of startups, because they might try to impress you with their dreams!)
• In case you are targeting corporate sector, do query about the IT hierarchy because that will affect your growth
• Office location and timings matter a lot, especially as per the recent incidents of our city
• Even if you are not serious about job (e.g. if you plan to go for masters, or in case you are a girl), do not under estimate yourself and demand what others are getting because you will be providing your service 9-6!
• Always take suggestions from your seniors and ex-employees of the organizations because they will really give you a different view
• Try to avoid the pressure from the internal employees because sometimes friends working in the organizations might have an effect on your decision
• Remember: Buyer will always look for a cheap service and Seller will demand a better deal, so try to negotiate for your salary package

One more thing I would like to share before I wrap up this post, do remember each and every word that is being said during the offer because tomorrow if you find any twist in the package, you know what to do – say Goodbye to the fellows because when they cannot keep a word about what they just said, its useless to work for/with them!

That’s all I had to share. Feel free to drop your comments or add up any suggestions.

Happy hunting!

*Knowing your appraisals is important because there are many organizations which do performance based appraisal where as other appraise you on a specified %