During the last ten years of company's existence, we designed many software projects and websites. and if I decide to give detailed account of development process, variety of experiences we had during our interaction with clients and the lessons learned, each project would turn into an interesting novel.
The living experience we had for such a long duration just cannot be put into words. Every client was different in one or other sense. Scenarios were different. our developers and their technologies changed. There were moments of new hopes while establishing contacts, tensions during work, happiness of achievements or frustrations due to failures in satisfying clients. There were also many other problems like accounts, correspondence, marketing and quality control.The experience of running a small business is really much more varied and valuable as compared to experience in large corporate, government or education field. I strongly feel that new entrepreneurs should take such experience before starting their own business.
Even after such a long and consistent involvement in software field, I did not get the status of IT man and was labeled always as environmental engineer due to my degree. As I had a long tenure of about 37 years as teacher and consultant in environmental engineering, my contacts were established mainly through my students. Very few of them had liking or interest in IT like me. They were interested in taking my advise in environmental or education field but did not take my views on IT seriously and considered it as my hobby or subsidiary job. The faculty from computer and IT departments of my college and other colleges did not give much attention to my work in this field.
Fortunately, there came an occasion, when I was called to inaugurate ISTE workshop for college teachers on "Recent advances in Information Technology" at Walchand Institute of Technology, Solapur. I was very happy and prepared a powerpoint presentation on Web 2.0. I had already used many tools like Twitter, Widgets,google map, registered for social networks like facebook, Linkedin, had started yahoogroups, googlepages and writing blogs. Still, I had to study many more new tools available on the internet, gather information about cloud computing, digg, mashup etc. The presentation was well received, but I knew that I lacked deep knowledge in these tools. Our Dnyandeep member, and senior software developer Sushant Yaldgudkar gave a two hour presentation on latest Flash/Flex technologies and impressed IT teachers from various engineering colleges about our achievements.
On the technology front, as I mentioned we adopted PHP, MySQL system for data integration to webpages. I learned use of PHP and could develop interactive web applications like Marathi-Sanskrit-English dictionary and Subhashit module for www.sanskritdeepika.org. I learned to use many flash web modules developed by Dnyandeep team, like photogallery, interactive map, page-flip, audio-video clip embedding, installing various components in websites based on Joomla and Wordpress CMS. Use of Unicode through Baraha and its integration with regional language pack of windows made Marathi & Sanskrit content management much easier and searchable through search engines.
In order to have a public contact place and centre for skilled human resource generation, our foundation established its office in the premises of Maharashtra Technical Education Society at Vishrambag, Sangli. Three students worked for their MCA project with us for four months and developed www.green-tech.biz website using latest Joomla version. Later, we transferred most my computer and IT books from our to the office, purchased four computers and started web design and flash programming training classes. Fortunately, we could get skilled dedicated computer programmers good in photoshop, flash and MS Office. Now some well known senior persons have started attending our course. My brothers also came forward to help me in accounts and marketing. We redesigned mysangli.com and hoped getting revenues through advertisements. However, there was very poor response and the reason was same old issue of ignorance about this effective media.
I took a decision to start a movement of awareness campaign about web design and decided to write blogs in Marathi on web design for education and for explaining the use of this technology in various fields. Till date, I have published many blogs on web design, Java Script and use of web technology for various sectors. We are planning to publish a book on this subject in due course of time.
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