The Geek Talk

Who is Anil Wadghule?

Anil is 26 year old programmer, hacker. He loves writing programs. Specially likes writing useful plugins, libraries. Over the last few years, he has become programming language obsessive and likes to learn new programming languages. Academically he has done engineering in Computer Science. He works for a software company in Pune.

Why Ruby?

I got introduced to Ruby in 2006 when I found some great del.icio.us popular links of tutorials and blogs about Ruby. A guy named Premshree who works for Yahoo was using it. He had done some talks and had written some blog posts about it. I read his stuff in early days. I read why’s Poignant’s Guide to Ruby and his blog got to know about stylish Ruby people. Later I completed reading free online version of Programming Ruby. All these things started my journey into Ruby programming world.

I started loving this beautiful programming language so much. I got a job in a programming shop in Pune where Ruby was a primary programming language. During that period, I came to know about awesome guys like defunkt, _why, Chad Fowler & Peter Cooper. They were all doing great stuff that time. I was always fascinated about them. I started attending local Ruby meets where I met with guy named Pratik Naik (now in Rails core) who was also doing Ruby that time. It is all interesting world from that time and I am in love with Ruby since.

Ruby is a awesome programming language which helps to solve your problems in very a less time. I love it’s syntax, metaprogramming features, fully object orientedness. The framework like Rails makes full benefit of the language features and that’s why Rails so powerful.

Best Framework in your opinion?

I think Ruby on Rails is the best web framework available there. Specially Rails 3.0 version makes it more powerful. Rails 3 is written to be very modular way. It’s now easy to swap out pieces as you wanted. The other mini web framework like Sinatra is very cool. For developing small web apps, it’s perfect but for developing bigger projects you will eventually end up using Rails as it’s a perfectly suitable.

I have not played enough with Django. Rails is RESTful oriented and a True MVC that Django is missing. But still I would like to use Django for a project someday.

Git or SVN?

Obviously Git. I have used SVN extensively in earlier time. SVN is damn slow. It does not help you much other than committing the files and updating the files. Git is perfect. It is very fast. it is distributed. You have your own copy of repository. You can work on your project when net is down. Git’s branching is awesome. It’s so easy to branch and merge too. Git tools I love are git stash, git rebase -i and git add -p. I use git-svn for SVN repositories. You won’t miss git with git-svn. I am proud to be one of the early users of GitHub and it has really changed the way we develop.

What does your typical day look like?

I can tell about my ideal day. I wake up around 7:30am in the morning, have a cup of tea, read overnight’s Twitter updates on mobile, read newspaper. After I try to get some exercise for 5-10 minutes.

I get ready around 8:30am. I travel to work by bike ad reach there around 9:15am. First thing I do at work is to check work related emails and reply them. Then I read my personal emails and read online news, blog feeds and twitter feed links. I start my work around 10am. I try to have some discussions about work in 10-15 minutes of time and continue doing my work.

At 1pm, I go to lunch. After lunch I play some Wii Tennis or Table Tennis with colleagues. I get back to work around 2pm. My most productive time at work in between 2:30pm to 5:00pm. Then, I discus with my seniors about done and remaining work. Around 7pm, I leave office.

I have my dinner around 9pm, then around 10pm, I again sit with my laptop. I work on personal projects this time. I read some of articles found during morning this time. I get logged in to IRC and try to discuss on some topics with IRC friends. Many times, I chose reading tech books over being with laptop at night. I usually get to bed somewhere around 12:30am. But sometimes, I keep working on the things or reading stuff and get to bed around 2:30am.

Current favorite apps?

Tweetie, Things, Google Chrome, Dropbox, 1Password. I like both TextMate and Aquamacs.

For my mobile Nokia E71, I love using Gravity as Twitter client and love it. It’s recent geo tweet and Foursquare support is awesome.

On web my current favorite apps are Twitter, Github, Foursquare, Flickr.

What OS do you prefer?

I use Mac OSX as my OS, particularly love Snow Leopard. At work, I use Ubuntu. I prefer Unix OSs for servers.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Favorite: Language (Python, Ruby ..), JS Framework?

I love Ruby and Python. There are times I preferred Python to Ruby as Python has good set of libraries and those really help. I am a fan of JQuery and love it.

Name something that has inspired you recently?

Rack, a Ruby webserver interface have inspired me a lot in recent times. I love Rack’s concept. I played a lot with various Rack apps, middlewares, servers. I am also crazy about Design patterns. Object oriented concepts, TDD. I love NoSQL databases Redis and MongoDB. I love Node.js. I really liked Lifo’s Cramp with Websockets.

Apart from code, I like to drive my new car Hyundai i10.

I have to mention that I am huge fan of A. R. Rahman. His music inspires me a lot. 90% of my music is his. My joy knew no bounds when he got Oscars and Grammys. (BTW he got double Oscar and double Grammy .. so think how much excited I was)

What are your personnel projects and goals for 2010?

Become a better programmer. Work more on open source and side projects. Specially contribute to Rails. Travel to nice places as much as possible.