Who is Zareef Ahmed?

This is a question which is still unanswered but has been attempted many times. Sometime by trying hands on programming, sometime on books.

A human
zareef ahmed , PHP developer / programmer in India ( Delhi )

Zareef Ahmed

 

Who I am ?
I am a techno savvy person, who conquered by Linux/Unix long ago, I forgot everything to learn & explore the world of Linux, In my learning drive, I came across the C, C++, and every shell of
Unix & languages including old but proven Perl and the flavor of present time
PHP.

Currently I am working with with many projects in PHP. Those projects includes some small content websites to heavy e-commerce website management systems. Nowadays I have specially focused myself on the performance enhancements and module development in PHP.
Total development work is going apace using PHPand Mysql.

Due to heavy work at office I am unable to release my work on my pet projects like LMPX.COM and FuseBulb.com. Of course this home page also need some real stuff about me, my work my life.

I hope, I can get some time to finish my work on these projects very soon.Till then you can visit my collection of links about Linux,
Mysql,
PHP,
XML.
Thanks for your visit.

if you want to contact me you can do so by visting my contact us page

 

This is the first part of my articles on the people who were instrumental in shaping my life in one or other way.

In this first part I am only including the people from my family because family is first place from where you got your dose of inspiration.

My Grand Father

My force and supporter for everything which I did since childhood, I can still recall his long sessions with me with small books in hands. He taught me the value of Education and real meaning of education. When I was not able to attend school for months due to my illness he passionately taught me many things at home. He was a self made person and without any training he was able to manage a long fleet of machine in his company for which he worked. He was a machinist as well as a known fitter in our area. He was also a visionary. Electricity in our village was not good so he install a diesel engine to run the machine which was processing the wheat. I got my interest in technology from him only. I am really thankful for the God to bring me in a family where machines and tools were just common things and even children were allowed to use and inspect them.

My Mother

Do I need to reiterate the need of good mother in any body?s life? I really feel amazed sometime that how my mother was having faith in me that I can do whatever I was trying to do at the age of 16.
She gave me support in any possible way; yes I was having access to a good amount of money at the age of 16. When other people of my age were struggling to get their pocket money, I was allowed to purchase books of hundreds rupees. Almost everybody at home was against my obsession with books and newspapers but she always supports me. Almost all leading newspapers were subscribed in my house and I was the only reader at home. Monthly newspaper bill was more than 300 Rs. at that time which was really high for our family but my mother always supports me for that. She even arranges the money for my computer course. My Grandfather was the second contributor for that. They spend their savings for my computer course.

My Wife

Do you believe in the concept of God? Do you know how a simple stone turns into a God? Faith, the ultimate power, does the magic of transforming of a stone to God. I got this faith from my wife at a time when it was most needed. I am thankful to God and my mother for choosing this wonderful girl for me. It was an arrange marriage and we never meet each other before our marriage, but bond we share with each other is beyond any comparison and evaluation. When I was nothing, she was there, when I was dumped by everybody she was there, when I was struggling to have even daily meal she was there, she was there with a belief that I can make IT.
She was even with me when I was not able to be with her due to my over involvement in the projects which I was doing, I even missed her birthdays while working on projects, but she never complains. She never demands, she is still the same girl, she still does not demand anything.
She transforms an introvert boy to an extrovert man. A person who was not able to drink a glass of water in front of others, today can do lunch and dinner with a group of people. She instils the confidence in me. She was the first person who makes me think that I am ?something? and can do ?something?.

In next part I will share my thoughts on the people from my professional career. I will include the people from whom I learned and got momentum in my career. Those are Rakesh Jaiswal,Nitin Pachnanda, Anil Langar, Bhupesh Tarsolia,A.V. Bagur and some others :)

This post was originally conceived many years ago when first time I thought about creating a homepage. It was around 2002.
so here I am compiling a list of some dates of my life, you can also treat them as milestones. I have tried to keep them in chronological order, but was not able to do so as I dont have any written record of these events, I am only doing it from my memory.

  • June 8, 1978 : Born on this Earth, exactly two years after marriage of my parents, yes June 8 is also the marriage anniversary of parents.
  • October 31, 1984 : This is the first date from where I start recalling dates. On that day Former Prime minister of India Indira Gandhi was murdered in New Delhi.
  • Winter of 1985 : I was operated for my Ear problem in Merut medical hospital, I still remember Dr. Bhatia who operated me. After 10 years I was again operated for the same problem in the same hospital.
  • Summer of 1986 : First time in my life I saw electricity, My grandfather arrange a electricity connection after doing so much work with electricity officers. I can still recall that it was community event at my village. After that our diesel engine was shelved. It was a news in our village as we transformed from ?engine wale? to ?Bijli wale?
  • Summer of 1987 : I came to Delhi to live with my parents, it was kind a punishment to me, and my grandfather promised me that if I will be first in my studies, he will take me back, which he never did year after year, but I am thankful to him that he given me a reason to study harder?.during this summer I also saw the electricity fan first time, I was so puzzled : how Air can be kept in that loose area?
  • Winter 1988 : First time I was on stage, I got second prize in my speech competition and first in my essay competition. Topic was :- Why I love roping trees? (Mujhe ped podhe lagana kyon accha lagta hai?), This instill confidence in me and over night I was famous in my school. I was in fifth class at that time. My fav teacher Shamshad ali was instrumental in my that confidence and success. I still enjoy a good relationship with him.
  • November 13, 1994. My first article was published in Ghaziabad?s local news paper Dainik Hint. Title was :-  Wild Life conservation : Importance of Public Zoo, I still have copy of that published article, a precious thing for me :)
  • Rainy Season of 1990 : I owed my life to one of my  neighbor who saved me from drowning. I knew swimming but somehow I was not able to cope with sudden change in depth of water.
  • Jan 1- Jan 4 1993 : First time in my life I saw and use a computer at National Science Center, Delhi.
  • August 1994 : I started my own advertising agency. Today I think I was living in dreams at that time, without any connections in the industry and background in the field I started that one, I was able to get affiliation with many news papers. Alas ! without any office and credit system, clients getting was not an easy task, but I still feel proud of it. What else you can expect from a 16 Years old boy. I did some advertising in Rastriya Sahara at that time.
  • April 1996 : I start my computer course, it was supposed to cover computer basics and some most popular word processor at that time like page maker and corel draw. I was fascinated by the concept of autoexec.bat file in MS Dos. Instant Artist was also one of great package which I have used to draw many pages.
  • May 1997 : I did a part time job as Currier delivery agent for around one week, it helps me to know about Delhi Roads at the expense of company, a win-win situation for me as well as spaceage agency for which I worked.
  • First week of June 1997 : I got my first job as Trainee Journalist in one of local news papers in Delhi, Dainik Satta Darshan, it was really a great experience. That job was instrumental  in instilling confidence in me but at the same time a new bad, corrupt and political face of journalism was also exposed to me. When they did not pay and start putting other name on my own articles then I left the job.
  • June 1998 : I visited Rajsthan?s Jaislmer, Bikarner, Jaipur, Jodhpur and many other cities, it was my first detailed journey outside my hometown. A new kind of experience and lots of new things came out from this, I saw the corruption in Army  and so many other things? I still have many photographs from that trip.
  • July 1998  : I visited Kanpur and Bareily separately for some business purpose, trip was a failure and I had to change my course of action after that.
  • August 1998 : First time in my life I heard the word ?Linux? on a large scale, before that I ?saw? word in Computer Today Magzine . In August 1998, I got a copy of PCQuest?s May-June 1998 edition. This edition was containing a CD of Red Hat Linux 5. I was really impressed by the concept of Open Source.
  • First week of October 1998 : I got engaged with my wife :)
  • March 29, 2000 : I was married to one of beautiful, loving and charming girl on this earth, I can?t believe we have spent 10 years together. It seems as just yesterday I got married.

    • My biggest weakness is the absence of formal training in programming and maintaining life cycle of a project.

    I am not good at academic lingo and often stumped with the heavy words like encapsulation, zero float (I just know the word urgency). I know heavy here is an adjective and has contextual meaning. ?Heavy? for me can be ?obvious? for someone else.

    But over the time this has become my strength because most of the time I was interacting or doing work with the direct client and they were also not good at that, so I take the things as they are and just designed/developed the product or application they were looking for.

    My emphasis was on the developing the solution which works better for them.

    Having said that I would like to clarify that I am not against using a traditional approach to manage software development like cycle, I am just saying that most of the time I was not able to tell the people about the technology or methodology I am using to manage the project. Like over the time when I tried to be good at academic lingo of managing and doing the things, I realize that my approach is somewhat near to Agile software management techniques and my programming structure was loose MVC structure with factory approach pattern.

    One of my other weaknesses is SQL; I am not good at SQL query language into deep level. I know the normal things but most of the time I go for abstraction in this case and have developed middle layer between database and my application, on many places it was a requirement of the system. I heavily used PEAR tools to stream line the process, and I normally prefer PHP for putting business logic than relying on the database for this.

    I can do most advanced things with the Mysql like replication and optimization, but have to think if someone ask me exact different between left and right join.

    Tab 6
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