Software People Stories

In this conversation Srilakshmi, Program Manager shares her 30+ year story with Chitra through her essence of being a person who naturally brings people together. Her story board contains

•  Science as her forte and choosing to study engineering
• Getting her first job in HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd) to build the Light Combat Aircraft or LCA, her first exposure to program management
• Learning slowly and a project definition phase of 2-3 years
• Working on mini computers and coding in machine language
• Moving to the US for a PhD, choosing computer science over management & economics, multiple transitions
• Being the first batch of computer science graduates from portland state university
• Joining Intel and staying there for 15 years
• Working in bunny suits inside fab labs on software for p-n junctions
• realising that software engineering was a job and her passion lay in bringing people together and organizing things
• Being part of various server teams at Intel and becoming a program manager in 2002
• Moving to India, discovering that leading by influence was her preferred way of working, working at NetApp, Cisco, VMWare
• Sharing her Program Management principles of equal authority, responsibility and weightage to all functions of a group
• Collaboration via a "map day" exercise and common understanding of the "why" of a project, examples from her experience at Intel and ADE (Aeronautical Development Establishment) & the importance of keeping the vision in mind at all times and to know how everything is connected
• Changes across time around collaboration
• How the pandemic has brought about awareness of different ecosystems
• Exploring influence without authority in the role of a program manager, knowing yourself when a job is well done and being approachable
• Her passion around voluntarism
• Looking long term, making technology an ally in your work and finding happiness in what you do.

Srilakshmi Renganathan was a Software Developer and is now a Release Manager & Program Manager. She started her career at the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited HAL in Bangalore and moved to the US for her Masters in Computer Science. She  worked in various MNCs - Intel Corp, NetApp, Cisco & VMware. She is currently a Software Release & Deployment Program Management at Zebra Technologies ( for Reflexis Retail Task & Schedule Management Software products recently acquired by Zebra).

She describes herself as a mother, daughter, wife, friend, ever longing to be a social worker.

As a software Program Manager trying to stay connected to technology by doing hands-on tactical coordination work assisting in moving products from inception to entity. She’s touched various domains albeit from the periphery including aircraft communication systems, chip manufacturing, storage technology, cloud infrastructure to more recently SAAS - Software as a Service. Sri continues to engage & adapt  through changing tools & technologies through the past 3 decades!  Electronics & Computer Science Engineer by Education & Software Engineer by training. Multi-Tasker, organizer, blogger & constant social media updater :) who lives by the phrase “sharing is caring”.

In this conversation, Ted Harrington, Executive Partner at Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) shares his career journey and perspectives with Sivaguru on various topics related to IT security and ethical hacking. He talks about

• His company of ethical hackers helping other companies secure their IT systems
• Wanting to be an entrepreneur and starting a consumer facing business
• Moving to a company, as the CEO / founder wanted to mentor someone and felt that would be a good experience
• With that experience, feeling the need to serve businesses rather than consumers directly
• How he met his current business partner and how the plan for the company evolved literally overnight
• His four core principles: do hard things, do things that matter, do things in the service of others and to get better every single day
• Applying these principles in the security business and getting a client
• Mindset needed for outhinking a hacker
• Thinking like a hacker and why it may not be possible to think one step ahead of the attacker
• Developing the skill of thinking ‘evil’, to raise the security levels of our solutions
• Whose job it is to think security in a team
• How security is a leadership issue
• How security thinking can be used to ensure the adherence to company values such as customer experience, quality etc.
• Using security as a business differentiator and gain competitive advantage
• His thoughts on security aspects of the ‘supply chain’
• Zero trust and defense in depth models
• How not to become obsessed and become a pessimist, thinking only of all bad things that can happen
• How he likes to look at systems in everything and how they could be improved by breaking them
• How he approached writing his book that is related to technology, when technology is changing very fast
• How to make security layers least obtrusive
• What it takes to become a security professional

Ted Harrington is the #1 best selling author of HACKABLE: How to Do Application Security Right.

He’s helped hundreds of companies fix tens of thousands of security vulnerabilities, including Google, Amazon, and Netflix.

Ted has been featured in more than 100 media outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Forbes.

His team founded and organizes IoT Village, an event whose hacking contest is a three-time DEF CON Black Badge winner. He hosts the Tech Done Different podcast.

Reach him at: ted [at] tedharrington [dot] com or https://tedharrington.com

In this conversation, Raja, a coach at PM Power, who likes to be known as a lifelong programmer shares his journey into the world of software and the lessons he learnt and his view on

• How he was inspired by two of his teachers to learn programming
• His liking for experiments that kept him interested in IT
• The transition from an individual contributor to working in teams
• How he would like to be associated with only one role : a programmer
• His surprise, when he took up employment after being an entrepreneur, to see designations and very hard delineation of responsibilities by roles
• His views on the titles on people’s visiting cards
• Whether he has a ‘Raja technique or Raja methodology’
• His views on ‘super specialization’ that many developers prefer, to work only on the server side or on the client side etc and who should own the value chain
• The power of the concept of ‘mock’s and ‘stub’s
• How an explicit approach can help in improving team productivity
• An analogy of a carnatic musicians in a concert having respect for each other on the concept of respect for each other
• The secret sauce of delivering high quality software is the respect for each other in a team
• How effective ideas can be simple and can come from anyone in the team, not necessarily senior in terms of experience
• His advice on choosing a technical or managerial path for one’s career
• Writing single intent code that progressively evolves

Raja would like to be recognized as a programmer since 1993 having extensive experience in architecting and implementing object-oriented and distributed systems. 

He has created applications for people to collaborate.

He preaches and practices Clean Coding Techniques.

His profile on the PM Power site is at: https://pm-powerconsulting.com/experts/raja-subramaian/

His LinkedIn profile is at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raja-subramanian-kamakshi-iyer-87aa7a54/

He can also be found on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-D08_UMQN5fM4rLx2Q7JOg

In this episode Dr. Neeta Trivedi, a former senior scientist with the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and an entrepreneur, is in conversation with Sivaguru. Neeta shares her experiences on

• Her modest family background from a small town with modest dreams
• Even without access to information sources, wanting to do something different, something big
• Being fortunate to have passionate teachers right from primary school, who were invested in building good persons overall, and nt just limiting themselves to teaching the curriculum
• Getting into a new program launched by DRDO, to develop computer scientists
• Starting her career with computer land war game systems
• Using the 2167-A methodology for software development
• Getting opportunities to attend conferences including once where she got to meet Prof. Watts Humphrey
• {understanding that developing software systems is more than writing some lines of code}
• About meeting her husband to be and later shifting to Bangalore after marriage
• Working on cockpit display systems for the Light Combat Aircraft
• Getting her first opportunity to see what is ‘inside the box’ of a computer and did not have an option of opting out.
• And how that have her a very good experience to understand various dynamics in a large program
• How the nuclear blast at Pokhran and subsequent Y2k meant a lot of constraints to be faced by the scientists
• Having the rigor of 100% test coverage, 0% dead code etc
• An interesting situation while integrating subsystems that took many months to resolve and the learning from that experience
• Nuances in hardware design that influence or constrain software to be developed or deployed
• Moving to work on UAVs and adopting structured systems development methodologies (standard 498)
• How she likes to use a metaphor of a divided two way street and 2167A, her experience with 2207, that is more flexible
• About using beetles to reach inaccessible spaces in times of disaster, where UAVs cannot & interesting experiences convening a group on micro air vehicles
• About taking a voluntary retirement and starting a company
• Handling Functional and non functional requirements
• The importance and need for systems thinking

Neeta did MSc Computer Science from Devi Ahilya University, Indore, through a DRDO sponsored programme, and joined DRDO in 1989. She later pursued academics while on the job, to obtain MSc (engineering) and PhD from Indian Institute of Science in the areas of Wireless Sensor Networks and Information Fusion.

Neeta worked for DRDO for 28 years before voluntarily retiring as Scientist ‘G’. She had a brief stint as Subject Matter Expert in Tata Advanced Systems Ltd after that, and is presently focusing on her startup venture Inferigence Quotient LLP.

During her initial years in ISSA-DRDO, Delhi, she was a team member for Computerised Land Wargames for the Indian Army. From 1996 to 2007 at ADE-DRDO, Bangalore, she led the software design and development team for Cockpit Display Systems for the Indian Light Combat Aircraft, Tejas. The display computer hardware and software were designed and developed completely within India at a time when indegenious capabilities in these areas were at a nascent stage, and private industry was still evolving. The display system successfully flew many hundreds of times, providing a platform for proving other avionics subsystems as well. From 2007 to 2017 at ADE she headed the UAV Payload Data Processing group, contributing to the ground image exploitation systems of various UAV programmes including micro, mini, tactical and MALE UAVs.

At TASL she contributed to Mission Systems, Ground Operating Systems and Ground Support Systems for aerial surveillance platforms, and to group autonomy for aerial robots.

Her startup venture is about building intelligent systems using computer vision and machine learning.

She has been part of many other technical and techno-managerial activities. She was expert member and convener of the Aeronautics R&D Board panel SIGMA (Special Interest Group on MAVs) for over 5 years, expert panel member of National Programme on MAVs, a joint initiative by DRDO and DST, contributed to white paper on homeland security for Govt of India. She has over 20 technical papers in national and international journals and conferences, and has also been on review panels herself.

Neeta is a senior member of IEEE and of Computer Society of India. She has received various awards including Young Engineer Award from Indian National Academy of Engineers, Young Scientist Awards from DRDO and from ADE, and Technology Award from DRDO. Her professional interests include Multisensor Data Fusion, Computer Vision, AI, Mission Systems for Aerial Surveillance Platforms, Ground Operating and Support Systems for UAVs, Payload Data Processing, Avionics and Cockpit Displays, Autonomous Single- and Multi-agent Robot Systems including Hybrid Navigation, Software and Systems Engineering.

Contact: [email protected]

For covid relief http://www.auwa.in/podforchange OR https://fundraisers.giveindia.org/fundraisers/podforchange-covid-relief-fund 

In this episode Amrita Samuel, People Leader and Executive Coach is in conversation with Gayatri sharing her experiences on

• Chosing HR as a career by choice
• Starting out in banking, manufacturing, hotels & then coming to IT via a .com company
• Working out of retail company warehouses and in actual stores, later moving into HR consulting across several industries
• The start of her long IT HR stint beginning with figuring out alphabets in computer programming languages and acronyms of the tech world
• The feel of working with tech across physical notebooks, shared computers, and accessing email via dial up connections
• Reflections on how mindsets and work constructs have shifted from meeting people in person
• How people have understood the role of HR and what it encompasses
• How people experience the organization through HR from hiring to retiring, HR as brand ambassadors
• Being a business partner, learning about what it means to code, what project management is and helping people who want to do something else
• On how people from tech functions bring more empathy to their role when some of them chose to move into HR
• Functioning and enabling in the background 
• Did she ever miss not being in the limelight? 
• Being a true partner in an organization
• Working with over 12 countries and cultures and how they perceive HR
• Her upbringing and how its helped shape her perspectives in her role
• Creating safe spaces, coaching leaders and being an invisible yet impactful function

Amrita is a thoughtful and accomplished people leader and executive coach. She is a certified Associate Certified Coach through the International Coaching Federation with over 20 years of experience in global human resource management. Her belief in the power of the human potential has helped the leaders she has coached flourish in all aspects of their life.

 Amrita has held several leadership roles in her two-decade career in Human Resources. She has worked and led teams in India, USA, Europe and Asia. She has worked across multiple industries ranging from Technology, Manufacturing to Retail and Hospitality. Most recently she was General Manager & Global HR Head at Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT), where she has worked for over 14 years.

 Amrita is a food & travel enthusiast. She is a certified scuba diver &  home baker. She is committed to social sector causes & hopes to be an impact agent in that space.

She can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amritasamuel/ OR @ [email protected]

For covid relief please contribute via http://www.auwa.in/podforchange  OR https://fundraisers.giveindia.org/fundraisers/podforchange-covid-relief-fund 

In this conversation Chuck Weindorf shares insights and incidents from his long career as an IT software developer, guide and mentor, with Chitra from PM Power Consulting, around

• His interest and curiosity to learn about new technology, picking it up as a hobbyist in high school
• His drive to offer his services as a software developer when he was in high school
• Having the drive and focus to stay on the software development path and learn
• How he loves working with young people, encouraging more young women to take up software engineering, & how youngsters can prepare themselves for a career
• Sharing his learnings from his career, failures and experiences through his book Leaders & Software Engineers: Communicate and Motivate without speaking in Code
• How he developed the ability to "see code" starting playing chess moves in his mind and then visualizing code movement later
• What it takes to be a good trouble shooter, dont have the fear of breaking something, discovering variability and complexity
• Being experimental to understand complexity and gain confidence 
• How new engineers can assimilate and understand existing code and systems and then build on them with newer tech and software
• What experienced engineers can do to enable fresh engineers understand pieces of the system and make the transition smooth
• Empathy, living a day in the life of your customer and continuous improvement takeaways, making personal connects to be successful software engineers
• Cultivating how to speak the language of business to get buy in for new features, technology
• Productivity through the value lens for software, individuals and the organization, building bridges between software and organization needs
• Two things to keep in mind for IT professionals
• Bring your best each day to work
• Embracing new technology, learning it and guiding the company through its adption

Charles Weindorf is a retired IT Director and Chief Engineer with nearly 40 years of experience in software engineering. At Erie Insurance, he served in every possible technical and supervisory role, where he encouraged software engineers to understand their responsibilities, see their value, adopt change, and focus on future direction. With stories, humor, and recollections of his roots as a young engineer, he influenced the next generation of software engineers to excel in their craft. Learn more at www.leadingsoftwareengineers.com 

Charles attempts to learn a new skill or hobby each year—including creating a board game from one of his fiction works, leading a new spiritual retreat, leaning to fly in a simulator, and managing a political campaign. He is a lifelong resident of Erie, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his high school sweetheart and wife, Debra, his four kids, and seven grandkids.

He can be contacted via LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-weindorf-engineer/

In Leaders and Software Engineers:Communicate and Motivate without speaking in Code, Charles Weindorf provides the Rosetta Stone for communicating to engineers with stories, analogies, and humor to encourage excellence in your team

In this episode Amit Sarangi, Agile Evangelist is in conversation with Gayatri. Amit shares his experiences on

• Starting his career in the functional HRM area as a business analyst
• Comparing the modules and configurations that used to be done in Oracle to the no-code generation of products of today
• Working as an onsite coordinator and understanding business needs and mapping them
• How the Agile journey has transformed him as well as how software is perceived
• Changing the mode of working from being like a whack-a-mole in terms of how feedback used to be collected and how that has changed
• How people need to be understood as who they are and not as robots to churn so many lines of code regularly
• His childhood, being a kid of Sanskrit professors, filled with stories, realms and possibilities
• The choices he’s made in his life and being comfortable staying out of the comfort zone and he’s better for it
• The legacy he’s leaving behind and inspiring today’s technologists to do the same
• Understanding your roots and past, constant curiosity and embracing the future creates multiple possibilities and opportunities. 
• Asking listeners to keep exploring! 

Amit can be contacted at https://www.linkedin.com/in/amit-sarangi/

Here is the link to the Give India campaign in support of the #PodForChange Covid Relief Fund https://fundraisers.giveindia.org/fundraisers/podforchange-covid-relief-fund

In this episode, SeethaPrasad Mandikel CEO and Founder of Tribyte Technologies shares his stories with Chitra around 

• His love for programming and natural motivation towards doing it, active coder at least once a week and reviewing code
• The "Made in India" inspiration when working in Talisma towards becoming an entrepreneur
• Having a lot of ideas, taking nearly 2 years to decide that "this is the one" and the journey from an idea towards making it into a business and founding Tribyte technologies
• Starting the business with building a video platform for entertainment and education & focusing on creating a platform to enable learning by making it both engaging and interesting
• How they got first customers, being confident about the problem being addressed of self-paced learning amidst bandwidth challenges to stream HD videos
• Enabling their early customers digital journeys, learning and co-creating the platform
• Developing and maintaining customer relationships mainly through partnering and referrals, and helping customer grow their business
• The growth explosion due to the pandemic, how the team responded and enabled educators transition to online education and ensuring customer business continuity
• Lessons learned while scaling rapidly at the onset of the pandemic to enable customers quickly move online, handling nearly 1500 sessions with 40-50 attendees per session, all starting at 9am
• Smart scaling approaches keeping cost and performance in mind
• A time when J&K state customers were enabled quickly so they could continue teaching
• How he built the team at Tribyte
• Catering to different learner personas and categories
• Messages for aspiring technologists on having a passion for programming & for entrepreneurs to examine viability & feasibility of a product or solution before starting your business 

Seethaprasad Mandikel is the founder and CEO of TriByte Technologies, a Bangalore (India) headquartered company, focused on developing a cutting-edge Interactive Learning Platform.

Seethaprasad has 25 years of experience in building technologies for large scale deployment with last 10 years focused on EduTech. He has grown TriByte from a start-up to enterprise by providing white-labelled solutions for many marquee customers and serving millions of users across 7 countries and 3 continents.

Prior to TriByte, he was part of the founding team of PI Corporation (later acquired by EMC) as Development Director. He worked in companies like Microsoft Corporation in the US), Talisma/ Aditi Technologies and with Robert Bosch, India

He can be reached via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seethaprasad/

In this conversation with Sanjay Tambwekar, CTO of Qwikcilver is in conversation with Chitra where he shares his experiences around

• His first exposure to engineering while witnessing his father building barges in shipyards
• Writing software at TUL after his graduation from IIT Bombay
• Working at Bell Northern Research and developing systems engineering understanding 
• Being part of the supercomputer team at CDAC and enabling its power for actual use by other government agencies
• Working at Verifone on digital payments software solutions
• Customer empathy and customer relationship experiences
• How he transitioned to management at Verifone and later managing a very large team at Sasken, along with his philosophy on management and leadership
• Experiences and learning in his role as CTO, from managing delivery, to understanding different customer personas, scaling transactions and conceptualizing product features
• A critical message on road safety through a foundation that he and his wife started and parents being role models
• His 2 part message for aspiring software and technology engineers
• Focus on the process to improve, your first competition is yourself
• Being an entrepreneur or being an employee, an marriage analogy

As the CTO, Sanjay leads the evolution of prepaid solutions at Qwikcilver, now merging into Pine Labs. Prior to this, his journey covers different domains across parallel computing (CDAC), payments (Verifone), wireless communications (Sasken) and digital storage (NetApp). He has a degree in EE from IIT Bombay, MS in CSE from NCSU, and a Diploma in Practicing Management from INSEAD.  

In the memory of their daughter, his wife and he run The Arundhati Foundation with the primary aim to improve road safety. 

Sanjay loves swimming, and occasional sketching.

Sanjay's LinkedIn profile

Social media handles related to The Arundhati Foundation : 

Twitter : @4stambwekar

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/thearundhatifoundation

In this conversation with Chitra, Pragati Ogal Rai shares her stories around

• How she became a technologist, published author, community technology evangelist, startup entrepreneur
• Having innate curiosity to study electronics and computer science, teach and do a double masters in computer science
• Working in a startup with her professor on creating a Skype-like feature on a palm pilot
• Working in mobile technology for 6 years, hardening mobile platforms before Android and IoS became popular
• Developing and training mobile engineers and becoming a technology evangelist
• Writing a book on Android Application Security
• How her career learning helped build a ladder to what she took up next
• Getting people to do the right thing through empathy, patient listening and investing time in problem discovery and the art of enabling developers
• Building and promoting communities, its all about the people
• Lessons in community building
• Inspiration to start an NGO focusing on Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Her lessons from her startup experience
• Her message for technology aspirants

Pragati is the Founder of ViryaDewdrops Autism Foundation, COO - ISSA India Chapter, Chair – Women in Cyber Security India Chapter, author of the book "Android Application Security Essentials” and the winner of 2014 Zinnov Thought Leadership award. 

In her 20-year career, Pragati has had the privilege to work with Motorola, PayPal, Deutsche Bank and Microsoft. She has held leadership roles in technology, evangelism, strategy, innovation, global program management, and product marketing. 

She was a founding member of Mo’blast a technology company in US and has now founded ViryaDewDrops Autism Foundation, a venture focusing on individuals with autism. 

Pragati works with academia all over the world in different capacities and volunteers at Swapaksh - a school for kids of migrant worker living in slum areas.  She is a recognized and much sought-after speaker at international technology events. 

Pragati has a dual Masters in computer science - one from Banasthali Vidhyapith (Gold medal at university level) and the other from San Jose State University. 

Pragati spent thirteen years in California before relocating to Bangalore. Reading, organizing, and spending time with family and friends keeps her life spiced up. Her inspiration is her mom and dad.

Here is her book on Book Android Application Security

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