Artha42 Innovations Private Limited

There has been some recent controversy regarding vampires and werewolves.

Programmers are like vampires. They're frequently up all night, paler than death itself, and generally afraid of being exposed to daylight. Oh yes, and they tend think of themselves (or at least their code) as immortal.

System Administrators are like werewolves. They may look outwardly ordinary, but are incredibly strong, mostly invulnerable to stuff that would kill regular people -- and prone to strange transformations during a moon "outage".

However, in my opinion, there are a new breed of engineers. The so called hybrids.

Hybrid is a pseudo-race from underworld evolution. They are both a vampire and a lycan (werewolf) at a cellular level and are stronger but have more craving for blood (to get things done). They switch roles between a programmer and a system administrator at a drop of a hat. They are comfortable configuring firewall rules, setting up log rotation, backing up and restoring databases and can comfortably snap into developing the next big feature once this is done. If you do not believe me, look at github.com or read about Zed Shaw. It is difficult to evolve into a hybrid. It takes years of practice but it is possible.

Once you are a hybrid, many people tend to call you the architect. And I do not mean the bald, old ones dabbling with abstract diagrams but people with common sense who can come up with pragmatic solutions that most people are blindsided to. Also the newer frameworks like Rails/Sinatra and databases like MongoDB provide ample space for either of the species to evolve into a hybrid. I always encourage the vampires at Artha42 to become werewolves and the vice versa. If you think you are a good vampire or a werewolf and would like to join our clan, you can apply here.

We use everything from Emacs to Eclipse to Vim. But I feel that Vim is the best editor ever. But that is just me. I am constantly on the lookout for tools and plugins that make me more productive with Vim.

If you use Rails then you must use the awesome rails.vim. Git integration is just unbelievable with the fugitive plugin. A good programmer should be able to navigate the code regardless of the project he is working on. I found that when diving into new projects, the NERDTree plugin is really helpful. Grep is the swiss army knife of search but ack is even better. Ack helps you search your sub-tree very quickly. Ack has even got an awesome vim plugin to make it easy to search your code while you are working on it. If you know the path to the files but want to quickly open it, there is no better candidate than the Command-T plugin. It emulates the Goto File feature of Textmate. You need to have vim compiled with ruby to use this plugin.

By the way, I use zenburn as my color theme. This website's grey theme is an inspiration from zen burn. What are the plugins that you use with vim? Do let me know.

When we were naming the baby, oops, the company, we came with a list of names. Vagmi came up with some coinage of English words and I googled for Sanskrit words (and their translation) and came up with a list.

Well why Sanskrit? It is said that the difference between other languages (both Indian and foreign) and Sanskrit is that this language was not created by humans, but discovered. It is said in the yogic lore that each sound has a corresponding form and each form has a corresponding sound. So the sound corresponding to the form had been discovered by the yogis and made as a collection to form the Sanskrit language. Usually Sanskrit names also carry a meaning. Infact Samskritam(which is now anglicised to Sanskrit) means "well-created". Vagmi means one who speaks well. Shanthi means peace. Well this sound actually may not correspond to the form ;-)

Vagmi finally agreed to go with a Sanskrit word and liked Artha and Tejas the most. Artha means "meaning". It also means "wealth", but that is not the context we chose it. However we couldn't get artha.com or tejas.com. So we were looking at alternatives. The domain names weren't available for most of them. So then I "deepthought" of some combinations and landed up with 42. (Those who don't understand deepthought or 42, refer "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"). So I came up with 42artha. Vagmi initially liked it, but then said it sounded like 37signals. I didn't know such name combinations really existed and was a little disappointed that there was a pioneer. So I proposed finally "Artha42". Artha42 Private Limited was rejected by the Registrar of Companies saying a company Artha already exists and merely numbers can't differentiate company names. So we gave them options of Artha42 Software, Artha42 Consulting, Artha42 Technology Solutions and finally they approved Artha42 Technology Solutions.

Each time I call a candidate or a vendor, in one breath, I say "I am Shanthi from Artha42 Technology Solutions". The response is "Shanthi from what?" The name has to be spelt and repeated thrice and they "correctly" note it down as "Artha 42 Technologies". I cannot avoid a grin when Vagmi introduces himself "I am Vagmi from Artha42 Technology Solutions" as I could picture the response would be "Hmm?" I am sure they can't figure out both names and they would not have even heard the tail end (Technology Solutions). So, what can they ask? :-)

Ok, I thought I can atleast fix one in three(Vagmi, Artha42, Technology Solutions). Like most developers, I chose the easiest. ;-) I came up with choices like Artha42 Innovations, Artha42 Crafting, Artha42 Labs to express what we do or intend to. We are glad that ROC accepted the first choice itself. Hence, we now are "Artha42 Innovations Private limited" since June 3rd, 2010.

We have overhauled ourselves. We have discarded Artha42 Technology Solutions and are reborn as Artha42 Innovations rooted by Vagmi Mudumbai and Shanthi. With this, we also want to say boldly, all we want to do is build awesome software with simplistic approach using the right tools. So we revamped our website with a new look.

Initially we started with the thought process on who are the users of the website. Obviously it is you who have the inclination to either take our services or join our family to provide them. Even if not, to provoke such an interest is the aim. With this intention, we started with the simple home page sporting links for Hire us, why hire us, Join us, why join us.

As per the new trend, we started with a dark themed website (dark grey, close to black). But then I had the feeling, "why do the same colour as others?". Grey was never my favourite. So we then tried white background. The first colours we used in combination with white looked awesome on a MAC, but horrible on a DELL Vostro. So we went ahead playing around with different colours. We started with orange (the chosen colour for Artha42) made it darker to subdue the brightness. Ultimately it landed in chocolate brown. It looked unconventional and it became my favourite of the three. However Vagmi had a differing opinion. So we then tried the theme (stylesheet) switcher and based on a poll within closed set of voters, we decided brown to be default. As we anyway want to give room to differences in taste, the theme switcher is left as intended design.

The website is powered by Apache with Phusion Passenger and is built on Sinatra and Mongo with aggressive caching. We had initially started off with a completely static site using jekyll but eventually chose the excellent Sinatra microframework to build this site.

We then felt the need to express our victories, challenges, the rough roads we travelled and the roller coaster rides. To cut it short, we always want to blog, but did not find the right platform or the opportune time until now. Your comments are most welcome. Do let us know what you think of our posts.