Sign in to follow 's advice will appear in your account when you log in. Follow specific Community Members and never miss out on their views and insights. Build a group of Members who you want to listen to.

Email: Password:

Don't have SiliconIndia account? Sign up Forgot your password? Reset

Ask Sharath Bs for Advice

If your advice request is relevant to other Community members, our Editorial team may choose to send this request to all Experts to attract a wider range of answers and share them with the Community. Rest Assured, we will protect your privacy (unless you recommend otherwise).

Advice Request

Submit Cancel

Sharath Bs

Next Member >>

Sharath Bs

Software Engineer

Slingmedia

My brief description

I’m Sharath BS currently working as a Software Engineer at Slingmedia. We develop the Slingbox which is a placeshifting device. More details can be found on http://www.slingbox.com I’m working on web frontend development and have about 1.5 years of experience. I joined this company as a fresher after completing my B.E from BMS College of engineering.

Challenges in job

A good UI should cater to the needs of majority of the users. A lot of challenges come up while implementing it due to browser inconsistencies, or design decisions (like deciding between using text on buttons vs. images that represent the functionality of the button. Text results in problems during translation to other languages and quite a few users don’t get what the image on the button represents). Dealing with all of these is a herculean task. The UI must be snappy, easy to use, should not confuse the user, must be consistent on all pages of the web-app and must work on all types of devices with different resolutions. Improving the solution to all these challenges and understanding the user’s mindset will help me build better websites and User Interfaces in the future.

Job made easy

Many open source frameworks and tools make UI development easier. The time and effort involved in building our own framework is minimized and the overall development time also comes down as the frameworks are thoroughly tested and used by thousands of people across the world.

Upcoming trends

Responsive design, Native support for things which require third party plugins right now(like HTML5 videos replacing flash based ones and Games being built entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript), Parallel processing in JavaScript, new ideas in social networking are some of the trends that will be game-changing in the next couple of years. The web is almost becoming a sort of a place to live in!! Web-apps nowadays can do almost anything a traditional application can do. Having a web-app replacement for a traditional application will do away with the differences in OS/ System architecture etc. One web-app will work across all platforms.

My point of view

My personal opinion on this topic is that we don’t focus on a single technology in most of the industries in India. We can see people working in Java for 2 years, then shifting to another domain where they get a project and some other one after that.. Instead if we focus on a single domain and try to gain expertise in that, we can build something which will dominate the world markets one day.

My goals

Keep up with the latest technology trends in the field of front end development and develop better web-apps which are more intuitive and easy to use. Also, contributing to the development of open source tools and frameworks which make our life easier.

Advice to professionals

I’m still quite young in this field and I don’t think I’ve reached a level of giving advice to others. This is what I learnt when I started off: What to do: •Get familiar with the various front end development techniques and frameworks available. •Try to reuse what is available •Attend seminars and view some good videos available on the internet to know about the latest developments in the field. •Try to pay attention to detail as even a small thing out of place looks ugly. What not to do: •Please don’t take out readymade code available on forums and use it in your applications. You never know where it’ll cause problems. •Try to understand the problem and solve its root cause rather than patching up its effects.

Advice to stuents

I did my internship at Slingmedia for about 3 months. That was when I realized that Industry and academics are miles apart. Industrial exposure in our universities is very minimal. I would like to tell the students to take up some projects or internships during their free time or holidays so that they get more familiar with all the necessary tools and technology used and problems encountered in the working of an industry.