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Madhukara Phatak

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Madhukara Phatak

Developer

Madhukara Phatak is a member of:

Could you tell us briefly about your family background?

I come from an agriculture based family in Udupi , Karnataka . I did most of my schooling in Mangalore and moved to Bangalore for engineering. I got job here in Bangalore and everything else is same as others :)

Required Reading:

Books will be , Design patterns by Gang of four , C programming by Dennis Ritchie , coders at work and all complete reference books
Google reader is one of best tool to keep track of different sites at one place . My favorite blogs are techcrunch , read write web and hacker news.

Plans For The Future:

I am passionate about building things . So I want to see myself building products ,in near future,which will impact millions of people in positive way.

Job Profile:

I work at Zinnia systems , Bangalore based telecom and big data product development company, as a software developer. As company is a startup I get to play different roles like developer,designer ,architect etc .

Changes In The Professional Environment:

Definitely recession is over and more opportunities for new comers.:)
But the biggest change I see is ,more and more product based startups are coming up which are passionate about building things and people are finally start to believe in indian's potential of building quality software products.

The Journey So Far:

I started as intern in my current company at very early times of company . Then I did few internships and consulting in bigger corporations but finally joined back to Zinnia as a developer .From last one and half years I am working on Hadoop and currently working as an Hadoop architect for a mnc

Career Profile:

My responsibilites revolve around building teams and building products. So right from design to delivery I will be involved in the process .

Other Thoughts:

Silicon India is one of the best organization's which lit up the entrepreneurial culture in Indian tech valley . I really enjoyed the startup meets held by silicon India in past and hope to see more and more such event from your guys.

Role Model:

Steve jobs is my role model as for many out there . He showed the world that with passion and hardwork you can turn the things around as he did with Apple. I admire his emphasis on core values of company rather than just profit.He was THE product guy of our industry .

Growth Strategy:

My high priority of any workplace is that it should give opportunity to learn . Most of the time you find me downloading lot of different code/ projects from github just for curiosity . I am always hungry for technical news and I believe in inbox zero for my google reader :)

Degrees That Matter:

Software industry is more driven by skill set and experience , at least in product development space . So for me ,certifications can became obsolete very easily.. So put your focus more on learning basics right and building things.Write more and code and participate in open source projects.

Done Differently:

I may skipped J2EE completely and started carrier in Hadoop. I may spent lil more time in perfecting basics like operating system, file systems Etc .Also I may tried to contribute to an open source project from day one rather waiting for 1.5 years.

Prized Accomplishment(s):

Releasing our first open source project,Nectar, on github was one of my product moment in professional life. It made our company as one of the contributer in the Hadoop ecosystem and lot of people really appreciated our effort .

Advice For New Professionals:

My advice is very simple. Love building the software not just the paycheck. Spend first few years of your carrier learning things rather than focusing on 5 digit salary. If you get a chance, work in a startup .It will get you lot exposure to the industry. Work hard and contribute back to community.