Professional karma

In the very early days of my career, an incident made me realise that perfoming my job irresponsibily will affect me adversely, not because it will affect my position adversely, but because it can affect my life otherwise also. I was part a team that produced a software used by a financial institution where I held my account. A bug in the software caused a failure which made several accounts, including my bank account, inaccessible! Fortunately I wasn't the one who introduced that bug and neither was other software engineer working on the product. It has simply crept through the cracks that the age-old software had developed as it went through many improvements. Something that happens to all the architectures, software or otherwise in the world. That was an enlightening and eve opening experience. But professional karma is not always bad; many times it's good. When the humble work I do for earning my living also improves my living, it gives me immense satisfaction. It means that it's also improving billions of lives that way across the globe.

When I was studying post-graduation in IIT Bombay, I often travelled by train - local and intercity. The online ticketing system for long distant trains was still in its early stages. Local train tickets were still issued at stations and getting one required standing in a long queue. Fast forward to today, you can buy a local train ticket on a mobile App or at a kiosk at the station by paying online through UPI. In my recent trip to IIT Bombay I bought such a ticket using GPay in a few seconds. And know what, UPI uses PostgreSQL as an OLTP database in its system. I didn't have to go through the same experience thank to the same education and the work I am doing. Students studying in my alma-matter no more have to go through the same painful experience now, thanks to many PostgreSQL contributors who once were students and might have similar painful experiences in their own lives.

PC: Pinaz Raut, organizer team, PGConf.India

In PGConf.India, Koji Annoura, who is a Graph database expert talked about our ongoing work on SQL/PGQ. He is also a certified professional for coffee, a drink that I greatly enjoy! He talked about improving coffee supply chain using graph databases. He is using SQL/PGQ, the software I am co-authorigin with Peter Eisentraut. I love coffee and my work is helping me procure a better quality coffee at a cheaper price!. Someone telling me that my work was useful to them gives me an immense satisfaction, irrespective of the size of the cause. As software developers we don't often get to hear that from the end users. Open source software and conferences around that give us that opportunity.

Professional life is full of stress, stress to get work done, to get paid, to secure job, promoted and what not. That stress is so overwhelming that we often loose the site of greater purpose. We often fail to notice that our work has other, arguably greater, benefits. These simple moments are enough to motivate me to continue doing our work leaving behind the stress that it carries.