POrtal...

Yesterday, I was contacted to make some changes in PLES Portal.
As I went and made changes and saw them reflected on the website, nostalgic memories rushed in to the mind.
I was with my baby again. And wasn’t it beautiful.
Though the portal was not started by me, but bringing it to the present shape – I can immodestly say was done by me.
My journey with it started when Shyam handed over an orange colored portal (now in white and blues) to me – having zero knowledge about what portals are, how they are made, how I will be setting up a server.
The next thing I remember is suddenly knowing everything and doing everything with considerable ease.
Of course this could not have been possible had Google would not have been there.
But everything was not sudden. It was slow and steady – contributions from everyone. Getting familiar with JSP’s (though I was somewhat familiar), then some Java.. then there were problems with Tomcat (I remember asking from Bharath, Babu and even Manoj about some error about an excel not opening through the server) and my complete ignorance about them even after considerable time spent (I didn’t know that a folder WEB-INF folder has to be present in the application directory until Neeraj told me). I can’t even remember how many times I bugged my cubicle mate Amrut for even trivial things. Amit was there. I can’t remember what error was there when Amit and Neeraj had spent a whole evening at the server helping me out.
Then there was Vishesh – whom I still owe some 50P or something to find bugs in the portal. Deal was 25 P per a minor UI bug and more for functionality. I guess there were 2 spelling mistakes.
Jalali used to come up frequently – I remember he tried hard when a table size was not being limited to a page width when the text increased beyond a limit. And there was a continuous flow of ideas from Amrut, Neeraj and Sandeep.
Portal also helped me increase my java interest.
There was the request Tracker. In my training days, I had never imagined that I would be able to write a java class from scratch. And for request tracker I coded a whole application (Though a small one) from scratch - Completely based on the MVC architecture.
When I see the front end and the functionality after many months today – it seems like ‘too good yaar’. And I feel proud that I have done the coding for this which is coming to use.
It was not very exciting at that time, but now when I look back, it gave me an opportunity to learn new things, different things, may be letting out my creativity to some extent and I guess increased my interest in Java language and web development part of it. I was helped by many people in the course. But all in all, I can say this Portal is my baby.

P.S: This piece may sound an immodest, boastful, self praising article. So be it. I am proud of the thing I have done !!!!