First Job

Current/Second Job

Technical Skills
 

Current Job:
  Company: Fujitsu Network Communications, Inc.
  Motto: The Possibilites are Infinite
  Started: Dec 1999
  Location: San Jose, California, USA aka Silicon Valley

  Its a nice small facility comprising around 200 employees and located right in the heart of the silicon valley. The place where the stock falls as it rises like
the tidal waves which hit this western coast of the great north america. This is where dreamcastles are built
without the fear of the earthquakes which shake and rock
this valley periodically.
 The main objective of this unit of Fujitsu is to
develop, maintain, sustain and support NETSMART which is
the NMS(Network Management System) tool to manage the
Fujitsu SONET/DWDM Network Elements.
 In a layman's jargon this company is in the field of
telecommunications using the optical fiber infrastructure to transfer the internet traffic at the speed of light
across the vast geography of mother earth. If you still
do not understand what the heck that means and how it is
possible just e-mail me and i shall be glad to explain.

First Job:
  Company: Hughes Software Systems.
           (subsidiary of Hughes Network Systems, Inc.)
  Duration: Feb' 1997 till Nov'1999
  Location: Gurgaon, Haryana, India

Here I'll tell you something about my
first job. It's a looooooong story, so come forward
to ur computer and stare !!

WARNING

Staring at the kampooter for too long can strain ur eyes and u might not be
able to walk straight after getting up from your chair and bang into some
obstacle !!

Iam working for Hughes Software Systems(HSS)
at Gurgaon(India) since Feb'1997. I was
recruited by them thru a campus interview. HSS
is a subsidiary of Hughes Network Systems(HNS)
which is headquartered at Germantown,MD,USA
near Washington DC. HSS develops software in
almost all the areas of communications and
networking. I was under training( we call it
the OASIS training here at HSS) for one month
after which I joined the ENS(Enterprise
Networking Solutions department). 23 months
and 3 projects later I shifted to SND-MOBILSAT
from ENS to get the feel of a new technology
area.
 
 

OASIS
As part of the training the trainees are divided into
groups of 5. Each group is then given a project. The
schedule for the project is decided upon apriori and each
group is supposed to complete every phase of the project
as per the schedule. The phases generally are
Functional Specification phase, High Level Design phase,
Low Level Design phase, Coding phase and finally the
Testing phase(or the most BORING phase).Seminars/lectures in the areas of networking and telecom, relevant Operating Systems(UNIX, VxWorks), computer languages and
object-oriented methodologies, code control
systems(Clearcase), document control systems (Interleaf)
and quality processes(ISO) are arranged as part of the
training in order to impart the necessary skills in the
groups for accomplishing their projects. Apart from the
Hi-Funda technical Seminars(during which most of the
trainees can be seen happily dozing and loudly snoring in
their seats or busy fininshing off the last pages of
thrilling novels), lectures on pyschology are also
delivered to the trainees. These are very stimulating
and enjoyable sessions during which the trainees get a
chance of delving into themselves and discovering hidden
qualities(read abnormalities ;-) within themselves. These
are also exciting as they are interactive in nature and
thus so very different from the boring technical
sessions. Different teams of trainees are also given a
task(same task for every team) which they are supposed
to complete within a stipulated time sitting in the same
room. This is a very interesting and challenging activity
for the young and enthusiastic guysszz and gals as it
involves a high degree of teamwork and close coordination. Since everybody is new to each other, it is
all the more difficult. At the end of it all the trainees
come out confident and ready to tackle the fresh projects.

After the OASIS training I was put into ENS-ATM group.
I don't know who decides who goes into which group. It
might be your background, your performance in the
interview, your grades blah blah. But certainly no choice
is given to the trainees. At the end of the training they are just informed about their project and whom they are
to report to.
 

Bored ? Go TO TOP of PAGE

ENS-ATM
Well I was happy and excited to have been put
into a group which worked in the leading edge
areas in Data Communications and Networking.
My first project was in the area of Frame Relay
and i had to report to Arti Khanna(a very astute,
methodical hard-working and beautiful lady.
well... actually all that in the reverse order
;-) The objective of the project was to add
priority, parallel trunks and channelized T1/E1
interface support to the FR Acces Device which
is called the IX(Interworking Switch) at HSS/HNS.
I worked on 2 software units of this device
namely the Information Manager and the Trunk and
Module Status. The first unit involved adding
support for channelized T1/E1 interface to the
software(this was necessitated due to upgradation
from the serial cards to the new channelized
cards). This task essentially involved modifying
the EPROM startup and download software as per
the requirements, burning it into the EPROM and
testing it on the new boards. And i enjoyed
completing this task right from the unit design
phase to the release testing phase. The other
task which i did in parallel to the first one was
to add the parallel trunk functionality to the
device. This involved making complicated
changes/additions to the Trunk and Module status
unit. And every thing worked fine right upto the
release testing. Of course there were plenty of
problems and glitches before everything worked
fine, but everything was in good hands(read Arti
Khanna's hands ;-) and the project sailed safely
thru the rough waters. The best part about the
project was the trip to Germantown, MD,USA for
the integration and release testing of the
project. And needless to say i freaked out ;-)

Bored ? Go TO TOP of PAGE

After the completion of this project i started
out on a new one. And this was to add the
Service Interworking feature(FRF-8) to the
Hughes ATM Backbone Switch(called the BX).
Naturally i was excited as I was now getting the
chance to work on the real stuff namely ATM. And
the new manager handling this was Ashwani Lal.
To put it simply he is a great guy !! Managers
like him are very rare to find. He was always so
close to each member in the team. The best thing
about him was that he was always game for fun.
We had a nice time with him. Welllll... it's not
all fun that i had in this project. I was
handling a unit called the FLC on the FRASM.
Hmmm... so wot's all this jargon u must be
thinking. Welll lemmi explain. The BX is a dual-
service switch providing both FR as well as ATM
services. The FRASM on theBX stands
for FR Adaptation Switching Module and its
purpose is to take in the FR traffic(frames),
convert it into ATM traffic(cells) and put these
cells on the cellstream fabric of the switch for
delivery to the destination. Now the FLC unit is
responsible for FR PVC Management. It does the
link control task associated with FR connections.
I had to modify this unit to incorporate the OAM
functionality as described in I.161 and the FRF-8.
Right from unit design to the integration and
testing phase i enjoyed my work. And again the
best part of this project was a cool 3 months
in the US !! And needless to say i phreaked out
yet again !! ;-)

My 3rd project in ENS was a short job. It was
the Coding(some part of it) and Unit Testing of
the FSM unit of the FRASM. It was a complicated
and tedious task. However i enjoyed it as this
unit does the real switching on the card,
namely chopping frames into cells and then
switching them.

Well after all this wot wud u think a guy gets ??
Absolutely Correct !! U guessed it right. The one
single word is SICK !! Therefore i moved over
to SND-MOBILSAT for a change.
Bored ? Go TO TOP of PAGE

SND-MOBILSAT
Now this is where currently Iam. And life is
difficult. It will take lill bit longer for me
to adjust to this newgroup. Well Iam now in the
ICO-LSRMS group. LSRMS stands for Local Satellite
Resource Management Subsystem. It resides on the
SAN(Satellite Access Node) in the ICO network.
The ICO network is composed of 12 satellites
(currently) in the MEO(Medium Earth Orbit) and
an equal number of SANs on mother Earth. And one
of the SANs willl be at chhattarpur, a sleepy
place near Delhi and Gurgaon !! Our current
objective is to add Frequecy Resource Management,
Frequency Handover Management and SAN to SAN
handover management to the LSRMS subsystem. And
the design phase is on at the time of this
writing.
 

 

Technical Skills and Technology Areas

I've worked in the following.

- Languages -> 8085, 86 Assembly lang., FORTRAN, PASCAL, C,
C++, JAVA.
- O.S worked on -> DOS, Windows-95, UNIX, Linux
- Platforms -> PC, HP-UX, Sun
- Real Time O.S -> VxWorks
- Areas worked in -> TCP/IP, FR, ATM.
- Software Engg. tools -> Clearcase tools, Rational Rose,
Interleaf, MS-Word, GNU Tools, Unix utilities, OSS.
- Standards -> Q922, Q933, FRF agreements, ATM Forum
agreements, GSM
- Areas of Specialisation - Embedded Systems(FR and ATM
Switches), Real Time Resource Management in Satellite
Access Nodes.
 

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