Raghavendra Talur's blog

1. File tax returns every year, yes, even first year. Apart from the fact that it is your duty, it is also useful for visa useful for house loans 2. Don't get fooled by unit linked insurance plans that agents try to sell to you along with credit cards. I repeat, don't buy them. What is unit linked insurance plan? They would probably say it is some thing like fixed deposit/recurring deposit with added benefits of insurance. 3. Follow the 100-age rule for distributing you savings. If you are 21, then invest 79% of savings in high-risk, high-gain things like shares, mutual funds  and 21 % in Fixed Deposits, Recurring Deposits etc. The idea is to take risk when you have capability to handle losses. Gradually bring down risk as you age. 4. For 80c section of tax savings, a. Start a PPF account of 15 years. Every year, calculate the difference between the max savings limit(1.5 Lakh currently) and your contribution to EPF. Transfer this amount to PPF account and you

Project management is one domain which is waiting for a revolutionary product that would have an effect as slack  had on communication between team members. There is no lack of options; we have had Jira, Rally and many more which have tried to solve it for the project managers but making it a painful task for the developers. We have also seen the other end of the spectrum where developers primarily use a simple bug tracker and project managers are forced to come up with a dashboard that visualizes data obtained from the bug tracker. It is not an easy problem to solve though, creating a product which is generic enough to fit every new user's workflow and yet make it feature rich is what leads to a product being average and not great. It is the problem that all one-size-fits-all products have. The other problem is maintaining the data ownership and integrating with other products in the ecosystem. More often than not, the integration is left as an exercise to the consumer by mak

Seven years ago........ Searching through my old mails, I found a story I had written for an online treasure hunt event we had organised in college as part of Linux Campus Club.  Fan fiction material from start to finish, I refer to Dan Brown 's books, Vedic Mathematics , Die Hard 4 , GNU   , National Treasure  and what not. The ending is a bit hurried because we had to end it within 5 stages. The story has breaks in between because that is where we had puzzle for players to solve. Imperfect writing with naive and idealistic thinking. This is reminder of a 20 year old's thought process. I am still proud of the twist in the ending though ;-) . Shout out to all the seniors and friends in Linux Campus Club. You were inspirational. The Secret of the ERABIGON Year: 2913 A.D A Messenger enters the room of the council and informs the council of ministers about the break-in into yet another learning center of the country. This was the 3rd break-in in two weeks