Karthik Hariharan's Blog

Taking Telligent to the next level

2008-09-23T15:21:00Z

I'm breaking my long time blogging silence for a major announcement. My company, Telligent, has now received a round of funding from Intel Capital. This funding will help us to grow the company and it also values our company very highly, which is a great achievement for our leadership. When I joined Telligent last year, I was really excited to see and understand how a startup worked and see how a company goes from being a small player to an industry leader. I stopped telling my friends that "I...(read more)

2008-08-21T18:22:20Z

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Google releases Calendar Sync

2008-03-07T18:04:00Z

Earlier I blogged about how to sync my Outlook and Google calendar using Plaxo . This has worked very well for me but now Google has released their own tool to do the same thing. One of the interesting features that this tool allows is the ability to do 1-way synchronization. You can get more information on how to set it up here . For now I'm going to continue to use my Plaxo setup since it already meets my needs. But if you're interested in a solution for Google and Outlook calendar synchronization...(read more)

Mastering the Hand-off

2008-02-12T15:10:14Z

Most consulting engagements usually end with a hand-off of the project's deliverables to the client's resources during the last few days of the consultant being in contact with the client. This is often referred to as the "knowledge transfer" and can involve walking the client through the finished code artifacts and any documentation around it. Most consultants dread this part of the process as it often requires mounds of documentation and tons of meetings with seemingly little...(read more)

Thoughts on Headspring's Agile/XP boot camp

2008-02-02T19:05:00Z

I recently had a chance to attend Headspring System's Agile/Extreme Programming boot camp for Advanced .NET developers led by Jeffrey Palermo in Austin, TX. I had wanted to learn the proper techniques to approach agile development on the .NET platform from an expert and when I found out about this course, I eagerly signed up. The three day course covered best practices in regards to Agile design and process while incorporating multiple deep dives into Jeffrey's tools of choice when doing...(read more)

Synchronizing Google Calendar and Outlook via Plaxo

2008-01-07T17:12:00Z

I've been an avid user of Google Calendar since its inception. It's been a great tool for personal organization and helps my wife and I to keep track of social engagements, personal events, vacations, and errands. We both have access to each other's calendars and can assign events to each other with ease. Before I got my AT&T Tilt , I had a phone with no Internet data plan. Luckily, I was able to configure Google Calendar to send me an SMS message as a reminder for any events in my...(read more)

Wheel of Time gets a new author

2007-12-12T04:20:00Z

This post is definitely a departure from my usual style, but since many of us software geeks also happen to be fantasy geeks I thought I would share the recent news that Tor books has announced a new author for the Wheel of Time series of fantasy books. Ever since Robert Jordan's passing last September, the fantasy world has been mourning the loss of one of its greatest authors. I myself felt the loss pretty hard since I have been reading RJ's books for over 10 years and it was the first...(read more)

Converting a Wordpress theme to Grafffiti

2007-12-08T17:53:00Z

Themes in Graffiti are very easy to write or convert from existing themes or templates. The theme on this site is derived from based on the WuCoco theme for Wordpress . I chose this theme because I liked the look of it and it was also very well organized into sections for the layout of the blog. These sections were very easy to convert into Graffiti views. Here is a list of the .php files included in the 2-column version of the WuCoco theme. Once this theme was converted for Graffiti, it had the...(read more)

Graffiti Beta 1 released

2007-12-06T17:47:34Z

As Rob announced , Telligent's Graffiti product is now in public beta! Download the necessary bits here . I've been running Graffiti both internally and externally for a while now and I can attest to it's excellent usability as it really makes it very simple to get content out there. Graffiti supports both Microsoft Access and SQL Server so you have some flexibility in terms of how you want to run it. We are still investigating other databases as well, with a focus on databases that support...(read more)

And we're back!

2007-12-04T14:40:00Z

This post has been a long time coming, but I've joined the latest Telligenti Club and relaunched my blog on Telligent's new Graffiti platform. Graffiti is our new site application for Content Made Simple. It is a very lightweight, easy to design and develop site application built from the ground up to address a different market segment than our flagship application, Community Server . You can read more about Graffiti here . If you are interested in participating in our private beta , fill...(read more)

Building a Balanced Team

2007-08-10T03:04:09Z

Fred George, noted Agile Developer and thought leader, had a great post where he described his ideal ratios of developer skill levels when building an Agile development team. One of the foundations of his theory is that the number of Apprentice or Junior level developers should remain small on any given team. ... bring on apprentices only at the rate they can be productive to the team; otherwise, be courageous and defer the staffing, ignoring what your spreadsheets are telling you. I can certainly...(read more)

Are you an Overpaid Payable?

2007-08-05T06:39:00Z

I spoke with a friend the other day who came to the startling realization that they had become overpaid. Most people would define being overpaid as receiving a salary above the current market standard for your responsibilities and skill set. Taking a moniker from a company which shares an office in my building, I have decided to call such an individual an Overpaid Payable . An Overpaid Payable is a resource whose cost to an organization exceeds the value that the resource provides back to the organization...(read more)

How Agile is your Architecture?

2007-07-16T02:48:19Z

One of the cornerstones of the Agile Manifesto is Responding to change over following a plan. Most of the time, we see this parable being applied to teams of software developers, but not always to the software itself. After a certain point, the software's architecture becomes rigid and inflexible, and only allows for minute changes to its supported feature set. This becomes especially true later in the software's lifecycle as its code base matures. As time passes, most software packages need...(read more)

Developers who become Managers

2007-07-06T16:42:48Z

Rob Walling had an amazing post where he described his experiences and frustrations during his career when moving from senior software development roles into management roles. Much of Rob's frustrations stemmed from losing the creative satisfaction one gets from writing code despite gaining the money, power, and respect generally associated with higher level management roles. This post struck a chord with me because I had many of the same thoughts while I was a management consultant. I saw many...(read more)

Things I learned about Software in College

2007-06-29T03:40:00Z

Dare Obasanjo started a thread listing things he learned about software while in college and Scott Hanselman extended it by adding three more things he learned in college and three things he learned outside of college. Both bloggers had some great points and I recommend reading both posts as well as the comments. But I thought I would chime in to the discussion with my own list. Things I Learned about Software in College If getting things working is the primary goal, most programming assignments...(read more)