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Bejoy Alex Jaison - Life and work

Who am I?

I am a technology professional from the Indian city of Bangalore, where I live with my wife Neetha and children Rony and Ria. Besides technology, I enjoy long scenic drives, writing, composing music and fiddling with the guitar. I also help a few churches and non-profits set-up and run websites.

Education and Career

I work with Nokia Siemens Networks, a top telecom infrastructure and service vendor to leading telecom operators around the world. Prior to the formation of Nokia Siemens Networks, I was with Siemens Public Communication Networks Pvt. Ltd..

I hold a Masters in Computer Applications in 1999 from National Institute of Technology, Calicut (NITC) with a short six-month stint at Honeywell as a project trainee and lucky enough to join Siemens straight from campus.

Since 1999, I've been helping develop software for managing network elements (exchanges, routers and all those boxes that runs the network) for mobile and fixed networks. I've been a C++, ASN.1 and Java developer; set-up integration teams; been an expert on Unix, Windows and OEM software; a scrum master with a truly cross-functional team; and now a technology strategist.

I've always been a keen technology watcher, looking at open-source repositories for tools that made software development easier and efficient. This, along with my Java knowledge, led me to my current role as a Global Concept Owner for Java Engineering Environments where I try to make the bring some succor to the life of Java developers.

Beyond Work

Another interesting area where I've been involved a lot is knowledge management (KM) -- and I started by handcrafting a small KM system in 2000 for my group of around 80 people using Microsoft technologies. Well, PHP and MySQL were yet to be hot in 2000! Later I played a pivotal role in architecting and setting up an organization-wide Livelink-based system. KM systems have now become more wiki-based and I keep playing around with Confluence and PmWiki. The interesting -- and often the least appreciated -- fact is that KM is a lot more of human and social interactons rather than applications and platforms!

After my graduation in Physics, I was set for a career in advertising or mass communication before I got into technology. I even enrolled for my post-graduation in English Literature. I guess this interest in media led me to learn Web technology as an after-work hobby. My first web page (still online) dates back to 1999 and is zero-graphics. I got fascinated with Web standards, usability and information architecture early on and got influenced by wonderful people like Jeffrey Zeldman, Eric Meyer, Douglas Bowman, Molly Holzschlag, Dave Shea, Tantek Çelik and Dan Cederholm. I discovered Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) somewhere around 2000 and probably was one of the early converts to XHTML/CSS. I still hand-code all my XHTML using Scite!

It's been a joy to see that that my XHTML tutorial (orginal location) -- written in 2001 -- is still widely accepted by people getting into standards-based Web development. It's been prescribed in Powerpoints presentations and university curriculum, posted in forums to help XHTML-transition woes, referenced in product specification documents and recommended as must-read, must-bookmark and must-print.

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