I'm a Software/Network engineer born to explore the Tech possibilities. My core Zeal lies with Telecom, especially, with IP Networks.

I began my journey of life in a very different way.
I wrote the first programme of my life in BASIC when I was 8 years old. Not by interest but it was a mandatory subject at school way back in the 2nd standard.
My dad always had a transferable job so every now and then i sued to study in a new city, a new school with all new kinds of people and new friends. This helped me better understand the people and the diversity that you would get and expect living in India.

I bought my first pc in 9th standard when I was 14. It was a Celeron 300A. I still remember the 4.3GB Hard disk that used to be slow and noisy. I was excited about having a PC. I used to sit in front of it exploring the things inside out of windows. Finally I opened the magic BOX in a weeks time from when I bought it.

I used to be so desperate about doing new things on PC, that I used to stay awake all night. Eventually, My Parents got to know of this. They started locking my PC room at nights. That didn't stopped me either, I got a locksmith home and got a secret duplicate key ;). Somehow, I was again caught working late nights. This time the anger level was higher, fearing that i`ll spoil my stuides and eyesight, they wanted me to depart from PC. Dad took of the power cables. But, It couldn't stop me either, :D. I made two power cables one for CPU, one for Monitor and there I was up n running at nights again :)
During that time, Internet access used to be very costly and yet slow. I bought a 500 hours dialup connection that costed around Rs. 10k or $200 for which I had to dial to different far away city with S.T.D calls applicable. Total cost per hour came to around Rs.80 or $1.55 at a speed of amazing 14.4Kbps, fast enough for you to open yahoo.com and get a cup of cofee in the meantime. But there was a learning, I learned patience.
As I grew up to my 10th standard, I had learnt basics of electronics and PC. My first hack was for my Audio system to open and make an auxillary audio in for connecting to PC audio. (my audio system didn't support line-in or aux-in). The new sound amazed me and later graved me when IC burned from audio system :). Then were series of other hacks that started going into PC, TV, Car audio and what not. Thanks to my parents they always supported me even though I burned lot of things.

My PC came with windows 95. And I got to know of win 98 and my patience didn't let me wait. I needed to upgrade, and my vendor needed a week's time before he could arrange 98. I took it from the market and installed 98 without having any knowledge of windows installations. Everything that appeared was answered with YES. Are you sure you want to Format the drive? Yes! lol, those days were funny.

In my 12th standard, I created a my customized audio system that consisted of Yamaha amplified sound card, my home audio + my old car stereo and one boombox. In all 9 speakers, those used to blow my room.

It was destined that i`ll join engineeing and that too electronics and communications. I joined by B.Tech, the world changed for me. I got my fantasies coming to real life. Lab was the place I always loved to be. In around the end of first year, I met someone who gave me another turn in my life. I met a esteemed Ethical Hacker, I was inspired to the level that a single 5 min talk brought another drastic change. I started studying about OS internals, Networking, security. I learned some basic Stuff during 2nd year of grad and won several awards for ethical hacking, those are now stacked up in my room.
I had been reading networking since a year now and in my 3rd year, another turn. I started loving Networking. During my 6 months internship, I joined IBM network solutions. This gave me an extensive handson with routing and switching and taking the Live projects. I w as mature enough to setup several customer solutions alone and it was during this time when I pursued my CCNA and prepared for CCNP (though i never gave the exam). In the final yr, things were cooler than before, time for final year project. I made something really unique, a different idea from rest of the students, and was awarded again. By that time, I was known as the networking/hacker/computer guy.

As graduation was nearing completion, time for placement into a good company of "choice" was becoming critical. I did't appear for any of the software companies, as none of them were Telecom/Networking. Luckily enough, came the one that I finally wanted to appear for, Verizon communications. I was selected, joined it and was trained on certain languages for a short duration and then came the first day of my work. My o my. It was a J2EE product and I had learnt Java core basics last week. Life had been challenging for 6 months. After that, things changed and I was awarded for being the fastest learner. A year later, I got promoted started leading my Team Lead and things were silky smooth after that. After all that, it was 2 yeas with the company, and I was sort of looking for a change due to less innovation at the same 3 products I worked on. This time I wanted a project which would satisfy the two best tastes. Java and Networking. And here I am working in this company. No.1 in Information, Communications, and Database and OpenSource, and many more. Again into product development but this time something that was purely my cup of tea.

About Webdevelopment
I made my first page in 10th standard too fool my classmates for the final board exam results. Then onwards i learned HTML, CSS, javascript, PHP, j2ee, flash, and now JavaFX. The journey began from there and I built 5 consecutive websites from then till now.
Taran.tk, Taranvector.com, Tarandj.com, and now Taranfx.com, Apnahomepage.in. Ofcourse All of the old ones were never renewed and are long gone.

Taranfx was adopted in 2004, since then It had been theme "RED", mainly a gadget blog with scripts to autoload content from here and there. Not many people were interested in that stuff. Infact I love Blazing Red so much that even one of the walls in my room is painted with designer Red treaks.

Last year, I finally decided to write stuff on my own. Installed wordpress and started writing. The Home page was still gadgets and /blog was my own content. I failed to attract visitors coz I never wanted to remove that Home page and I never wanted to share my knowledge by writing good topics on the web. In early 2009, I took a time out and decided to re-vamp the way it has worked, and will work in future. I didn't wanted use blog as the first page, neither did I wanted to use a theme like 99% bloggers do. So, I took a base theme for wordpress and modified inside out to get the current look n feel. Then was the time to use plugins. I used few and others I handcoded. The main challenge was in coding the front homepage. I tried many designs and finally decided to finalize one. I wrote custom queries to fetch wordpress data and display on frontpage, like the way it was done here. I wrote it all over again to achieve a wider page adding new widgets to the page to get the look wht can be soon today.

My purpose of handcoding stuff was not to re-invent the wheel but to innovate new ideas and keep myself busy. Some of the things I created are better performing than wordpress natively would do. Take the example of the home page, it's caching mechanism is more advanced and faster than what "WP Supercache" plugin provides.(it's very heavy though size wise) It is database resilient and has better algortihms of page expiry and triggers that refresh the page. And the second purpose, the look and feel of the Home page is the way I wanted it to be and not the way its limited by wordpress themes.

-Tarandeep Singh Email: taranfx [at] gmail [dot] com