The Insider

Yahooooo…. Yeah I and my team have just been presented with the prestigious “Yahoo! Odyssey Award” this week, for our extraordinary effort in getting Y!Xtra launch on date and dot on time. The Y! Odyssey Awards have been introduced in 2006 for the “International Engineering” and is an effort to recognize significant contribution made by either a team/individual. I guess it is a way by which the Senior management wants to say “Thank You!” to the marvellous effort put in.

One of the most enjoyable challenges I have faced so far at Yahoo!7 was the Y!Xtra development and launch. We had very short time to build a bunch of properties and our team was working 7 days a week to get this up and I myself think that we did an excellent job as a team and also indiidually We were putting in a seamless effort to reach the deadlines but at the same time never giving up on the quality. Very well led by the able hands of Sebastian Urban, apart from the homepage, we launched Y!Xtra News , Y!Xtra Entertainment, Astrology at 12:00 am on March 1st. Yes the early hours of March 1st! It was an amazing experience to work never-tired on a project and then to see it as a full-fledged product, up and running!

And you will feel that its all worth it, when you put in such an effort and then get rewarded accordingly, may be a day-off, may be a gift-voucher, may be both of them and when you think its the end of rewards, may be you get pleasantly surprised on a fine morning by seeing Y! Odyssey Award waiting for you on your desk along with a congratulations letter.

One of the many good reasons as to why we want to stay with Yahoo!

I have been to a party where I had some yummy gulab jamuns. Its been a while that I made them, so thought I will make them this time for my husband’s birthday party. It was nice, quick and easy method. But I dint use any of those instant mixes that you get in the market like MTR or Bambino. I wanted to do it from the scratch! SO here goes the yummy recipe!

Ingredients:

Full Cream Milk Powder - 1.5 cups

Self Raising Flour - 0.5 cup

Thickened cream - As required

Oil for fryiing

Sugar - 4 cups

Water - 7 cups

A bit of elaichi (cardamom) powder for its flavour

Some grated nuts like Pista, Cashew and Almonds for garnishing.

Procedure:

Firstly, mix both sugar and water in a dish and boil it for 10-15 minutes to form sugar syrup. Now switch off the stove and put cardamom (elaichi) powder in it and let it cool.

Make a dough with Milk powder and Self raising flour by adding just enough cream to it. Make small balls out of the dough. The milk powder in the Gulab Jamuns gives them a kind of “Kova” taste.
In a pan heat the oil and fry the the small dough balls in it till they reach nice brown colour. Take them out of the oil and let them cool

Now soak the jamuns (the fried balls) into the sugar syrup for atleast 20 minutes. Garnish them with the pista, cashew or badam flakes.

And Voila! Some yummy Gulab Jamuns are ready for serving.

We have been having discussions on how to write specs for redesigining of a currently existing site. I guess it needs a bit of experience to write one. You get hundreds of questions in your mind like:

1. If the current project is a redesign then one of the most infamous questions you would get is “Do I need to keep the design same as the current one?”

2. Functionality-wise should it be similar to the existing one

3. What should I give importance to? Time/ Quality / functionality / user interface designing??

4. If its a new project then usually there is a problem that you go off the track as you will have to imagine a finished product while developing the specs.

Well here are a few tips in overcoming these hurdles:

1. Think about your product and the features you would like to add but at the same time try to keep them realistic. I mean, I would love to develop a search engine like Google or a portal like Yahoo! but frankly how long would it take me to do it? And when there is Google and Yahoo! why would peope want to use my product?

2. Try to keep your product unique by adding in unique features but at the samtime try to maintain relevancy with the concept. E.g.. Quotes listing and company announcements on a finance site is related but not a Political news module on a finance site. Though political news would earn lots of clicks, its not related to the main product. So you would be missing return users.

3. Dont concentrate on the Jargon. Try explain the features in simplest terms you can think of.

4. Keep in touch. Yes, try to talk to as many people as you can to know what is going on in your field. Talk to engineers and web devs to see if there are any “Technical Cant Do”s

So Happy PRD writing!!