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Entreplayer

From the day when I literally begged the Prerana committee for support to the online gaming event, to today when Mastishk has more than 11000 hits and beyond 2000 registrations – I have come a long way with MastishK. During the past 3 months I have spent numerous hours for making this event a success. . . and happily enough, the hard work has paid. But more than the satisfaction of having made it is my satisfaction of having learnt a lot from it.
Take for example my understanding of SEI-CMM levels. I had read it in the course on Software Management, but I came to realise it lately, when we launched MastishK. As many times we struggled, as many times I remembered the definition of an SEI-CMM level 1 company. Chaos prevails, no processes are defined, success depends on heroic efforts of individual team members . . . and what not; each characteristic matches !

Talking of heroic efforts, I must whole heartedly thank my team mates from PGDIM XI (the junior batch). Without them this event wouldn’t have been big enough. Of late I have been sitting with almost all teams for little times, clearing some minor code-glitches etc. It is during these sessions that I realised the amount of code that was written for the event. Lines and lines of code – My God !!… it sends shivers through my spine. . Had I been doing all this alone it would never have happened at all. Even today, they are all burning midnight oil and sitting up late (and in effect bunking classes, and sleeping in them) as much as me – to make the event a success. There are people who have been working even during exams.

As much is also due to our senior teams, even they are up with the juniors whenever the game logic needs rework. For the past few days I have been regularly spending time with the Entreplayer team. Me, Milind, Ashita are sitting up everyday till 5 or 6 AM with Nikhil (Patil), G Aswin, and Hemendra – solving queries, removing bugs and correcting logical errors. The game itself is so near to real life that making it has turned out to be a challenge.

I have also improved a lot in my people handling skills. I have learnt how to get the team(s) working in spite of problems with individual members. Many dependencies have to be handled, and the show must go on. More so what is important is handling egos and moods of different people. You yourself have to be very calm and think in a balanced manner. For a person like me, it’s a difficult job to keep my calm; but I believe I have improved over the past three months. Have stopped reacting immediately to events and have started taking some time before I decide.
Needless to day I haven’t myself played any games; haven’t got the time to. Nevertheless creating this event is a game for me, a real life game – and this being an Entrepreneurial venture (now this isn’t me, its others who call it this way) – I believe I can call myself an Entreplayer!

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