The festival of light, enlightenment, Karamchand

Hope you had a sparkling and safe Diwali. We did have a good one, ourselves. Lots of lights all around and in the process, we were en-light-ened.
During Diwali, we found out that we have received some review from Expedia. You can read about what one of the "big daddy"s of travel think about us here: http://traveltekker.com/2013/10/17/2013-10-01-traveltech-news-review/
Quite clearly, we have left quite more to be desired on our "semantic search". We have been seeing this from the various queries that you have asked findmycarrots and where we have failed to show you meaningful results. This was our moment of truth. We now clearly see what you have been trying to tell us. We need to provide you a better search experience. What is the point in having sterling information in our system if we cannot produce the carrots that you are looking for?
This far, we have been focused on 2 fronts:
1. To improve our India DB. We already are at 6K+ which is, dare I say, one of the most comprehensive travel db in India. But we were not satisfied. We know there are still some gems that we are missing and we want to bring them to you.
2. Based on the feedback we received from Kartick Prabu of Tnooz (here: www.tnooz.com/article/findmycarrots-leverages-semantic-search-big-data-ease-travel-planning/), we have been constantly trying to provide better insight into the places with options like TripAdvisor ratings and twitter feeds.

After the understanding, we have decided to change our focus a bit. Here's how:
1. Henceforth, we will be focusing on improving our search algorithm and introducing what we believe will help find better carrots from your queries. We plan to introduce our improved search algorithm in the near future. And that is where we plan to invite our childhood hero to findmycarrots - Mr. Karamchand. The first episode of Karamchand search algorithm will be introduced in findmycarrots very soon. We are working on production as I write this report to you.
2. Sometime back we had promised to bring to you new adventure activities, very soon. We had clearly underestimated the complexity and ignored the time it will take us to react to your comments that we lack useful information on the places that we dish out as results to your queries. We will continue that work, but believe we are in the final part of that effort and we will be able to bring something very meaningful to you in terms of additional information to help decide a place from the multiple results we dish out. We have received a few interesting feedbacks. We never knew that an adventure sports called "SeaWalking" exists. We have learnt from your feedback and will be adding that to the list of adventure activities we provide results for.
3. We will continue our work on providing better and "easier to use" insights of a place, so that your decision making process becomes a sweeter experience.

However, we are still a Work in Progress and need your feedback desperately to learn what you will like to see.going forward. Please keep your feedback flowing. We are listening intently and trying to react to your requests as fast as we possibly can.
--Enemy-JustInTime

What's in a name?

Well, apparently, everything!!

A name is a proper noun that ( well, almost!!) uniquely identifies a person. But looked at, with a magnifying glass, gives an insight into the person who named this entity. Heard carefully, tells the mood of the person who is calling out the name. I even know for a fact, Siva, the god's son (he is not called Ganesh or Karthik, in case you were curious!!), can compose a humm-able song using just the name.

Let us look at the name in question, then... FindMyCarrots. Some have called it "weirdly named website", others have called it "madly named website". I could not agree more. The name, indeed, reflects the mental stability and madness quotient of the person(s) who named it.
We are indeed a bunch of retards, who will not take a No for an answer. Is it possible to make the discovery and planning your next vacation based on a vague travel idea a pleasant experience? Can the fun and thrill of your next vacation start from the time you start dreaming about it? We believe the answer is a resounding YES!!

Well, the time the fox and I grew up, used to be when there were at most 2 TV channels, none, on air for more than 6-7 hours in the evening. And back then, we used to flock around those black-n-white idiot boxes to watch serials like Humlog, Nukkad.  Yes, my friends, we belong to such pre-historic era. One of the spook serials of that time, which really grabbed our attention was Karamchand. He was smart and had an uncanny liking for Carrots. If he was assigned a case by you, my dear user, to discover your travel destination from a vague idea, what will you ask him to do? FIND, MY CARROTS!!

We would love to be your Karamchand and take all the stick so that we can come back to you with your travel carrots.  We even try to cook up some carrot dish in the kitchen before serving it to you, in the form of local attractions, pictures, weather details as well as a way to get there.

We hope you like the carrot-dishes we cook in our kitchen, If yes, let others know about the taste in your mouth. If not, let us know what new spices, sweeteners and salt we should add to suit your taste buds! We are eager to cook a better dish, Just for you...

Happy Carrot-ing.

--Enemy-JustInTime.

The Genesis

I live the life of a ubiquitous software engineer, very hectic, stressed and very long working hours. This is how the world sees me. However, truth be told, work "grows" to take up the time that I am willing to spend in office.When the days are a little "slow" in terms of work, general web browsing fills in the time I am ready to spend at work. I see you have already started calling it the "confessions of a software engineer"!!

My wife, Paromita, on the contrary, leads the life of a software engineer, a Tiger mom of 2 demanding kids, and the engine that runs the vehicle, called family.Owing to this real pressure that she is subjected to, she prefers a few "pit-stops" in the yearly race called life. That is the primary driver for our frequent holidays. But there is a standard pattern in that too.

Summer of 2012. After a punishing 6 months of the race, called life, the family Formula 1 team decides on a pit-stop to some hill station in the pristine and beautiful North East India. Of course the pit-stop director (me) had to plan out everything for a smooth execution. I am scared of holiday planning. Each pit-stop tests my ingenuity of reasoning - why I did not do the trip-planning on time. I am fond of relaxing in the face of onslaught of work. I think I revel in showing work, that I am the boss!! Well, until the real boss (wife) shows who is the boss!! Ahem! This time was not going to be any exception. After all, unless you dream big you cannot achieve it. So, I concentrated on dreaming up these beautiful unknown locales we will go to in the north-east of India. Result, after a week of pestering I do not have any progress to show for my holiday-planning responsibilities. The race director (wife) is frustrated. Pulls up the pit-stop director and decides to personally monitor the planning process!! Man!! Do I hate having the boss watching over my shoulders!!

But, this time I am going to pull a rat out of the hat!! In my day-dreaming time, when I was reading up articles on web, instead of trip-planning for our holiday to the hill station in north east India, I found this information about the cool holiday-discovery site called ixigo. I was going to show the boss, that I indeed worked on the framework and not just this single problem at hand. After all, I am not petty! That 1 trip-planning was way below my standard. So, off I went and opened up this website to zip-zap-zoom through the holiday-planning process. But alas! Search for hill-stations in north-east India yielded only 1 result: MEGHALAYA. I felt like the balloon that has just received a small prick from a needle. All the air went out in a jiffy and I was desperately searching for place to hide. Worry not!! I had my back-up plans!! holidayiq Search for hill stations in north-east india yields a bunch of links to reviews and hotels. Just as I was getting ready to gloat over my ability to find a solution to the problem of trip-planning, the boss, found another needle. A link to a trip to Ooty!! Ooty is not in North East India. So, are we going to discover a new place and get ready to plan the trip only to find out that it is in Kerala? Wow!! She said it. She did not provide the right "requirement"!! The race director was looking for destination-discovery in India and NOT trip-planning/holiday-planning. How can a software engineer work with faulty requirements? I have found my alliby for missing the deadline, AGAIN!! Now that there was no question about my ingenuity, we got down to finding a solution to the problem at hand.  We tried the standard big OTAs: makemytrip, yatra, expedia. They all failed to help us discover the destination as per our travel idea. They expect us to know where we want to go and we DID NOT. Desperate, we did what any net user will do. Searched for "Hill Stations in North East India" on google. The first link did show some 6 places. But the region has 7 hilly states. Could not believe that those are the only options and that too the information available about them were very limited for us to make a decision. The next link showed us wikipedia page for all hill stations in India. We had to search through 100+ hill stations to find out what we were looking for. At this point, the race-director had made up her mind. We are going to the only hill station that I knew of in North East India. I had mentioned it to her as an example: SHILLONG...

Now, that was a quick decision. A decision that was decided by lack of information or over-dose of data, not because that seemed to be the best location as per our requirement. At that point in time, the dye had been set. I had proclaimed to my love that once we get back, I am going to solve this problem of vacation-discovery/location-discovery/holiday-discovery once and for all..

BTW, we had a lovely trip in Shillong. The pit-stop was well worth it. Little did I know, that 1 moment of bravado before we went for vacation will be remembered. On our return, I started settling into my routine of software-engineer's life, till 1 day the boss asked what am I doing about the promise of "one stop solution for "trip-dicovery"? Surely, she was not serious. But she was. And she was persistent. So, after quite a few futile attempts to dodge that "self-inflicted" responsibility, I started the arduous journey of setting up the initial building blocks of what we know today as findmycarrots. Here is a confession from the bottom of my heart. I would not be doing this, if the love of my life did not stand behind me the way she has. Love you!!

But the genesis will be incomplete without the accomplices. Siva, the god, decided he liked the mad idea well enough to see how it works and the fox loved it enough to quit everything and put his 200% energy into findmycarrots. This "enemy Just In Time" is truly humbled by these crazy people that make findmycarrots click. I hope you like using it as much as we do bringing it to you. Happy Carrot-ing!

--Enemy-JustInTime