An Idea a day, keeps the brain ticking away

It’s been a while since the Winners of the Second Annual Software Developer Challenger where announced and still the thought has not sunk in. Our application named “Inline File Deduplication” took 3^rd place and being the only entry from India to be selected in the top 3, was an amazing feeling.

The application named “Inline File Deduplication” is similar to data compression but looks for redundancy in data. Our application reduces the amount of data stored on a drive, by linking similar chunks of data. Consider a situation where multiple users have access to the same drive without knowledge of this shared storage drive. The sharing of a drive among several users is a concept of Cloud Computing, leveraging this technology our application monitors the files being copied, moved, deleted, etc. During these operations our application checks the file and generates a unique number that is based on its contents and if it finds any similar file with the similar unique number the file is linked rather than taking up the same amount of storage space. Consider “File1” stored in some location and consuming 100mb of space and along come’s a request to store a similar file named “File2” at a different location or same, our application would link the file’s “File1” and “File2”. In normal scenario the two file would consume 200mb space on the drive, but in our case the consumption on the drive would be 100mb.

For those who got lost with my cloud explanation can consider their own desktops or laptops which happen to accumulate a lot of picture/music/video files shared from their dear ones. These files are stored on the hard drive of the machine and at times I have noticed; I don’t really get time to check which files do I already have on my drive or not and directly copy off my friend’s collection. In such a case our application would intimate you the file that already exist on the drive and prompt you to Link, Delete or Skip that file.

I want to share my experience with you all and how we managed to bring to life a new idea that we can call ours. It all started one fine day when I was approached by Nisarruddin Shaik and Satish Kumar Govindaraju regarding a concept they had in mind related to deduplication. We put in strenuous hours after office to come up with an idea that would be new and would have significant impact on the market. I had suggested on tackling one of the key aspects of deduplication being inline. At the time it seemed very ambitious but the dedication was defiantly seen among all the members we had selected. The members are as follows: Nisarruddin Shaik, Satish Kumar Govindaraju, Atif Ali Siddiqui, Neha Jain, Namrata Dessai, and Shwetha Sharma.

Along with the core of “Inline File Deduplication” we had decided to provide an application for Android Mobile that would be able to monitor the duplicates as well. These two ideas where submitted on 9^th November 2011.

As all ideas go the initial kick off was pursued with passion and dedication, along with time and each individual member’s project work load increasing due to deadlines things reached a stalemate. We all dispersed for our one week winter vacations and meet up with each other on 2^nd January 2012. With no progress on our idea and with a deadline short of a month the Team got demotivated and had planned to drop the idea for ESC Challenge 2012. Neha, Namrata and I boosted the morale of the Team at the time, right after the meeting Satish, Namrata and I dedicated our after office hours in efforts to develop the Android Application and inline file deduplication core. I still remember those days where nights were days and days where spent at office working on our SPC 2.1 release.

With all said and done we managed to secure a spot in the top three out of our 2 projects submitted in ESC. Everyone in our team put in loads of effort and dedication; it was a true inspiration working on such a venture with such unique individuals.

The learning’s we took from our experience were keeping commitment’s, Keeping our eyes on the price with loads of focus, easy to drift from our goal, distribution of workload among team members, etc..