About | Tarandeep Singh

About Geeknizer.com

Geeknizer.com (formerly Taranfx) is aimed on delivering unique Tech content related with Gadgets, Science, Innovation, Apple – iPhone, Programming, Networking, guides – How Tos.

Currently Site receives traffic primarily from U.S. (50%), UK (10%)  and India (10%) with Daily Unique page views of 20k+. More about Geeknizer on the About Page.

My Profile

About Tarandeep singh:

Tarandeep brings 8.5 years of Technology (Product development) experience. He has been developing mobile, enterprise, B2B, B2C applications with Top MNCs. He worked for Google as a consultant for nearly 5 years helping shape various technologies. Prior to that he worked with Oracle India and Verizon data services in hyderabad.

He loves reading, writing about Tech. He started writing about Tech, before it was cool in India. He has been blogging on various Tech-topics from Geekiest programming algorithms to IT business since 2006.

When away from computer, he likes to travel for photography and fun. Among other things, he’s avid music listener, and sci-fi buff

What I do:

  1. Employed as a Software consultant/Programmer at No.1 Software product company – Java, Android
  2. Freelance Android developer/consultant.
  3. Freelance Photography (Google+, Facebook, GeekPhotography)
  4. Tech columnist/Blogger/Chief Editor at Geeknizer, AndroidNG.
  5. Tech Speaker at forums.

What I Love:

  1. Photography
  2. Music & Audio (Audiophile)
  3. Programming
  4. Bragging about gadgets
  5. Travel
  6. Delivering Tech sessions.

My Gear:

  1. Camera: Nikon D7000 with Nikkor 1.8G 50mm, Nikon 18-105mm, Tamron AF 90mm  F2.8 Micro 1:1, Sony NEX 5 with 18-155
  2. PC: HP z420 – Intel Xeon 3.5Ghz 12-Core, 32GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro 6000 Kepler,
  3. Laptop: Macbook Pro 15″ i5 sandybridge, HP i7
  4. Monitor: 29″ 2460×1600 Dell Ultrasharp MonitorSamsung 1080p LCD
  5. TV: 47″ LG LED TV
  6. Speakers: Monitor Audio RX6, Logitech Z5500 5.1 , F&D v
  7. Integrated Amplifier: NAD 356 C BEE
  8. Tablet: Nexus 10, iPad 4
  9. Phone: Xperia Z1
  10. Headphones: Audio Technica ATH-M50
  11. In-ears: Vsonic VC02
  12. Game console: PS4, OUYA
  13. More, that I don’t remember

How to Contact me: Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Email: taran at taranfx [dot]com, taranfx [at the rate] gmail [dot] com

Auto-biography

I began my journey of life in a very different way.

I wrote the first program of my life in BASIC when I was 9 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 used to study in a new city, a new school with all new kinds of people and new friends. This helped me in understanding the people and the diversity that you would get and expect living in a culture rich country like India.

I bought my first PC in 9th standard when I was 14. It was a Celeron 300A. I still remember and possess that 4.3GB Seagate 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 exploring 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 during night. Obviously, I was’t happy and I wanted to do something about it. I managed to sneak a locksmith home and got a secret duplicate key ;). Somehow, I was caught sitting late nights. This time my dad’s anger level was higher, fearing that i`ll spoil my stuides and eyesight, they wanted me to depart from PC. Dad took off the power cables. He used to hide them in his cupboard, but soon after I sneaked that out, he took the ultimate weapon called knife and teared the wire-apart. But, you know its impossible to stop the unstoppable. Dad rightly called me “Rubber” — “an object that regains its shape no matter how much you pull it”. 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 a far away city with charges for 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 in Netscape navigator and prepare a cup of coffee 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 amplifier was pushed to limits and burned into flames. What followed that were a series of other hacks that started destroying anything from PC, TV, Car audio, refrigerator and what not. Thanks to my parents they always supported me even though I burned a lot of things.

 

My PC came with windows 95. And I got to know of win 98 soon after. 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. Crash and learn!

In my 12th standard, I created a my customized audio system that was powered by a Yamaha (amplified) sound card, Mini-Hifi home audio + my old car stereo and one boombox. In all 9 speakers could pump enough sound to blow out the neighbors.

It was destined that i`ll become an engineer 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 (Update: I no longer have all of them).

I had been into IP networking for  a year now and it was my 3rd year of graduation. Before I could realize, I was in love with Networks. During my 6 months internship, I joined IBM network solutions. This gave me an extensive handson with routing and switching which invloved configuring and managing Cisco routers, Layer3 switches, firewalls, Radware, Juniper. I got the opportunity of handosn with 10 different projects. This gave me enough exposure to setup customer solutions independently. During this time I pursued my CCNA and prepared for CCNP (though i never appeared for  the exam). by the time 6 months got over, I had grabbed enough attention to fetch an offer at the company.

In the final yr of the college, things were cooler than ever. When it was time for the final year project. I made something really unique, a different idea from rest of the students, and was awarded for the best project of the year. It involved hardware fabrication plus knowledge of various web technologies and bit of native frontend. My partner made it look like an ultimate fantasy box with transparent sheets and blue LEDs. I wish I had its photo to showcase here.

By the time I passed out, I was known as the networking/hacker/computer guy in college. Everyone had a different name, but they all meant the same.

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 a week before. My manager was demanding (i still thank him for that) and those first 6 months  were the most challenging months of my life.  After that, things changed and my hard work started being appreciated. I was awarded for being the fastest learner. A year later, I got promoted and started leading my Team Lead and things were silky smooth with me turning out to be a constant hard-worker. After all that, I switched. This time I wanted a project which would satisfy the two best tastes. Java and Networking. Then I worked with Oracle (communications) for IP Service activation. Currently, I work for one of the biggest Internet companies, and my area of specialization is Android development.

It was during my stay at this company that I started loving Photography some of my work can be found here and here. Ever since, I’ve met new people and relished my geeky hobbies with them. I get to freelance android projects, freelance photography, and geek-out with people.

 

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 and now Geeknizer.com. Ofcourse All of the old ones were never renewed and are long gone. Taranfx was rebranded as Geeknizer.com

Taranfx was adopted in 2005, 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 streaks.

In 2010, I finally decided to write stuff on my own. Installed wordpress and started writing. In 2011, it took a step further as we rebranded it to Geeknizer.com.

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.

 

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