Venu Anuganti Blog

Today is my last day @Yahoo!. It is my first ever short stay in any company that I worked so far, but I do not regret for leaving.

I decided to leave two months back but as I had a vacation in the middle (India trip), I have to postpone till am back. During my stay at Yahoo! I learned enough from rest of the MySQL geeks but I miss the whole geek community, which I doubt any company will have such a great MySQL folks.

Personally what I learned from Yahoo! is that, I needed to be in a company and/or team; where the management knows what the engineers actually do and capable of delivering rather than what was presented by managers itself from down the layers.

Anyway, I have multiple offers to continue as DB internals developer along with DB architect positions; but I will evaluate carefully in the next few days before I make up my mind as opposed to what I did in my last job search.

Recently Yahoo! released a new beta messenger (code name Diablo) for Windows Vista. Initially I tried during the alpha days and did not had a chance to try it again; and I installed it today during the free time and surprised to see that it offers almost all the existing features of regular messenger with much more enhancements.

The good thing about the new Diablo is;  it is completely re-written messenger on top of  Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for Vista to get the rich GUI look and feel. It has number of interesting features like zooming of contacts to the desired level, multiple color choice, searching of contacts, auto spell checker, phone support, call history etc. This is for sure much better than the currently existing one; and need to see what new features the team will add in the coming days especially towards the social networking of friends as part of YOS.

The only thing that I found missing is the archive of messages; that’s one of the feature that I use a lot by archiving all the messages; so that I can refer back to them at any time.

The screenshots of the messenger can be found from here:

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I did not notice for a while; but today noticed that Yahoo! mail has a cool new feature called ‘Download all’. This is indeed useful feature when you have multiple attachments. Normally we used to download each attachment by going through multiple checks. But now ‘Download all’ allows to download all attachments in .zip format; and before you can download; the files are already scanned to avoid another layer of validation.

Looks like Yahoo! mail blog posted this info couple of days back.

On 2005-Dec-05, I received the first check from Yahoo! publisher network (YPN) and may be I started using it a month before that. Even though I could not find any info on when I joined the YPN, may be good idea if they could display in the YPN profile whats the age of the account…I am still successfully running the YPN on all my blog sites (currently this is the only active blog, rest of them are all history).

Before switching to YPN, I used to have Google adwords; and once I made a switch, I never had a chance to look back…and never had any problems with YPN…interestingly I found YPN was displaying the content related ads much better than adwords by picking the tags from the blog entry…where as adwords most of the time used to display random ads which are not even related in any form.

I just read an article on Is Yahoo Gaining on Google and found it interesting. To some extent I am supporting that Yahoo! search results are getting better and better day by day.

I use mostly both Yahoo! and Google for search. And at times when I think I can’t find a result what am looking for, I change between the search and notice that Yahoo! produces better results than Google. Lets see how it continues in the coming days.

The recent addition of search assist from Yahoo! is a cool feature and am sure it will attract many users. At least am happy that search assist has my name when I start typing as … “VENU ANUGANTI”… see the pic below: