Blog It Forward – Sunil Chandra

Thanks to Nabheet for inviting me to Blog It Forward challenge. It has been 7 years since I blogged last, although I used to browse through SCN silently whenever I get some time. During these years, lots of things changed in integration space and so on my personal front. I am married now and proud father of a kid.

After a long break, got connected back to the community in person this year during SAP Inside Track Chandigarh, a well-managed community event initiated and organized by Nabheet. This is the first time when I met him in person and found him – full of energy and passionate towards the unprecedented change in technology.

Introduction – About Me

I am a native of Patna, capital of Bihar state, northern India. But I always stayed outside most of the time. In fact, it was more kind of a destination for summer vacation while visiting my grandparents during school days. Due to transferable job of my father, we used to shift to a new location every 4 or 5 years. It might appear a bit uncomfortable, but it is a different kind of fun adopting and adjusting in a completely new environment and culture.

My SAP journey started right after college when I got placed in an IT firm in Mumbai. I was privileged enough to have good mentors and one of them was Pratik Srivastava. Been inspired by him, I created my SDN (SCN now) account and gradually started responding to queries and eventually some blogging in the integration space. Also, the frequent blogs from Michal Krawczyk and Shabarish those days always motivated me to contribute and explore more to share back with the community.

For the last few years, we are staying in Singapore and we love this place. It is so clean and well organized. Really inspiring to see how the country has grown in such a short span of just over 50 years.

Fun Fact

My 2-year-old son is super active and keeps his mom busy with all his tantrums most of the time. Really appreciate her patience and energy for handling all this alone while I am away during office hours. In one of the incidents, he threw water on the floor and got scared looking at her angry mom. He immediately turned to Google home and said – hey google, wipe the floor ??

Let me now respond to the questions from Nabheet.

What do you do apart from SAP in your free time?

Being a family man, I love to spend most of my free time playing with my kid. If he is sleeping, then I prefer going out for a long walk or watching a TV series, currently watching The House of cards. Next is catching up with cloud technology specially the innovation in open source – Kubernetas, Istio etc.

How do you balance your life between work and family/personal time?

I believe in work life harmony rather than balance. If I am happy at office, I come home with positive energy. Happy home gets me ready for handling challenges at work with cool head and feel more productive. In that way, it is a circle where professional and personal life complements each other and keeps you going. But the life is not always fair and will have some negative spillover or stressful situation at times. If that continues for long, it is time to reprioritize your priorities and give yourself a break before it starts affecting your health.

What would you choose if given a choice between coffee or tea and why?

Although I am not a fan of either of them, an occasional tea/chai is doable! On a rainy day, deep fried onion pakoras with a cup of hot chai comes as a perfect blessing.

Now I would like to take this opportunity to request Morten Wittrock, Vadim Klimov and Michal Krawczyk to Blog It Forward and share their stories along with below questions.

• What do you enjoy most in your work and why?
• If you were not in your current position, what/where would you be and why?
• What do you do apart from SAP in your free time?