Self Interview - Sachin Sancheti

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi! I am Sachin Sancheti. I work at a real estate firm and handle multiple things. I am a currently a functional head for marketing and planning. I am a structural head for a few construction projects that I undertake for clients as a project management service. The company, Vitrag Group, is headed by my uncle and we are today a team of about 20+ members in office and 5+ members at various site locations handling real estate sales, supervision, services and development and building activities.

The business has grown over time and it is a growing business in my opinion. Traditionally the industry has been led here in the Nilgiris by family owned houses and lately, by larger players and comglomerates in the industry.

What hardware do you use?

I use an Acer Nitro 5, gaming laptop as the primary device which is supported by a 2010 bought Microsoft ergonomic 4000 keyboard, an ergonomic logitech M570 mouse and an acer or samsung 24” monitor. I like having second hand phones of Android as my primary handphone device. My office infact, all of us use some assembled desktop or branded laptop with windows 10 loaded. Some had linux Mint but that was scrapped eventually.

My printers are Canon and Epson. Canon is something I use for all my photography prints and Epson Rips high end models for business printing. We do a lot of photocopies as documentation is a core part to our business.

A kindle reader is my evening passtime if not a bound book.

And what software?

I use a lot of software and manage the same for the company. These include the following but my list may be not exhaustive at this point of time

G Suite for email and business services, the business has a legacy account.
Pipedrive is the CRM I use for marketing
Netlify is my preferred website hosting service though I also use Vercel and may explore Cloudflare pages.
Zapier is my automation agent for all my activity
NodeJS is the go to for all my frontend programming. I especially love 11ty for JAMStack sites. Yarn is WIP for me, npm is my package manager. Choco for windows binary installations
For my office automation, I use Fibaro hardware and software for the same
RStudio is a great IDE for R, which I use as my go-to tool for all sorts of data wrangling, processing and analysis. I studied R at college for my Statistics Major
Sublime Text 3 is the only editor I use for it’s simplicity, infact, I wrote this whole article in Sublime Text before publishing
Markdown -> Pandoc workflow is just awesome for all my reports. No more MS Powerpoint, no more MS Word for boring stuff. My presentations are augmented with RMarkdown documents which with beamr or ioslides presentations
MS Excel is ubiquitous and I use it in combination with VBA programming modules I created years back, saved those snippets and automated a lot of my work. I use all functions including optimization, XLOOKUP and the pivottables
AutoCAD 2021 LT is my computer aided design software for 2D drawings which I use for business
Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects are great tools for video design, something our company is proud of getting great videos
Gimp 2.10 for photoediting
Imagemagick for doing multiple photo edits
VLC as my main video player, converter and sometimes for coding and trimming videos
GitHub! How can I forget this. Git is one of my favourite cli tools. Sublime Merge is great for larger repos I manage.
Google Earth Pro for desktop is just amazing for remote sensing and we use this a lot to understand sites being in the hills
Zoom (the pandemic brought this)
Linkman Pro is a low software but powerful one to bookmark things for archiving and retrieval in the future.
Some cloud backups ofcourse
I do not know why they killed Picasa 3! I still use and shall continue to use even though the cloud storage options seem most convenient for mobile devices/computer device interfacing
Slack is our business tool for communication.
No pdf reader beats the slim nature of SumatraPDF so far. I use this as the only allowed pdf reader in the entire organization
pdftk is another cli for all pdf manipulation, something I tend to need almost daily
I learn online with LinkedIn Learning. Been on this for a few years now and I thoroughly enjoy the experience.

What would be your dream setup?

There is no specific thing as a dream setup. I have learnt that these things are evolutionary. A lot of tools get outdated very quickly. I like my current setup and prefer to not compromise on the functionality that I enjoy. I continue to upgrade on the setup I have been able to build around me. I just home that computer migrations get easier as I upgrade :)