My friend Deepa had mailed me couple of days back after reading one of my post, “Foundation Stone #6 - Keeping yourself updated“. Here is the snippet from the mail.

“In one of ur post, Foundation stone#6-Keeping yourself updated……

“When someone says that he/she knows a particularly technology what really matters is whether he/she
knows the concept behind that technology. If one is good in the concept then it is matter of
spending some time to really work on that technology.”

I am still not able to understand the terms concept and technology…..gimme an example.“

It was a good question, how do you draw a line between, when you can say that you know a concept and when can you say that you really know the technology behind it or to be put simple when you can apply and edit it. I thought about it for some time and replied to her. I thought this would be useful for everyone as well. Here is the snippet from my reply mail, what exactly I wrote back to her.

“Let me first clarify your first question Concept Vs Technology. I will try to explain it with an example rather than trying to define it. You have a car and you are driving it. You can think of what happens inside when you are shifting gear or accelerating it. If not technically how things work, you at least know what are the components and what their responsibility is. But at the same time if your car doesn’t start or you feel it has problem, you cannot get into it and try to fix it, if you want to then you need to know technically what it takes to do the repair. Understanding how things work is conceptual, but working on it to create/modify is technical. Every model or concept has a scope and you can create/edit technically only within that scope. For example you cannot technically edit your car to make it fly. However if you were successful then you cannot call it car anymore but it will start belonging to the conceptual model of flying because you have to apply the principles of flying to make it really fly.

Hopefully you are not getting confused. Let me give you another example for concept vs technology. Lets say you are watching TV. You are a user here, but lets reverse your role, say when you are watching a TV, I want you to think about how do you see those pictures in motion? What really happens? You maybe able to answer this question depending on your conceptual knowledge on how TV works. If you put that question back to me, I can explain how a TV works. But if your TV gets repaired I cannot fix it, you need to go to a person who knows conceptually as well as technically how a TV works. Did it help?

She understood it, hope you understood it. Questions/Comments welcome.