There is a heavy technical jargon pollution happening with the pace of technology changes and growth.  Using tech jargons have become part of our speech on a day to day basis at least with people who are associated with computers and internet.  But most of the times many of us don’t even realize we are using some jargon without knowing what it really means.  The ability of questioning what, why and how is becoming difficult as there is a tremendous explosion of jargons every day.  Here is an interesting article “Geekspeak still baffles web users” in BBC that talks about this with some survey information.

I was reading this post “The State Of Web Development - Ajax set to surpass Flash in ‘07” and more than the technology statistics it was good to read the list of what’s next big thing on the web.  No wonder web will be the axis on which the world will be spinning.  Web will dominate wherever there are things that work digitally.  It will be more of collaborate, cooperate, complement and work together.  As an end user it would project like one thing doing multiple jobs but in reality it would be processed by different things scattered around the world. From now it looks more like a sci-fi movie but when we are there looking back at what we are today might look more uncivilized.

Thanks to my friend Chokks who sent me this link to an article “What Gartner Is Telling Your Boss” in Devsource that brings out the theme expressed during the Gartner’s Application Development Summit.  The essence that I took from this article is that development is no more on how fast you can develop rather how better you can code and how well the system is architected for more reuse and plug and play kind of environment.  The following passages are few excerpts taken up from the article that talk about this.

“Developers may be relieved to know that Gartner is not stressing the need for programmers to write code faster. Faster is good, said Hoyle, but better is more important. Hoyle, who refered to RAD (rapid application deployment) as a way to create lousy programs fast, made it clear that agile methods are an accepted part of enterprise software development, and are no longer a subject only for methodology zealots. In his presentation later in the day, “Project Management in a Process Oriented World,” for example, Hoyle stressed that task granularity should generally be 8 to 80 hours, and suggested that agile methods be applied to business process management.”

“The future of application development is not about programmer productivity,” said Hoyle during the keynote presentation, “but in assembling functionality from components.” While programming will not go away, he stressed, programming has decreasing importance in delivering excellence. “Assembling, buying, and extracting is an increasing part of what you need to do,” he said. To be more agile and responsive, application development managers have to manipulate, orchestrate, and compose new business processes, using resources available from outside partners, third-party applications, Web services, and existing code components. Veccio asked, “Why would you ever code an app from scratch again? Why would you need to?”

It is important as a developer to think if a piece of your code is a common solution for a common problem.  If yes it makes lot of sense to keep it generic and reuse it wherever it applies.  Architectures such as SOA emphasizes on components that are services (not necessarily web services) reusable wherever applicable. Think about the amount of time that could be saved when you have pieces already developed and you could fit into wherever that solution is needed. In fact the Web 2.0 has lot of relevance here wherein you don’t need to plugin only the reusable component you have developed but components available over the internet.  That is true way of thinking web as a platform.

I was having one of my teeth fixed over the last weekend.  When I was in the Dr.’s room sitting in the dental chair with my mouth widely opened and the Dr. was repairing my tooth like a mechanic repairing a car going under it, I had this wild thought all of a sudden.  What would happen if professionals like Dr.’s forget their basics? Anything could happen right? I think in some profession basics cannot be ignored at any cost. In fact it doesn’t work at all. And if you think about it, basics are like how you struggle initially to learn bicycling but once it is registered in your subconscious mind it all works like magic as though you were born hardwired with the skill. But the time it is all getting registered in the subconscious mind a lot of focus, attention, commitment and care is needed.  At the time of learning, it all looks too hard and weird. Irrespective of any profession basics are quite important.  It is unfortunate that most of the college pass outs that join the IT industry seem to be directly getting engaged into advanced topics.  It might be easy to refer a book, search the net and copy paste but on the long run it is not going to help one grow in this profession.  There is a saying that nails pinned into a tree when it is young cannot be removed when it has grown. Similarly basics are the foundation to any advanced concepts irrespective of any profession. It is worth putting effort to nail them down into your subconscious mind so that it can act like a magic whenever you need without conscious effort.

Look at my other foundation stone posts.

Fonts - getting them right and making them work on different browsers under different operating environment is one of the clumsiest jobs of a web designer as well as a developer.  It is very important to understand that not every font that you may see on the machine you are working on will be available for different operating environments.  Usually designers choose a couple to three options of fonts in the priority the site needs to be built and is specified in the style sheet. The font card available from VisiBone could be a useful resource for web designers as well as the web developers to refer fonts and its availability in PC, Mac and Linux environments.

Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong - Peter T. Mcintyre

There is also a saying paranoids survive.  The above quote talks about confidence but implicitly also about being paranoid.  You should be afraid to be wrong but if you really think, its good to be afraid of being wrong. The only thing you should not be worrying about is what will happen to you if you go wrong.  If you go wrong you learn the mistake anyway and all it matters is you don’t make that mistake again.  Confidence is all about not only being right but learning from when you went wrong and correcting it the next time.

The above thoughts struck me when I got to see this link that has the last few moments of the famous TV show “Who wants to be a millionaire” where this guy wins a million confidently with style.

I am a great fan of StumbleUpon.  It is a great tool to pick up something interesting on your area of interest but you really don’t know what to look for. Once you install this extension on your browser and configure your areas of interest, you can click on StumbleUpon button anytime and it will bring you a website randomly picked up on your area of interest.  I actually stumbled upon this site that has a flash movie on “How to use StumbleUpon“.

Happy Weekend!