Thanks to my friend Kanmani who sent me a link that has information how to be an effective programmer. In fact TechMasala’s foundation series of posts main objective is also to list down certain technical as well as soft skills to be an effective programmer. The document covers tips and best practices under the categories of personal and team skills for a beginner, intermediate and advanced programmer. “How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary” is a good read for every programmer.

In North East India there is a saying “When the bamboo flowers, famine, death and destruction follow”.  I got to know about this from a beautiful program called “Animal Planet Insights” in Animal Planet channel yesterday. When the program started with this message I was wondering how could this be possible and I was more interested to continue watching the program. The villages suffered a huge loss of human once in every fifty years until 1950’s and as per the saying every time it happened when the bamboo flowered.  A variety of bamboo that only grows in north eastern forests of India has a lifespan of 50 years and when its end comes, flowers that becomes fruits. The fruit falls down the seed within grows up as new trees. The bamboo fruit is rich in vitamins and other essentials that invite rats. These rats eat up the fruit and the natural system of a rat is that when there is plenty of food it copulates and gives birth to more rats than normally.  This multiplies the number of rats enormously.  Once there are no more bamboo fruits the rats enter into the paddy fields and eat up everything. Due to the enormous number of rats there was no way the villagers could stop them. In one night the entire paddy fields surrounding the villages are devastated. The rats don’t stop there; they enter into the houses and eat up every piece of food. Some people leave the village but most of them are stuck with famine and lose lives because of hunger. The bamboo forest cannot be destroyed because it is a source of input for various purposes in the villages.

The program continued on to explain how the villagers in the recent past came up with different ways of traps to kill the rats and reduce the number of rats during the bamboo flowering season. The program also showed other chain reactions that cause devastations like more rats invite deadly snakes. Sometimes from the onset we get easily deceived to believe something to be the cause of a problem when it is actually not.  A deep probe and trace would reveal the root cause of the problem. As another saying also states one needs to find the root cause of the problem and solve it rather than to try to treat the symptoms. Easy fixes to problems may not be an effective solution and could come back with something huge or could produce a side effect. Identifying the root cause and fixing it is the only effective solution.

Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series.

I was watching a renowned saint’s talk on TV three days back. During his speech, he told several stories. A part of a story inspired me and this post is based on that. Here is the excerpt from the story.

A saint was on his deathbed counting his last days.  His disciples were around and looking after him.  The disciples were always astonished with the knowledge and wisdom that their guru had and wanted to know who his guru was who might have been more knowledgeable than him.  So they asked the guru who his guru was.  The guru smiled and said that he had learned from thousands of gurus throughout his life and that he doesn’t have enough time to tell about all of them.  The disciples were persistent and asked the guru to tell at least about few of his gurus.  The guru agreed and started telling about few of his gurus and what he learned from them.

“The first guru to me was a thief.  I was in search for knowledge and was walking through a village.  It was late night and the entire village was deep asleep. I wanted to take shelter for few days in the village but at that time of the night I didn’t wanted to disturb anyone. As I walking through a small street I saw someone near a house and as I closed in, I could recognize that it was a thief who was trying to get into a house and steal. Not daring to bother about what he is doing I asked him, if I could find any shelter in the village. The thief said that there is no public shelter but then he offered that I could stay in his house provided he doesn’t mind staying with a thief.  I thought about it and really didn’t care because he is a thief. Every day the thief went in the night to do his work and returned back in the morning. Every morning he came empty handed and I would tell him he failed to steal and he would say that he will make it tomorrow. I stayed with the thief for about a month and for the entire month he was not able to steal anything but he still kept saying he would make it tomorrow.  That was the first lesson I learnt from the first guru.  A lot of times I was impatient that I am not getting enough knowledge and wisdom to carry on the saint path that I even considered renouncing it and going back to normal life. But the thief guru taught me the concept of never giving up and if I am here today it is that first lesson that I learnt has brought me up till here.

My second guru was a dog.  I was drinking water from a pool of water. A thirsty dog came by and wanted to drink the water from pool.  As he put his head down to the pool he saw his own reflection and thought it was another dog and started barking.  The reflection of him also did the same actions but the dog thought there was another dog inside the pool which is barking at him. So he stepped back and attempted again. Again the same thing happened and he backed away. This happened for few times and then I don’t know what the dog thought it jumped into the pool. Once he was in he didn’t see any other dog and started drinking the water to its content. That was a big lesson for me that taught me that if I have to become knowledgeable I have to delve deep into it, just by looking at the outset I will not be able to feed to my content.”

The saint told few more of his gurus and what he learned from them but more related to sainthood and Godliness. The first two lessons that the guru learnt are applicable whether you are software engineer or a saint. Never give up and delve deep into what you are learning.

Have a great week.

Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series of posts.

Way too much to learn and do yet 24 hrs a day - that’s the fact as it exists today. If you are entering into the software development industry or even relatively new then already you are lost in a forest. Every day you might feel that you want to learn, try out this but very few of those items really get executed and we happily put the blame on time. But unless someone hones that ability to take up multiple tasks, he/she will not have a chance to stand out in this crowd.

One thing that can help is to plan and attack the tasks in chunks. One may not be able to complete all the To-Do’s in a day but definitely complete few tasks in each of the To-Do’s every day. The ability to plan your time for various things in a day and execute is something that has to come by practice. A simple practice is to dedicate 15 to 30 minutes everyday in the morning to list down the tasks in To-Do’s, prioritize and go through them as the day progresses. Again end of the day another 15 to 30 minutes to summarize what was done and what was not. Try it daily and you will know if you are good in executing what you plan and also improve upon it. Planning is so important in life that it is applicable for everyone and the more early a person starts planning the more he/she will be able to take up and execute them on time.

Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series.

The son of a master thief asked his father to teach him the secrets of the trade. The old thief agreed and that night took his son to burglarize a large house. While the family was asleep, he silently led his young apprentice into a room that contained a clothes closet. The father told his son to go into the closet to pick out some clothes. When he did, his father quickly shut the door and locked him in. Then he went back outside, knocked loudly on the front door, thereby waking the family, and quickly slipped away before anyone saw him. Hours later, his son returned home, bedraggled and exhausted. “Father,” he cried angrily, “Why did you lock me in that closet? If I hadn’t been made desperate by my fear of getting caught, I never would have escaped. It took all my ingenuity to get out!” The old thief smiled. “Son, you have had your first lesson in the art of burglary.”

That was a Zen story about learning the hard way. The software development world these days is a comfort one where one can get anything done with few tools and few mouse clicks. While it can help one achieve what needs to be done but personally if one wants to build a career the basics are important and the basics does not come easier and only through hard work and effort.  For that matter think of learning anything new, say for example learning to bicycle or learning to play an instrument or as from the Zen story even to become a thief. One cannot become even an amateur in a day or two. But the transition from amateur to professional can be lot smoother because there is a groundwork set. So if you are new to software development learning the hard way initially can help in setting up a strong foundation.

Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series.

Rajesh Setty was addressing some of us at Compassites on how to create a brand for the organization. One of the points he brought was that the company’s brand can significantly be valued if each one in the company can brand himself/herself. A typical software engineer if asked what he/she does answers that he/she is a developer/software engineer working for such and such company and for a project. The truth is millions of software engineers will say the same, so what difference does it make? He brought up a good analogy to explain this. The best example is a beautifully choreographed Indian movie song where the hero and heroine dance for a song and there are about 30 to 50 group dancers behind them. On the outlook it looks beautiful to have these extras add color to the whole scene but does anyone care if one of those extras is missing in a shot? Probably the audience would not even realize it. The attention is more on the hero and heroine and if they go missing the whole song goes incomplete and meaningless. It is important that a software engineer needs to add more accomplishments around him/her than doing just the job. The accomplishments help him/her to brand not just him/her but also add value to the brand of the organization. You definitely don’t want to be in the extras and be not missed when you are missing.

You can take a look at “Grassroots Brand-building Questions: A Baker’s dozen” for the questions that Rajesh asks for each one of us to answer in building a brand.
Note:- This post is part of the “Foundations” series

It is easy as a developer get glued on to the projects that the company is putting him/her in.  Particularly if you are in a big multi national company, you would be part of a big project that will run for years (and probably had been running for years) and one might be put into maintaining it or enhancing it. In such situations a developer’s knowledge might get confined to the project and the technology surrounding it.  This is like a slow poison bringing the developer to narrow down his/her knowledge.  It is important to keep widening the knowledge making sure that there is something else to achieve, accomplish and learn in the process. One thing that could help developers to keep themselves updated and to increase their knowledge is to freelance or contribute to open source projects. One could even take up a new technology and could use the open source projects as a means to learn and implement.

This post is part of the “Foundations” series of posts.

You might be ambitious and have a vision to become someone and have a deadline to reach there, but have you considered the steps to get there? If you need to reach a floor through stairs you cannot skip the steps. If you try to, beware you could trip and fall down. Achieving what you want will require you to understand the steps involved in it and go through those steps.  You can fast track but then you cannot skip the steps that will take you there. I have heard of newbie’s in the industry wanting to become leads and managers in very short period of time, I am not saying it is not possible but one cannot miss the steps necessary to be there. A designation doesn’t necessarily mean the person understands and performs the roles and responsibility of the position. At least in India, still promotions and designations are based on age rather than the experience and capability to take up particular roles and responsibilities. So watch your steps,  being there means going through  what it takes to be there.

Note:- This post is part of the Foundation series