I was impressed reading a recent news article in the local newspaper on 18 ministers in Kerala being provided with a website for their respective departments, that keeps track of their profile, reports, achievements and many more. I was initially thinking that the quality of the sites maybe substandard as I have seen many other Indian Government sites, but surprisingly the quality is not at all bad and it already contains many information on each of the state department’s activities. This is a good step and every other state in the country should follow it, provided the content is regularly updated and also provides ways for people to reach out and provide suggestions/complaints etc.

YSlow is an extension to the Firebug extension for Firefox. As you might be aware the Firebug extension is a very useful tool for developers to analyze a web page in terms of different components, structure and their construction. YSlow helps one analyze the performance of the website in terms of response times and the difference components within a page that is the result of the overall response time. Web page performance is a combination of implications starting from the page layout to database queries. YSlow helps in analyzing what is visible to the outside world. YSlow is from Yahoo! and they have shared the best practices for improving the performance of the web sites. A good add on Firfeox extension for the developers to keep a tab on the performance right from the beginning.

If you are as crazy as me spending a lot of time on putty terminal windows and like to drum the keyboard than drag the mouse this might interest you. Goosh is an unofficial Google shell that imitates working in a UNIX type shell environment and provides a command line based features that Google search engine offers. Not all of the features are available but the most important ones are already there. When you open the Goosh page, you feel like you have logged in into a shell environment. “Man” in *nix is the command for viewing the manual for any help. Similarly here if you type “man” or “help” or “h” or “?” you will get a list of commands that can be used Goosh. Here is the list of commands available.

The default is a search command; type anything and hit “enter” key, you get back the search results as you would perform on a typical Google search. Many of the commands have aliases as well and the alias is as simple as a single letter. For example “l youtube” takes you to the Youtube website. It is the equivalent as typing youtube in Google search page and pressing “I’m Feeling Lucky”. Try Goosh, am sure you will like it.

Thanks to my friend Rajesh Kannan for bringing Goosh to my notice.

RescueTime is a site that I came up recently through stumbling. There is a good and a bad side to me finding this site. The bad part first. One year ago this was my idea. But as you might know ideas are to be put into action soon, otherwise either it will not see the light or there will be someone else who will envision the same idea and probably would implement it. The second case was what happened to me. OK now the good part is this tool really helps me take a look at the time I spend everyday on the various applications on my laptop. I wish I had this tool ten years back so that my time management would have been much better. RescueTime has a desktop service that can be downloaded and sits on your computer tray. It constantly monitors the active applications you are in and keeps sending information to its website. The website aggregates this data and presents a graphical report on the dashboard. You can tag the applications you used, so that RescueTime can group the time under different categories. For example, I use work, learning, research etc. Another key feature is that you can set goals like how many productive hours you want to put everyday. RescueTime will tell you if you met that goals and sends a weekly report by email.

RescueTime comes in two flavors - a personal edition and team plus edition. Both of them are free except for team plus edition, up to 5 users it is free. A team plus edition will allow you to compare time with the group time which helps in setting team level benchmarks. What RescueTime will not know of course is your idle time or time that you were in meetings. But I am practicing to capture this as well. Since I use Google calendar for my schedule, before I go to the meeting I activate the Google calendar window. This gets captured by RescueTime and gets tagged under Meetings. It would be good if RescueTime can export this data in different formats that can be imported into Timesheet systems or if it can integrate with Timesheet systems. That would really save a lot of time or when people forget to fill the timesheets and later when they fill it is only approximate or partial just because they don’t remember what they did after a day (that’s natural). RescueTime is a fantastic product to take a look at how you spend your time, do better time management, set goals and cut down on time wasters like checking mail every now and then or on the instant messengers. Of course only if you would want to make better time management consciously; no tool would do that by black magic.

A river when it is a river is never stagnant. It keeps flowing. Until it reaches a pool or a greater river which then flows and reaches the ocean. A river flows until it reaches a point where water is stagnant. The definition of stagnant as I search, gives me,

• dead(a): not circulating or flowing; “dead air”; “dead water”; “stagnant water”
• not growing or changing; without force or vitality

If you look at it from a career perspective, it is easy to get into being stagnant. One doesn’t need to do anything beyond what he is expected. The person will be in the flow but at a point will become stagnant, in more business terms a commodity. You are no more worth than millions of others who are in the pool. Standing out or being uniquely recognized and becoming successful is to swim against the commodity pool. As you keep moving against, you will raise to a lesser commodity pool.

Taking the same analogy of a river, if I have to take the example of river Ganges, it has many tributaries flowing through many cities North East India until it reaches the Ganges Delta and flows into the Bay of Bengal, north eastern part of the Indian Ocean. But the source of Ganges is a 19 mile stretch glacier in the Himalayas called the Gangotri glacier. The origin of yet another major river in India called Cauvery is Talakavery, which is a spring. The source of any river is unique and distinct.

To reach success and growth in career is to swim against the current, to constantly grow and change and not be stagnant. Growth is not possible until one exerts additional effort to do things beyond what is expected. When one tries to do things beyond what is expected, there will be hurdles and blocks as in the current that pushes the water in the river. Sure, swimming against the current is difficult, but when you make it you get towards a point, a unique identity and are in a pool of lesser commodity.

So what did you do/learn beyond what is expected out of you?

Sometime back I had written a post “Lessons learnt from Jenga“. The latest revelation came to me again through Jenga. Somehow I get fascinated to this simple game! Every time I visit my nephew I play Jenga with him. It was only this time that I found a variation of Jenga in a toy shop, called Uno Stacko. If you have not played Uno, then you have missed some fun, particularly when you are in a group during events or functions. Anyway this game is a combination of rules applied from Uno and Jenga. This makes it even more interesting and challenging.

After playing several rounds, in a particular game, we came to a “can’t remove anymore” point where the tower started to sway and even a blow would bring it down. Neither I nor my nephew wanted to pull out pieces anymore, it was quite obvious the entire tower was shaky and clearly the foundation was very weak and supported by only individual pieces.

An idea stuck to me at that moment, what would it take to do a reverse Jenga? At this point how easy or difficult would it be to construct back the tower to its initial state? I relaxed the rule and used both my hands in doing this, so that I can hold the tower with one hand and it doesn’t collapse. Slowly I started taking the pieces from the top and started inserting them into the gaps. Very soon I realized that it was much more difficult to insert the blocks than to remove them. Because of a poor foundation, the weight of the tower had fallen on its individual pieces that were at the bottom and it was very rigid to insert any piece near them.

I had to force and lift the pieces carefully, so that a piece can fit in. But beyond a point I could not hold the tower any more, inserting a piece at the foundation was harder than removing it. Ultimately the tower collapsed. My friends, here is where I realized again, how important the foundations are, if you miss learning them in the first place, it is very difficult to put in those pieces later because, by then you would become rigid, your practices are rigid. Less flexibility provides less scope for putting in those important pieces which are the basis to support for the future.

But there is nothing as impossible. What is more important to realize is that there is always scope for unlearning and re-learning. Creating a stronger foundation is always possible if you are ready to let go of whatever you have learnt (wrong) and build the foundation again by relearning it the right way, which adds more value. Traditions and old practices may not apply for every generation. You can sustain and keep growing only if you are able to let go of old practices that are not applicable and learn and apply what is necessary for the current needs. So my friend, be open to unlearn and relearn as and when necessary.

This post is part of the foundation stone series of posts.

“Quality in computer software is a controversial field. For some, software quality is a largely aesthetic and practical issue, dealing with the question of how efficiently and elegantly a computer program performs a task and source code looks (see Programming style). For others, quality is defined as strict conformance to requirements and absence of bugs. In both cases, there are sets of practices that are either required, or highly useful in this pursuit.”

That’s an introduction to software quality on Wikipedia. While I was agreed upon that description, I had some realization and thought around that word recently. This happened after my visit to a friend’s place in the United States last week. My friend wanted to meet a relative of hers and asked me to join her. We went to her relative’s home and after some introductions they offered us to show around their house. The first impression I got was this house must be new. Apparently my friend had the same question (this was her first visit too) and it came out of her mouth as a question. I was wrong and they were living in that house for some time now. I realized the saying “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” looking at that house and how it was maintained. Sparkling clean with each and every object placed properly and positioned properly. The credit goes to the mistress of the house and from further discussions we understood it is her passion to keep things in order every day. Her in-law quoted that she is so particular about things in proper place and positioned properly and was explaining with a tooth brush holder which had to be positioned parallel to the walls and not tilted sideways. The closet looked like a cloth shop.

The visit had an effect on me and made a lasting impression. I started feeling that the essence of quality can only be realized with some attitude. It is an attitude of perseverance, an attitude of trying to be a perfectionist, an attitude of being passionate about the work being done, an attitude of being adamant about doing right things the right way. When these characteristics show up in work, that is the evidence of quality. A common proverb in India says, you just need to crush a rice to see if the entire pot of rice has boiled or not. A quality work shows up on its own. Quality is also not about having a check once in a while but it is something that needs to be practiced on a day to day basis. When each member in the team has these quality attitudes, then the team is a quality team. When each team in the organization has these quality attitudes then it is a quality organization. Think about it, do you have these characteristics in you?

My other Foundation Stones

We all know that we cannot eat a water melon in one mouthful but to break them into pieces, remove the seeds and skin and then share and eat the fruit. Similarly the work we do might look complex, big and not solvable from the onset. I was watching a Discovery channel program on Siafu ants (pinching ants) which is a common ant type in Africa. These ants would eat everything in sight that moved. They eat mice, scorpions, spiders, anything that comes on their way and the local people say even elephants sometimes. They would kill and eat dogs and cats if they were trapped in the house also. The warrior ants have big claws that can tear off the outer skin of the victim and the rest of the ants swarm in and tear the soft inner flesh. These march in thousands and thousands and are nomads that shift the colony once in two weeks. Here is the best part, these ants are totally blind. They rely on touch, smell and chemical signals from the abdomen of the leading ants. The swarms can travel at up to 20 metres per hour, stripping all animal life in their path.

Think about the collaboration, team work and best of all the strategy of attacking in pieces but in huge numbers. The victim is outnumbered and is soon captivated. The whole episode was mind boggling just like watching a thriller movie. I could not take my eyes off the whole hour. The commercials did give me time to think about the lesson learnt through these ants and I thought this is an analogy I can share with you. Working as a team with good communication and collaboration and applying the divide and conquer rule can help in tackling huge problems so easy that you would want more.

Note - This post is a part of foundation stone series of posts