Life's good!!

Finally, some good news on the work front!
Don't have time these days to do any reading; this was sent by an ex-colleague.
http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2006/01/stratifys_hocke.html

Lets see!

Talent + Processes = Deadly Combo

Last coupla months have been hectic and exciting!
I never expected any of my buddies to notice this blog; somehow some of the closest ones seem to have visited. Have received encouraging feedback and decided to continue on this series after a gap of 3-4 months now!

So many things happening around; will be writing abt specific experiences later. For now, just a summary of small conversation I had with a team-mate:
Ever since I understood what're "processes" in a software products company, have been a religious follower of processes. I guess this is the reason, out of my 7 years of working, most of the time, I've been tasked with enforcing processes in my teams.
I was trying to get across this point to this guy in my team. He is a promising CS graduate from an NIT (erstwhile REC, one of the top technical institutes in India), we'd hired 3-4 months back. He's started everything afresh after coming here and had started actively contributing in last 1 month. Him being a fresher, some peculiar issues were found with him too; and I've been taking efforts to bring him up to a level. I sensed that many a times, when I asked him to follow a particular process to do certain things, he was not completely agreeing with me and had different thought process going on at the back of his mind. On specific occasaions he tried to implement quick solutions for some problems raised by QA, bypassing the dictated process. And almost each of these cases, it turned out that the time taken to resolve the issues was a lot more. He used to get furious at QA team members for raising bugs for supposedly trivial matters.
It had to be explained to him, that having talent is one thing; following processes is another. Any one alone cannot gurantee good results. In the past I've seen results delivered by individuals sheerly based on their talent and heroics, without following processes. But I think, its not a scalable model to build upon. It can work only till the team size is small (5-10) and all of it is at one place. The moment you have bigger teams split between more than one places, it'll fail. In the absense of processes, even if you have tremendous talent in the team, you cannot gurantee good and timely results.
In todays market, there no dirth of individuals with either talent or understanding of processes; but there're very few with both skills. And I feel such people are of tremendous value to the organization they belong to.

In this regard, had to share my opinion abt guys who contribute to the open source community; but gotta finish this now. Keep watchin this space for more ...

Options!

This one is abt options; one of the characters in a novel I read long time back ("No comebacks") was reported to be use this approach. He used to evaluate all the available options, take into consideration the pluses and minuses of each, and then pick up the safest and the most suitable option for his context.
Nothing new! Probably a lot of people do this already. So? I was amazed with this being documented and written with clarity. So called managers of the world might have given this a fancy name and must already be practising this, preaching this. But you don't need to be a manager to do things smartly! (no offence meant!!)
This was for the real world.
What I always tell my team is abt the relevance of this in software developement:
Understand why one approach is preferred to other ones existing. It helps you understand and evaluate the best of the available options. You get into such situations when you have to evaluate a bunch of frameworks, vendors to work with your product or application.
From my side, I make it a point to forward to the team, some important mail conversations that discuss the pros-cons of available options. I believe its a good way to learn things.

Guys we come across

Ok, this is once again outta context!

Interviewd a guy with 3 yrs of software programming experience in the skills that we desire. From the earlier rounds of interviews taken by a colleague, the feedback was this guy was decent with basic fundamentals and very confident.

He'd quoted having worked on frameworks like Struts, Hibernate and Spring. As usual, I started off with digging into the internals of Struts, and caught the guy in a few mins.
The guy had superficial knowledge of Struts, which may be considered OK by others, for working on projects. I have this habit of testing the knowledge of how-things-work, in interviews or in conversations with my colleagues/team-mates. When we hire experienced guys, I insist that they really know how things work the way they work. So, it may sound very demanding, but I think it matters a lot when you're designing/developing anything new, maintaining existing code or debuggin a problem. These open source frameworks are a result of greate efforts by people in the open source community; a lot of thought has gone into developing these and making them robust and industry standard. There're definitely many design priniciples that one can learn from and use in their own work.

Thinking back, I think I did the right thing when I rejected the guy.

Will have to talk to my superior though, whether I shd be this insistant going further!

:)

Ex Myzus

Today, created an egroup (http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/xmyzus/) for all my ex-colleagues who used to work for Myzus (http://www.myzus.com). Myzus is a startup by IIT Bombay graduates, started in mid 2000, after they won a business plan competition at the technology festival of IIT Bombay. I was a part of the initial team involved in involving of Myzus from a student-run-startup to a professionally run company, doing business with Telecom giants outside India. It was the experience of my lifetime that I can't easily forget. It was a great bunch of guys to work with. To date am in touch with most of them. Just wanted to have a place where we all could discuss ideas, exchange thoughts, maybe reach out to others when we need to etc.; the egroup is the fallout.

Inspiration

One of the factors behind this belief of mine into Patterns-and-processes is Martin Fowler (http://www.martinfowler.com). Have been reading his stuff since last 3-4 years. Writes great stuff on technology. Even non-tech stuff (related to processes, offshore development etc.) is pretty interesting; more than anything, it appears to be pure-common-sense-documented!!
:)

One such inspirational author is Joel (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/). I consider both Martin Fowler and Joel in the same genre.

What the heck..

.. I have to write something abt myself apart from the boring first post...!
Who I am?
(OK, this is not my CV and I don't want it to sound like one!)
I am a believer in patterns-and-processes. I want to apply this knowledge wherever possible, in order to make our lives more efficient. When I say "wherever", I mean it. I myself make every effort to apply this: to myself and to everything around me: my workplace and my home.
This understanding and appreciation for patterns-and-processes was not clear to myself, till I got in touch with my graduation project guide, Prof R K Joshi. He was the person who initiated me in this space, though it was from Software Development point of view. This appreciation was further generalized and crystalized, when I worked with Atul Yadav (our General Manager) for a brief time. I still remember our long discussions around life, management, software development and practices, which I thouroughly enjoyed.
Watch out for this space for more dumps....

Finally, my presence on the Net

They say, having a blog these days is as essential as having email!

A presence on the Net is must... Never had any homepage...
This is the my beginning...
If nothing else, this will be some place where I can scribble abt arbitrary thoughts that go on in my mind...

Though, am busy at the moment, had to just start this process sometime. So be it now..

More later...