Musings of an Apprentice Architect

I had the privilege of conducting a Software Apprenticeship program for close to 30 weeks or so, one hour per week. It was extremely fruitful personally though I am not too sure about the poor sorts who had to put up with me for one hour, every Friday morning.

The thing is, I also had my sadistic streak going and asked everyone to be present at 8.30 AM on otherwise beautiful Friday mornings. So, here was I, forcing folks to unreasonable things like coming to work at the official timings (which BTW, is 8.00 AM to 5.00 PM) - I am sure to burn in hell for such despicable acts.

So every Friday, the poor sorts had to learn things like Objected Oriented Programming, Clean Code, Design Patterns, Test Driven Development and so forth and I thought I was doing a fantastic job until the end when my boss showed Dan North's video on "Sharpening the tool". In this video, Dan North talks about the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition amongst other things, when I actually understood what he was talking about, I realized that I am still a Novice programmer as per the Dreyfus model :)

At least now I know that I really don't know what I don't know :) As they say, ignorance is bliss!

World's most popular Jugaad

An a-ha moment - a moment of serendipity for me: The world's most popular jugaad must have come from Microsoft: that of rebooting the machine when things don't work ... any thoughts?

India Made Software

I keep reading the term "Swiss Made Software" and according to its website, "swiss made software" is the new label of the Swiss software industry. International software companies like Google, IBM or Microsoft have discovered the Swiss values - quality, reliability and precision - in software development and have established important research and development centers in Switzerland" So what would a similar label for India's "famed" IT industry offer?

Here are my two cents:

1. The brand and its website will be called madeinindiasoftware.org
2. It will be based on truly Indian values of

• Adjustment,
• Indian stretchable time and
• The ubiquitous jugaad.

Based on the above values, I speculate the following scenarios:

1. All error messages from the applications would be standardized to "Kindly adjust, we are like that only"
2. For calculation intensive work, you might have a screen showing the friendly message "Calculations are happening, please ask your children to check in between as your grandchildren will probably see the results"
3. All software will come with message: In case of a crash, contact your neighbor for his version of software.

I am sure there will be more such interesting things - will write as I see them :)

Pizza Parties AT Work

Even though it's almost a decade since the heydays of the dot com boom, there is an idiosyncrasy that continues to exist in my industry -that of ordering Pizza if working late/over the weekend etc. So we have blokes (mostly) and a few ladies (sometimes) indulge in what looks like a cheese orgies a la Asterix in Switzerland :) Now here's the best part (or worst - depending on your POV) - these Pizza parties are held in meeting rooms which have just been cleaned up by housekeeping! The best part: Some brave soul actually goes and tells the pissed of housekeeping guy not to worry - we will clean up .... a statement which has as much truth as folks running their car on water!

Now the folks who eat the most are the ones who are, as Bertie Wooster would have described, "well nourished"! So one can always rely on hearing somebody say something on the lines of "I will go to the gym from now on" or "I need to go to the gym" or words to that effect.

In the end, the most junior of the lot play the janitor and try to restore the meeting room to its original state - a job so well done to make the boss cuss the housekeeping staff the next day