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

I am the World's ugliest!

Well the other day I entered the lift to go down. I was alone, so I put the mirror to full use and saw myself... and as soon as I saw myself, I muttered the lines from the Gita: "Bheeshanam Bheeshanaam, Bhayam Bhayam" - the lines were originally used to describe Krishna's "Vishwaroop" in Mahabharat - which loosely translates into " Massive and very Scary". In my context, it just means: Ugly, Very Ugly to the point of scariness. Now most (I mean everyone apart from me....) blokes in my position would not think so about themselves - most would rather think how they were like ... Tom Cruise or what ever ... but yours truly could only recollect the horrible / scary description from the Mahabharat on seeing myself...so I must be one of the ugliest around by some distance! :)

Being British in India......

Stiff upper lipped, insular, cynical, strictly law abiding but rather eccentric - all terms that one usually associates with the Brits. However, to be very fair to my British friends, they are not alone in this!! I don't know about the rest of the world, but the people from the place where I live in currently, certainly show all the above characteristics in equal measure!

Let me start with narrating something I had just read a couple of days back in the parking lot of a building: "If you don't want to be insulted, park your vehicles properly" or words to that effect, albeit in Marathi (the local language here). Now why would you want to warn a potential offender that he would be insulted if he did X is beyond me - I mean most "normal" people would not be offenders anyway and most offenders would be too thick skinned to pay heed to the insults!

It gets even more interesting - this happened to my friend so apologies to him for pinching his story. The story goes thus: there is a very interesting and famous sweet meat shop here where people queue up outside the shop since 7AM in the morning (Needless to say, the shop opens at 8.30)!! Now on one such morning, my friend had to go through the horror of waiting in the queue at 7AM, thanks to orders from SHQ (Supreme Head Quarters, aka wife). He was the third or fourth in the queue and he couldn't but help notice that the first guy, an oldish man in his 60s getting extremely impatient; he kept looking at his watch all the time. This went on all the while from 7.30 AM until 8 AM when suddenly, the impatient bloke took a key out of his pocket and opened the doors of the sweet shop!!! Needless to say, he went straight to the till, welcoming his customers with dire warnings to not touch any of the sweets, lest they be considered sold!!!! He was, after all, the owner of the shop and considered it his divine duty that his customer be serviced only at the designated hours , not a minute early, nor a minute late, never mind even if things are ready well in time and the entire staff is ready to serve ... it was, after all, not a matter of making money, it was a matter of principles.....

My third story is a little poignant but never the less quite shocking - I was doing some sort of community work which involved going to peoples' places and doing some paper work for them. We would choose an area within the city, go to each apartment/house and do the paperwork. In one of the apartment, we were welcomed by a middle aged lady who opened the door a few microns to take a paper from us and promptly slammed it on us .... only to reopen again (a little more than a few microns this time - ostensibly to let some antharx or similar viruses on us...) to give us back the filled paper - and firm instructions to bugger off, lest her dogs decide to start taking interest in our meat....

Now this is nothing new - ask any salesman who has to solicit his products and the amount of abuse that he has to go through and he would call this a walk in the park... so we proceeded to the next apartment where we were welcomed by a serious looking bloke in his 60s. I explained to him the purpose of my visit and told him that he would have to fill in forms for each adult living in that house. The gent told me he need two forms for now, but had I come last week, he would have asked for three but for the fact that his wife passed away over the weekend.......

My final story relates to kindness/human compassion - there was a tragedy in my place as somebody passed away and I needed to buy flowers/wreath to lay on the body of the deceased soul. I went to a flower vendor, an old and cheerful lady. I asked her for some flowers, a mala etc - which she said would cost me Rs 50. While I was talking my wallet out, the lady asked me the reason for buying flowers (I certainly don't look the religious types!!) - and on knowing the real reason, she refused to take the Rs 50 and took only Rs 10.. and this was a women who would probably have to go to bed on an empty stomach if she made Rs 20 less then her daily earnings.........

It is not mere coincidence that the place I am talking about and London share the same STD code: 020....

Fueled by Tea

The greatest gift from God to mankind in my very humble opinion, is good old Tea. Not that my opinion counts in any case but since you are reading this, I might as well subject you to it :)

My love for Tea is quite recent although I have been drinking ever since I was 5. When I was a kid, drinking milk was akin to drinking castor oil and the Tea made at my home was comfortably a much superior alternative. Besides, tea was an extremely good drink to have at 2AM in the night in the midst of an extremely tense card game .... a very routine thing to do during Summer holidays.

However, over the years, I got incerasingly disillusioned with Tea .. .especially the one made at home as it was almost always too strong, too sweet and had too much milk which was too fatty... in short I found it ghastly. Of course, as I got a little more enlightened and introduced to the world of Starbucks, coffee was quite an alternative, especially a Tall/Grande Cappucino without sugar and with cinnamon sprinkled liberally on it.

Well this was so until I got introduced to good old English Breakfast tea... and thats where my love affair with Tea was rekindled. It all started in a rather tacky B&B in Chester ... the Scotish lady who owned it was quite friendly and good to talk to, but her breakfasts were something which we would not miss for anything. So apart from the usual fare of Sausages (which I don't eat), fried mushrooms, fried eggs, variuous cereal, various juices, breads, yoghurt etc, there was that special cup of English breakfast tea to deal with and my word it kept me fueled for the day.
I used to compare that cup of tea with one of Jeev's pick-me-up lifesavers for Bertie Wooster - of course that was made of raw eggs and Worcestershire sauce but Tea (especially English Breakfast) has almost exactly the same effect on yours truly.

One of the best places to have tea though is the National Arts Gallery at Trafalgar Square in London. The canteen serves the world's best Tea, croissant and scones! Another good place to have excellent Tea is the T Centre at Churchgate, Mumbai -> They even show live football / cricket matches if you go there in the right season.

Finally, my latest craze: I got these funny packs of exotic Tea called Tazo free with Breakfast cereal ... verdict so far: 10/10!

For more on Tea, you might want to see this DNA's essential read at this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A61345