Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

I was in Pune the other day and saw a few battery powered motor bikes. Ace Motors was the company selling them, and it looked like a good deal.

• Charge it for 6 hours, and it will run 70 kilometers.
• It can take upto 160 kilos of weight.
• Does not need number plate / license / RTO approvals.
• No maintenance - almost.
• And they are eco-friendly!

My sister told me earlier that there are many Yo-Bikes in Ahmedabad. And that it’s a good alternative to a bike if your needs are limited. These bikes don’t run that fast and have their limitations, but are excellent for students and people who do not travel often.
Reva - the electric car is doing well too. I saw many electric cars in Germany a few years ago, and have spotted a couple here as well. Reva introduced a new model today, and by the looks of it, it feels good!

I have been thinking about this for about three months now. One of the major problems in software industry these days is to find good programmers. (retention comes after hiring It’s easy to find people, but extremely difficult to find good people. It becomes important then, to groom candidates to become better programmers.

So how to transform someone into a good programmer? Do you want to be a good / better programmer?

I take a session about being a good programmer as part of our induction training. I am thinking there should be something more concrete on the subject. Paul Graham’s Great Hackers is a wonderful piece and so are the Pragmatic Programmer and Mythical Man Month - (and the whole pragmatic series actually.) But can we come up with something that can bring out transformational results?

Thinking…

Excerpts from The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams

Ego-wise, two things are important to engineers: a) how smart they are, b) how many cool devices they own.

The fastest way to get an engineer to solve a problem is to declare that the problem is unsolvable. No engineer can walk away from an unsolvable problem until it’s solved. These types of challenges quickly become personal – a battle between the engineer and the laws of nature.

Engineers will go without food and hygiene for days to solve a problem. (Other times just because they forgot.) And when they succeed in solving the problem they will experience an ego rush that is better than sex – and I’m including the kind of sex where other people are involved. Not only is it better at the moment, but it lasts longer.

When an engineer says that something can’t be done (a code phrase that means it’s not fun to do), some clever normal people have learned to glance at the engineer with a look of compassion and pity and say something like: “I’ll ask Bob to figure out. He knows how to solve difficult technical problems.”

At that point, it is a good idea for the normal person to not stand between the engineer and the problem.

Engineers can actually hear machines talk to them. The computer hums an approving tune when the engineer writes an especially brilliant piece of computer code. An engineer who is surrounded by machines is never lonely and never judged by appearance. These are friends. So it should be no surprise that engineers invest much of their ego in what kind of “friends” they have.

I have posted a few pictures of the new office. Starting from the early days - how it was when we saw the place, how we opened up the whole structure and what we built finally.

I wrote earlier that we tried Corel Draw X3’s trace feature earlier and were very happy. We used it to create the wall poster for our new office. The poster is now ready and I have uploaded a low res version here.

It’s taken a lot of work to make this poster! We learnt a lot about Corel Draw, tracing images, some great features that helped shorten the work and flex printing. It was also a good experience to collect so much of content for the poster. The idea was that if somebody goes to the poster, s/he should be able to find something or the other interesting. And that the content should not loose value over time. We have done almost all the graphic work in vector format and hopefully the print will come out crisp now!

Moving the focus to the computer system now

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