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After the recent petrol price hike
from http://reflectionof.me/meanwhile-in-india, Found via a board post in Quora
Clean up your attitude
Have you ever wondered what makes you unhappy, discontented, dissatisfied and restless?
- Jealousy: Resentment of others’ success and prosperity.
- Persecution complex: The unhealthy belief that people are deliberately placing obstacles on our path to prevent us from achieving what we desire.
- Obsessive desire for perfection: The inability to be content with what we are and what we do.
- Needless regret over past decisions: It’s futile wishing to change the past, which cannot be changed.
To put it simply, we are unhappy because:
- We can’t get what we want.
- We are not satisfied with what we have.
- We live in the past or fantasise about the future, and cannot live in the present.
- We want to change conditions around us, or in some cases, we resist any change in our present conditions.
It is clear that unhappiness arises out of our unwillingness to accept life as it is.
I am sorry, I could not help but post the content from the article literally here. A great article, worth a read.
Read the entire article here. Found via a forum post in http://www.geetham.net/forums.
Management
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below.He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I
promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am."
The woman below replied, "You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."
"You must be in Information Technology," said the balloonist. "I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, everything you told me is technically
correct, but I’ve no idea what to make of your information and the fact is I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help at all. If anything, you’ve delayed my trip."
The woman below responded, "You must be in Management." "I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?" "Well," said the woman, "you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air.
You made a promise, which you’ve no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault."
Via a forum post from http://www.geetham.net
What distinguishes a good software engineer from a great one?
I found these from the answers to the quora question – http://www.quora.com/Software-Engineering/What-distinguishes-a-good-software-engineer-from-a-great-one
- Talent. Some people get software design. Most people don’t. The ones that do are naturals. They’ve been doing it since they were very young, they just understand problem solving, expressing solutions in quality code, debugging, large scale architecture design, etc. The best people I’ve met can produce incredible quantities of correct, well-designed code in a staggeringly short amount of time. Very, very few people can do that, and if they don’t have innate feel for it very early on, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll ever develop it.
- Discipline. These days it’s fashionable to talk about productivity, flow, etc., but great people spend 99% of their time doing useful work, and almost no time browsing the web or chatting on AIM. Everyone has ups and downs, but most people mistake lack of discipline for natural productivity fluctuations. There are millions of incredibly talented people that never see the light of day because they’re lazy.
- Experience. Intelligence and talent are not enough – the space of potential mistakes in software development is enormous, and even the smartest people cannot work it all out on their own. Experience builds intuition, and great people make significantly fewer mistakes because they’ve seen them made before.
- Business-awareness. You can also call it product-awareness. Most engineers (especially the really talented ones) tend to waste a huge percentage of their time making improvements to things that won’t make the slightest bit of difference in the grand scheme of things. Great engineers are aware of the fact the company exists for a purpose – they have a feel for what matters and what doesn’t to the customers. They prioritize their time accordingly, and they can work for months without any direction and still produce useful work because they always understand what’s the next most important thing to do for the company.
- Social-awareness. Really great people are capable of cooperating with, leading, mentoring, being led by, and being mentored by other people. They’re not jerks. They’re pleasant to be around, and they understand that proving someone wrong and convincing them that you’re right are two completely different things.
- Able to balance pragmatism and perfectionism – Great programmers have the ability to make both masterful/quick/dirty hacks and elegant/refined/robust solutions, and the wisdom to choose which is appropriate for a given problem. Some lesser programmers seem to lack the extreme attention to detail necessary for some problems. Others are stuck in perfectionist mode.
- Not averse to debugging and bugfixing – Mediocre programmers often fear and loathe debugging, even of their own code. Great programmers seem to dive right and drill down with Churchill-esque tenacity. They might not be happy if if it turns out that the bug is outside their code, but they will find it.
- Healthy skepticism – A good programmer will get a solution that appears to work and call it a day. A great programmer will tend to not trust their own code until they’ve tested it extensively. This also comes up a lot in data analysis and system administration. An average programmer might see a small innocuous-looking discrepancy and ignore it. If a great programmer sees something like that they will suspect it could be a hint of a greater problem, and investigate further. Great programmers tend to do more cross-checking and sanity checking, and in doing so discover subtle bugs.
Compiled from answers of Russel Simmons and Slava Akhmechet
How to Document Wisely
Life is too short to write crap nobody will read; if you write crap, nobody will read it. Therefore a little good documentation is best. Managers often don’t understand this, because even bad documentation gives them a false sense of security that they are not dependent on their programmers. If someone absolutely insists that you write truly useless documentation, say “yes” and quietly begin looking for a better job.
There’s nothing quite as effective as putting an accurate estimate of the amount of time it will take to produce good documentation into an estimate to slacken the demand for documentation. The truth is cold and hard: documentation, like testing, can take many times longer than developing code.
from How to be a Programmer: A short, comprehensive, and personal summary by Robert L Read – http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html#id2791115
Quotable quote
The first to apologize is the bravest.
The first to forgive is the strongest
And the first to forget is the happiest…
What are some good short term rewards to motivate a child
Found a great answer to this question – What are some good short term rewards to motivate a child? by Jane Chin
http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-good-short-term-rewards-to-motivate-a-child/answer/Jane-Chin
Poster
We have a strategic plan – It’s called *Doing* things. – Herb Kelleher
From http://baltimoreprintstudios.com/2010/05/strategic-plan-posters-are-back/
Quotable Quote
Don’t promise when you’re happy.
Do not reply when you’re angry and
Do not decide when you’re sad.
– Unknown
Sendhil's Cyber Home 