self.machine

Today, i reached Hyderabad on a one day stay (well, i am out by tomorrow evening). The weather here is so f**king awesome that it had to be documented. For the last one week, I have been trying to locate cities where I can live without getting a heat stroke. Reaching Hyderabad today really made my day, now i have located a city which is not going to become a desert any time soon.

The traffic was relatively less and the trip from the airport to the place where I am staying was smooth to say the least. Staying in Delhi for the last 8 years, I have completely forgotten a life without the dust, heat and super traffic (beep beep). At 27 degrees, its the perfect climate post a very dry and hot summer for the whole nation. Till now the electricity and power has been good to me, which is making me very very happy.

Here are some graphs which measure some of the temperature and rainfall averages for both the cities over the year. Delhi is clearly becoming hotter and dryer. Will need to see if i can find some data to support that. Have fun, for all the stat minded people out there.

Hyderabad

New Delhi

I have been working on other people’s bugs for the last couple of weeks and it has been a terribly painful experience. This has been a great experience which has taught me a lot of corrective measures for the roadmap ahead for me. Some basic observations are

• Not everyone can program or should program – Conceptually it is really easy to type in read a tutorial or 2. But what i saw is pure torture for a guy like me , you need some talent to write a decent application.
• Bad deadlines always means bad code – I come from a difficult school where we more often than not had hard deadline on coding. More often than not best practices go for a toss when you do not set realistic deadline.
• Not all developers can be good managers – Very obvious , but unless one can see it in practice all is theory i would say. This is confirmed after repeated experiments
• Focus on the meat, rest is crap – People start focusing on the fringes far too often, look into the core and there is so much to be done always. It does seem that fringes are always better for the ego and easier to handle.
• Hiring people from good schools does not cover up older issues – It really unfair on “people” from good schools to have to clean up the mess, hire well from start and focus on building a clean application if not a “high performance” one.

Thats all to be honest, there will be always more to say. I have always believed that the mistakes are on both the sides when things fail (some more than others although), but these are things which are observed over a variation of organisation and individuals.

“What gets measured gets done.
What gets measured and fed back gets done well.
What gets rewarded gets repeated.”
John Earl Jones

What is Pragmatism ? Something i had little idea about it turns out. Seems i need to read up a lot more about the words i encounter. What stories they hide within their seemingly mundane meanings.

The most influential philosophy in America in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Viewed against the widely diversified intellectual currents that have characterized American life, pragmatism stands out as an energetically evolved philosophical movement. As a movement it is best understood as, in part, a critical rejection of much of traditional academic philosophy and, in part, a regard to establish certain positive aims. It is in these respects, rather than because of any one idea or exclusive doctrine, that pragmatism has been the most distinctive and the major contribution of America to the world of philosophy. The historical occasion of the birth of pragmatism is complicated by the fact that it was to some extent the product of co-operative deliberation and mutual influences within the ‘Metaphysical Club’, founded by Peirce, James and others in the 1870s in Cambridge. Peirce and James often gave very different accounts of what they understood by ‘pragmatism’. Nevertheless, despite different influences of Peirce, James, and John Dewey, pragmatism is to be viewed as a group of associated theoretical ideas and attitudes developed over a period of time and exhibiting rather significant shifts in direction and formulation.