It is not over, till it is over

I wanted to be in Hosur, last Saturday by 9:45 a.m. and so boarded a bus by 8:30 a.m. in Bangalore. This bus stopped at almost all the bus stops in Bangalore from the place I got into it.

I was thinking...Did I take the wrong bus?

Soon, there was another bus, supposed to go to Hosur that overtook the one I was travelling.

I started thinking...Did I made a wrong decision?

When I reached Hosur, I saw the bus that overtook the one I was travelling, reached later.

Good!! It is not always the present situation that decides our future. We may be lacking or lagging at the present moment, but what actually makes difference, is how we end.

Copy paste blunder

This incidence happened some 4-5 months ago. I was debugging an issue and found from the error log a particular stored procedure was throwing some exception. I could not find any issue with the procedure. Later, found there was another procedure that threw this exception.

So, why was the error log misleading? I found the developer who created the procedure that failed, had copied the exception block from the first one!!

Copy & paste helps developers a lot. Still, we need to be careful in doing so.

Comment the message in MQ and run your code!!

One of my team mate was debugging an issue that involved Message Queue. After some hard time of debugging he found that there is a invalid message in the queue, that is preventing further messages to get processed. In the mean time another collegue of me who was there (not a developer) said this

"comment the message in MQ and run your code..."

The whole team burst into laughter.

Lessons I learnt

(i) Some how catch up with the latest technologies, or we may become useless some day

(ii) Think before you suggest something! May be it is not approriate.

Processes in Software Development Cycle

Three people were assigned by a company to plant trees in the city. They had very specific roles to play. First person's job is to dig a pit, second one puts the plant inside and third one closes the pit and pours water. They were paid daily basis. One day the second person was on leave. Still the first and third person went for their job and carried out their work...!!! Why miss out the payment for the day??

Are we following the software development processes like the above story? Are we just doing something for the sake of doing? In couple of my code review sessions, here are some of the feedback I got for my suggestions.

"It is a good suggestion, but is it worth changing the code at this point of time?"

"This code cannot be changed now because we may miss the deployment date, though your suggesstion is good"

Some refinement in the processes can bring in more value.  (e.g. Have code review sessions at an earlier stage of  development)  Still, I wonder, whether the documents (e.g. RTM) I create as part of development adds value (in spite of the cost involved in preparing the document). May be I will appreciate the value of all the processes later in my career!? Will wait and see.

Introvert professionals

I often thought if extraverts are at an advantage, as far as moving up in an organization. When I browsed, to my surprise I found that there are great leaders who by personality type are introverts.

Here are few of them

- Bill Gates

- Warren Buffet

- Gandhi

Also, it is encouraging to know that a lot of CEOs are introverts. 

Here is a good article on this subject

To conclude, to be a winner, it is important to work on the skills and stand tall among the crowd, rather worrying about the personality type!!

lookout for new things...

nothing new now...