Collage of Thoughts - II

Try and recall the most productive and skilled individual contributor you have ever watched closely in action. Think of the signal-to-noise ratio in his/her one undisturbed hour of "flow".

Now try and recall the most productive group meeting you have ever been a part of. What hard skills did it take? What was the signal-to-noise ratio in this meeting like? How many person hours did this one hour of meeting consume? Weigh that against the outcome the group as a whole produced in that one hour.

Group meetings are highly overrated and overdone, and generally contribute to your self-importance and your time-sheet. Two is company, three is a crowd.. and one is transcendence. Great work stands on the shoulders of giant individual contributors, who you let be masters of their own time and work.

If, as a leader or as an organization, you are okay with losing this giant share of productivity and magic to the mediocracy of meetings; that's your loss.

Modern development takes an incredible level and mix of skills ranging from problem-solving, to design elegance, to language nuances and fluency, to mastering the intricacies of every framework, technology and tool in use – all in unison!

Many of these may even have been non-existent a few years ago. Technology landscape and paradigms shift often, and enough to topple all your old practices and limits - so that what was your best practice is now an anti-pattern or plain redundant.

So, as an architect, are you still qualified to lead a modern dev team? It's a tall order, especially if you have cross-skills.

   - When was the last time you have written complex production code in this same space?
   - How updated are you with new languages or versions?

If you have answered poorly (I haven’t impressed myself either!), do you have the bandwidth and focus at work and a personal urge and passion to catch up?

If no - strictly keep your old-school ideas to yourself and make way for the new generation of leads. Just having problem-solving skills without up-to-date tech skills, doesn’t qualify you to lead (if you knew better, it might be a solved problem in that technology already!). You will do more of a disservice to the team and take them behind many years, otherwise.

Which book would you imagine is the best to read in such an absurd time? I would imagine it’s Camus’ “The Plague” - though I would prefer to grab a paperback and not read an electronic copy.

Camus’ “The Stranger” had lingered on my thoughts for long, and perhaps I understood it better after I read his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” – wherein I got a clearer glimpse of his “absurd hero”, in his immensely powerful expression of stoicism in the face of an overwhelming and inescapable absurdity. It’s a different brand of stoicism from Viktor Frankl’s “Man's Search for Meaning”, wherein the author personally bears testimony to witnessing a handful few (including himself) discover meaning even in the worst of human circumstances. Camus’ stoicism stems from defiance and scorn, rather than as a response to/submission to a higher force.

As someone who would question and search for meaning in everything, these books held a strange appeal for me. You would be drawn towards the characters and be left wondering whether what you see is ultimate dispassion or ultimate passion - perhaps two sides of the same coin. And perhaps the ones who have mastered enough and are capable of the highest passions, are also the ones capable of the deepest dispassion.

Do read Camus, if you get a chance. :-)

Last week marked the 25th birth anniversary of #Java. I owe this language, and the JVM platform so much! I had professionally embraced Java by choice than by chance; by giving up my campus job in Mainframe (biggies don't care about a fresher's inclination). Rather than having to maintain COBOL for a living, Java gave me not just a good living but so much exposure to modern software development at large!

There is a wise saying that resonates deeply with me - "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." Having spent innumerable quiet and productive hours building software with Java, Scala and the JVM ecosystem at large; Java/JVM has taught me whatever I know of Enterprise Backend, Distributed Systems, and Big Data. It has taught me the joy of thinking, designing, and programming in OO and functional paradigms. It has also taught me what a thriving ecosystem and community can build around an open source platform (we moved to Amazon Corretto OpenJDK, when Oracle started charging for Java LTS).

I only hope I have earned a rightful claim to call JVM my home-ground, and Java my mother-tongue (though it's been more of Scala, of late). It's more of a hard-earned deep familiarity than any expertise I have a claim to.

Long live Java & the JVM! #MovedByJava #jvm

[Re-posted from my recently authored posts on LinkedIn]