Uncle Bob, in one of his lectures that has stuck with me for years, asks you to imagine yourself having an out-of-body experience and watching over your own open-heart surgery! How would you expect your surgeon to behave at this moment, even in the face of his deadline? Careful, deliberate, knowing what he is doing? The only way to go fast is to slow down and do a good job, and the bad code you wrote yesterday will slow you down today; he firmly reminds you.
Code Quality is perhaps the hardest-to-quantify metric in the industry. In many organizations, it stands for a bunch of static code analysis reports that gets fed to management dashboards. While certainly a good starter, they are far from adequate. Just like you can write a perfectly crappy novel even with the help of a writing assistant (for writing is way more than just structure, grammar, and textbook rules), so it goes with code.
Coding is akin to writing – it takes skills, experience, and thought. A prerequisite to sound thinking is "thairaav" (for lack of a better word in English) – the antithesis of what in Zen is symbolized by the "Monkey Mind" jumping around from one unrelated activity to another, settling on nothing. Building a coding culture in any organization starts with this realization.
#coding #culture
One of my favorite poems I recall particularly on this day is Tagore's "Let my country awake". Most Indians are familiar with the famous first line, of course. The poem is a grand vision of a truly "free" and progressive India; but the message is so universal and ageless that it applies equally to a progressive world, a progressive organization or, even to an individual's personal world and awakening. It reminds us of all that in our culture imprisons versus liberates us.
Here's the full version from Gitanjali, translated by the Nobel Laureate himself -
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
#tagore #culturetransformation #india #republicday
There are no unqualified problem statements in the real world. Any real-world objective function comes with it's (externally) stated set of equations/inequations that bound the feasibility zone of finding an optima. An optima that goes beyond these extremities is hence a mathematically impossible ask. A mutually contradictory set of constraints can even make this feasible zone vanish completely, making the problem itself an infeasible one to solve. Often times, while judging the merit of a solution, one gets too obsessed with the objective, while being lazily ignorant of the set of constraints the objective was subject to.
#problemsolving #review
[Re-posted from my recently authored posts on LinkedIn]