Screen-Bound minds

If you read a book in continuity, according to my observation, the later half of the book finishes faster than the first half. Partly because you have become acquainted with the book and its subject and partly because your level of concentration has increased. Reading a book gives you mental stability. Further I used to wonder why to repeat a tasbeeh 'n' times? The answer is simple It gives us peace of heart and mind to tread the spiritual path. Peace of heart and mind is not just the requirement of spiritual path but also mundane success.

Unfortunately today most of us, no matter how busy, find ample time to a screen of screen of some sort. Be it an iPhone, iPad, tablet, android phone or laptop. This would decrease our level of concentration and mental stability. I would personally try my level best not to become a slave of the screen. Imagine yourself fully engrossed in a screen, you are lesser likely to listen to anything and pay attention to the surroundings.

No doubt Google can take us to scores of unverified data, but nothing can match the reading of a book, the joy of turning pages and placing book marks! Healthy habits are being taken over by clicks of all sorts. Placing those geographically close very far and those far away as 'all-day-in-touch'. Rather than being book-bound we see today more people are screen-bound.

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Playing games has its benefits no doubt like improving reflexes, logical thinking but not excess of everything is bad. Though I have no research backing on this but I feel that too much handheld devices can also limit the imagination of children as the bigger world is observed less and the screen of the hand-held device is observed more. Observation in turn is directly related with imagination.

Children are the suffering party. It is not just the 'character' that parents are responsible for, it's also the 'personality'. There is a chance of children too much involved in technology to become anti-social. Staying at home and playing a video game becomes a bigger charm than meeting and interacting with people.

These machines make them 'in-charge' at a very young age, which means their mind would eventually become unfit for being a part of team. I have written on importance of team work in another post. Machines would never make decisions and the user becomes in-charge of everything.

A touch screen has limited demands from the user and is extremely flexible and customize-able.So we are bound to think that the real world scenarios should adjust according to us. Because we are the ones who decide.

The response time is very fast this factors induce aggression. Because in the real world the response time is not as quick and your request is not always fulfilled! So children become short-tempered as they demand the same speed of processing from the people around them. Mechanic accuracy is not possible in the real world.

I wonder if these children who remain bound to screens in childhood would ever bother to read a book, to think, observe their surroundings, make new things and so on. I once asked my nephew if his dreams were touch-screen sort! select dream type, select color, select characters and go!

Actually its not the children who are addicted to handheld devices it's actually the parents! More screens at home is not a 'feature' its a serious 'bug'. Sure we should not turn our back towards technology related stuff but we do need to have some limits on it. We have to find a way out  between having techno-fright and being a  techno-freak! While we have other factors in our society to take us high up on the frustration graph we should avoid having more reasons to facilitate it.

[Link to read some valid research on the subject]

Developers VS. Engineers

My perception is that a developer’s job starts where an engineer’s job ends. Though an engineer’s job does not end literally, but when design is in a shape suitable to be handed over to the developer can be termed as ‘end’.

Accepting the fact that a developer is not just a code writer or a syntax specialist, he would also review and modify the design, so the jobs of both overlap but are clearly different. Just like the jobs of a technical and creative writer are totally different but of course both have to ‘write’.

A designer has the eye to see through a design whether it is easily modifiable or not. For example when implementing user roles the designers concern would be what if a new role has to be added later on? Does the design allow this change easily or not? What if a role has to be removed? Whether all the roles present in the real time domain should go into the software system at all? An architect’s concern would be how to manage the interaction of modules and layers and which architecture to follow reviewing the trade offs related to speed, modifiability, etc.

So if my perception is correct and ‘design & architecture’ is different from ‘development’ then should developers call themselves engineers, when they are not fulfilling the role of an engineer? I would not prefer to call a job an engineering one unless it is related to whole lot of design decisions, architectural decisions and their documentation and modeling. Starting off from the domain model, use case model, vision document ending up somewhere around class diagram and partially final architecture diagrams. An architect may or may not take part in coding.

I remember when I started my internship I was given an individual project to start with and was expected to come up with the database design first up, and I was a kind of shocked that how am I supposed to jump unto database design before having gone through the ‘analysis’ phase, or without design documentation. However I fast forwarded through the design diagrams for my own understanding. But this was actually how work is done practically, and I find there is a gap in how things are being done in education and industry.

Later on came to know the same from other friends who were working at software houses that things are not done practically as we are taught in university. Most people think that they don’t have this much time, where as in books we have read that time spent on design and architecture is the most beneficial. Many people believe that documenting or not documenting design is not a concern on professional level, as both ways bugs are produced!

My question here is that all that we learned throughout our degree, and all that we drew so much, are they just fairy tales? Or can they really be implemented in real time settings and larger scope projects? Are these methodologies (RUP, Agile, XP) actually followed or is it possible to completely follow them? most importantly: Does the industry differ between a developer and an Engineer? (If the answer is yes, then why are universities offering two lines i.e. computer science and software engineering?)or do they (the companies) just need 'code writers'?

Living in the Year 13 AG

We are right now witnessing the year 13AG (After Google) where google is more of a verb than a noun! And information on an awful lot of subjects is avalaible justa few keystrokes and clicks away.

Google is not just a search engine, now it’s a phenomenon. A reachable, fast and efficient and ever improving serach engine. Just as I had started to wonder that maybe now google would be focussing more on search optimization at the backend, as what more could features could the search engine put on but then Google came of with ‘Let me google that for you’,  intellisense, a callout showing the preview of the search result color based search in images and so on. The intellisense not only suggests you search keywords but also shows you the number of results against each search string! And that too within seconds. The callout showing preview of the page also saves you a lot of time as you can easily shunt off the irrelevant pages.  It seems pretty understandable that, in university,  one of my fellow presenter enlisted ‘Google’ as the only reference on the slide to show all references! Because google really is the ultimate reference and today search means ‘Google’!

Google does lead you to scores of data but validity still remains an issue.

With google googling with Maps, Translation tools, Google Sites,  Google documents, Google desktop, Gtalk, Gmail, Buzz, Chrome, Picasa, Android and now an OS for those who live their life online! Also other endless services provided by google: Blog, Currency conversion, weather, AdSense,  Adwords and so on The people at Googleplex never seem to stop. And this age can truly be called as google’s age. We would be seeing more of the expansion of google’s empire.

Each of the product presented by google has a trademark feature of efficiency and simplicity. Be it their browser i.e. Chrome is extremely fast, image editor Picasa, search engine, Google Desktop each of the products has the google effect i.e user friendliness, simplicity and remarkable speed.

As a developer one thing I have noticed is that Google still uses HTML frames! When many of us think that frames might have become obsolete but tell you what, Google is using it!