Lucky to be a human

Just the other day something happened that made me realize how lucky we are to be humans. Yesterday I was having my lunch at my usual place where I go everyday to have my lunch. As usual I was having my vegetable burger and lime juice when an old lady walked into the place. Obviously any one can see from her torn cloths and the way that she looked, she was a homeless person. Everybody just seem to ignore her or moved out of the way as if repelled by her.

This lady went near the food display and was looking at the foods and from the look in her face even I at a distance could see that she was not having money to buy any food.

To all our surprise, in walked a gentleman and walked up to her and asked her something, and I could barely hear but it looked like he was asking if there was anything she liked in the display. After that she pointed out an item, then this gent wen to the counter and bought her the food item as well as some deserts ,took her to a table and asked her to enjoy the meal.

What I realized at that time was that just like everyone else this gent also had the same choices, whether to ignore or to care and he chose to care. This was a perfect example of how we humans differ from other animal species where we have the power to decide and do what is right or wrong where as most species of animals are just driven by instinct. So let's be grateful that whatever force that created us, gave us the ability to think freely and act accordingly for without our free will we are no different from the rest of the animal kingdom. Let's use this free will to care for one another then destroy one another.

Feeling overwhelmed with work

Just the other day a friend of mine was having a chat with me and said that he was having three key projects that he is working on right now and he is not sure how to handle these three projects as all need his attention and he was feeling really stressed out. While listening to him I remembered recently how I was also having a similar situation and how I overcame that.

One day around 10 am I was feeling really uneasy and I could tell that I was getting stressed out due to something, I was not being the usual myself. Though I could not pinpoint it at first I knew something was not right.

The first thing I did was to close my eyes and go on my dream vacation, this is a mental picture I have of a quite calm place that relaxes me. For me of course this is walk on a beach with the sun on my back and the sound of the waves in my ears. I just closed my eyes and took a deep breath and I could literally feel the smell of the sea, and the warmth of the sun. This just quickly got me out of my stress and put me immediately in an empowering state.

After that I just thought about what was bothering me, and I knew it was the projects that I was working on. What I did was I quickly opened a worksheet and listed down all the projects that I am working on. It came out that I was working on over 20  projects at the same time. No wonder I was getting stressed out.

In the next column I put down by the end of the day what state I wanted each of these projects to be in (what were my outcomes), and what is the purpose of each project. This gave me a chance to reflect back on my  outcomes and I saw that for half of the projects there was nothing major to achieved by end of the day. So that meant I only had to work on half the projects today.

In the column after that, I put down what is the current status of each project I needed to work on today. This gave me chance to see where I am right now in each project and now I was empowered by knowing at this moment the status of my projects.

In the next column I put down if I had to work on the remaining projects, what would my immediate three things (tasks) be. This gave me a chance to see what things I can do in parallel as well as how big the next step in each project is. It also gave me the chance to see if I can leverage , delegate or enlist the help of someone for any of these tasks. To my surprise most of the tasks could either be done in parallel or I could find people who I could enlist the help of.

In the last column I prioritized the most important three projects and started working on the immediate tasks. This was either my self working on the task or leveraging. Also I was able to identify the less important projects and I immediately called / fired mails to the relevant projects stake holders and informed what I have planned to do in their projects and that I will not be able complete some of the items in their projects today as I have some other priorities and when I will be able to do them.

This whole process took me less then 25 to 30 mins but it allowed me to work on my projects without being stressed out. I know if I had planned these projects out early I would not be in this situation, but I think sometimes no matter how much we plan we get in to situations like this. The most strangest thing was that after I started this process I was able to work on almost all the important projects and achieve my daily outcome for almost all the projects.

Going back in time

Have you ever had a chance to go back in time. Well  I had a chance to do this just the other day.

I was  about to take my car out from my house and it was raining heavily (which is very common these days).  As I was was opening the gate I saw a taxi (tuk tuk) stuck on the road and the only people inside were a girl of about 12 years and the driver. Suddenly this little girl got out and started pushing the taxi in the pouring rain. It was difficult, but she trying her best.

I do not know what but something told me to help this girl out so I also went and checked what the situation was and we both started pushed the taxi. When we were pushing I saw that she was smiling all over and very happily pushing the taxi. For her being out in the rain was a very exiting thing, very soon I also started feeling the same because I started remembering how I used to run up and down my street in the pouring rain when I was young.

By the time we started to get the taxi running, we were both soaking wet but we were laughing our heads off and making fun at the rain and splashing on the water puddles. The taxi driver, who I later found was her father, got down and thanked me but I felt I should thank them for giving me this little moment in time to go back to my child hood and feel those same feelings and emotions again.

At the end of it I was soaking wet but I was emotionally juiced and that whole day I was feeling the same energy. I was thinking how beautiful life would be if once in a while we can become the kids that we were and literally go back in time as and when we need... I hope that when you read this you will also get the chance to go back in time as I did.

Clean Code or Code Clean

I am pretty sure that most of the times, us developers have heard the following line from some senior personal "Why don't you code it clean the first time". Well in fact I have heard this many times as a developer and have told this to my juniors many times as well.

But when you dig deep, you begin to ask your self, Is there anything called coding clean these days. With the business demands, systems evolving, pressure to fix or develop faster etc... we as developers are tide down to quickly hash code and release! in fact all these new Agile methodologies and time boxed sprints are not making it any more easier.

So how do we make sure that we keep our code maintainable, clean and effective... We use a simple term called "Code Refactor".

So what really is refactoring...

Full Article - http://cleancoderefactoring.blogspot.com/

Giving estimates on R&D software projects

Recently I was at a seminar were one of the participants asked a question regarding estimating properly when working on an R&D project from the expert panel.

The question was “How do we give proper deadlines when we are working on R&D projects, because when we start going into research we come up with so many stumbling blocks that we need to figure out so many things and our estimations goes out of the window”.
http://estimating-the-unknown.blogspot.com/

Aikido and My Life

Aikido, a traditional Japanese martial art which teaches the way of Budo, was introduced to me quite accidentally at a very turmoil junction in my life. I was at several cross roads of my life which was filling my life with much stress and it was impacting me on my health, my emotions and my life as whole.

I was immediately drawn to the flowing movements and charm of Aikido and from the day I saw Shihan Tadashi Komenoi, who later became my teacher and mentor, practicing with his pupils. However after experiencing Aikido first hand I knew I was truly beginning a journey that would not know any boundaries or limits.

Catching performance bottlenecks

Well I've been involved in several Performance issues and 90% of the time what I have seen is that asking the right questions would solve the problem and the other 10% is hope, pray, trial and error.

So I decided the I would share some of my experience in order help any IT personal who maybe praying, hoping and asking god to give some sort of solutions to a performance bottleneck.

Being a Java guy, I have been mostly involved in performance issues pertaining to JEE apps and surprise, surprise... 99% of the time the issue is with the application or the DB structures....
 
So here goes my two cents....

When I am called to check on performance issues I always go with a blank page... no pre-assumptions, no ideas why this is happening or what could be causing the issue.

The first set of questions I ask are

What does the user see as a performance issue?
When does he see it?
What is he doing when he see performance issues?
What has he done before getting the performance issues?

Well most of the time the performance issues comes in two folds,

1. The system is really slow in giving out a desired response
2. The system just crashes

I will cover the sluggish / slowness performance issues here and will have another dedicated article on system crashes and what I have done to handle them.

Well once I get to know that the issue is a slowness problem, I try to ask my second and third questions


When does he see it?
What is he doing when he see performance issues?

Most of the time the answers would be,

1. When I try to go to certain screen or do some action in the screen
2. When I run the application for a certain time
3. At a specific time of day
4. Or a real disgruntled customer would say ALL THE TIME 

From the above three questions and the answers that I get, I can start formulating some solutions.