Going back to Java

Having been distant from Java for last 1 year or so, I think I started feeling that I am bit out of touch and might be missing the latest which might have turned up in CAFE during this period. I started to pick it up from CAFEBABE as that's where I left it ;-)

While googling for CAFEBABE, this is the link I found and I liked it a lot, even if for fun purprose. There are other links but not so precise with good insights about the history of the language. If you may wish to read.. http://suprgeek.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/a-java-old-timer/

Happy Reading

Jesus saves multiple copies now

Hi,

If you live in internet world, you must have heard this joke about Jesus saves.

Yesterday, one of my friends showed me a huge library of e-books that he has kept for some day. There were over 1000 books amounting just about 4GB. He has just kept it with the intent of reading them some day. But, almost everyone knows that "that day" will never come ;-)

A question popped into my mind that how many copies of an e-book would be lying on different websites, people's desktops/laptops, pen drives or CDs..with each copy waiting for that double-click to happen so that a pair of eyes would read, even if vertical, through it. I remember the days in my school when we used to have floppies and we gave a hard though that which game do we want to copy on it.

Over time, storage has become so cheap. We keep a copy on laptop. Another copy on CD so just in case laptop crashed and never recovers. It's not done yet. Some would keep another copy of online storage drive for that special reason - *just in case*. This is true for almost everything...emails, photos, videos, almost everything most of which we wont see again but *just in case*.

World really changes fast.
~ Navjot Singh

The other side of NNPP

Happy New Year,

You can think of me as a polar bear coming out of the hiberantion period. I was away for months because of some personal and professional changes in my life. A lot has happened in the past 6 months. Few frauds, more stores close down, more job losss, more confirmations fo recession leading to possble chances of depression. Everybody has read about it in great details so lets discuss something different.

I just heard a new buzzword i.e. NNPP. You wish to know more about it, please read this simple and precise article on the Net Negative Producing Programmer. Ideally, I agree on all the points but I tend to think from a different perspective also.

1. Many large scale companies with masses of employees need to have all kind of people. If you know what normalization curve is and how it is applied in the industries, you know where I am coming from. Usually, they have large base of can-do workers with top of can-think workers. Can-do workers are usually low-cost employees, mostly freshers, less than 2-3 year experience guys and may be with no engineering background or hired from T-3 institutes. Nothing against them as It is also not fair to seek the best of software engineering practices from these guys. With time or training, they may learn but till then they can do mistakes leading to higher defects and all that metrics stuff. For companies, the gross margin is high on these resources. So, in any typical project, you will see many of these kind. And for Time and Material kind of projects, it means more revenue if managed effectively. So, net-net, many service (not product) companies would like to have NNPPs.

2. Lets think from people perspective also. Although some good reasons are already mentioned about people not logging the defects. I have some more...more from day to day practice.

a. Managers dont say that they wont do it. But some may try to escape a few defects to meet or exceed some of their SLAs, to show their better control of the processes.

b. Developers invent reasons not to do it ;-). Reasons are vastly different covering different aspects of attitude..

+ Tool is not nice and I am not going to keep filling the excel files.

+ Even if I log, who is going to look at it.

+ Why should I log, my manager comes back and ask me the delete it or reduce the fix hours.

+ I already know that this is a bug. So, why not just fix it?

I spent 20 minutes writing this so I didnt code. Was I being NNPP?

¬ Navjot Singh