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In the movie matrix Agent Smith says to Neo “But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned” as an answer to why an Utopian matrix was a disaster.  So many inventions which have been dreams to our ancestors are now an indispensable everyday need in our life. Right now an individual with an average income is able afford phones, computers, automobiles and so on which was not so easy to possess just a few decades ago. Yet we crave for better ones and we keep getting them.

Countries where first civilizations surfaced and lived a life ahead of its times were later colonized by more technologically advanced nations which sometimes were much smaller in area and people count. If the civilization stops advancing then it is destroyed or taken over by an advanced one.

There has to be a constant urge to keep pushing ourselves to improve, upgrade and innovate else it is very easy for us to be pushed out of existence. The fact does not apply only to civilizations, it is for individuals or organizations as well. The pay check after easy days at office gives a false sense of security as it takes care of immediate and long term basic needs. Jobs are easy if there is not a slight stretch or push; a stretch or push means we are out of the comfort zone learning and unlearning, if we are learning and applying then we are advancing. If we advance then dreams become true through inventions and they become necessity.

As the advancements in technology and methodologies keep going sky high, the amount of preparation an individual goes through before landing at the workplace is also increasing. That puts a greater emphasis on effective and efficient learning right from childhood that will keep going on and on and on. Workplace always has a cycle of tight work, vacation and lean days, we can plan our continuous learning such that we don’t get burnt out and at the same time we are not left behind.

Every morning in Africa, a deer wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest deer, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or deer – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Every time I find it difficult to think of a good test to start, I am always tempted to try backdoors like getters, setters to help get started. The backdoors are not limited to getters and setters alone. Here is a list of my observations which has been used only for writing unit tests in Java easier.

  • Getters/Setters
  • Constructors
  • Equals implementation
  • Protected or package private access specifiers for variables and methods
  • ToString implementation
  • Special backdoor methods to alter the state of an object (The worst of all)

Any line of code which exists other than for another production code, it encourages a programmer in the future to exploit that backdoor for quick gains. As the tests are the specification to the production software, it is better to resist the tempation to use any of these. It also causes increase in code length and also an excuse for more people to follow the same path. The more time and effort I had spent trying to avoid backdoors, I have benefitted with more clarity in design. The benefits have prompted me to have routine static checks in the code base to keep them at check.

A question and a counter argument posed by a peer who belonged to another school of thought. If tests are considered to be first class consumers of production code, then is it right to have some backdoors help ease writing tests faster? Comments?

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It was the eve of a festival and I was returning back home from another city. The gateway to my home town was choking with unusually high traffic with everyone trying to rush to meet their near and dear ones. A stretch of few kilometers took more than an hour. It is at this time I witnessed a miracle. There was a sound of an ambulance siren approaching, on hearing almost every one on the road made their best effort to make way for the ambulance. In such a dense choking traffic there was a pathway made under a minute good enough for the ambulance to pass through. The patient who must have survived her illness might not even realized how tons of strangers on the road help save her life.

We humans are altruistic by nature and some how from inside it makes us feel good when we help others. Reader’s digest also mentioned in one article that may be only humans who were helpful to each other survived droughts, war and other adversities so that trait is deeply ingrained within us. There are also some beliefs about collective intelligence being superior than the sum of all individual intelligence. This is very evident from team games like football where the understanding between the team members a mix of skills gets the team to win. I have observed the striker scores more goals than anyone else in the team and most of the times ends up being the most valuable player. In my opinion the striker who scores a goal is largely enabled by the other 10 in the team.

Workplaces are no different, at many workplaces team work always matters; and many of those workplaces have awards like employee of the month/quarter/year or super star awards. The awards definitely help a lot to life the spirits of those who win it but it also puts a dent in the rest of the team’s spirit as the winner is enabled by the team and hardly there is a credit to the team. It is better to do away with these kind of awards and much energy can be concentrated on removing negative influence in the team like someone who exploits the system and team setup. It takes only one selfish person to bring down the morale of a high performing team, we must make sure our workplace does not offer any dividends to someone who tries to exploit; instead make the workplace such a way that the more cohesive the team becomes the more rewarding and enjoyable it is to work.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net