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It is dark when I go home

When I started my career, my typical work day started by 8 am and ended by 5. Lots of sunlight both during the morning and evening commute (My dad and his friends had such a lifestyle for 30 years). During my school and college days there were not even good TV programs beyond 10.30 pm. Globalization and outsourcing has forced many of us to work from different time zones for the same set of goals, which has made it mandatory that working hours between the two zones overlap even if it is 12 hours apart.

Biological evolution is too slow compared to the technological revolutions. Any thing happening in the technical world is not adapted by us, instead it gets retrofitted into our system. Scientists often point out the importance of circadian rhythm and critics try to prove other wise by staying awake for days together. People have stopped measuring sleep records because brain is so capable of putting sensory organs to sleep without the individual being aware of anything which means there was no way of proving wakefulness. Micro sleeps are a result of large sleep debt and it is the one which causes many road accidents and critical errors (Chernobyl accident happened when the staff worked on double shifts). Sleep also restores the body, processes memory (removes noise and indexes) and there tons of other things which are beneficial and still under research.

Circadian rhythm helps us to get a healthy sleep wake cycle which will reduce the dependency on stimulants and relaxants. The current lifestyle has become largely transactional and time spent on basic necessities like consuming food, sleep are considered to be a low yield activity. This makes us prioritize activities which outright give the illusion of bang for the buck. Since our body is still wired very much to the sunlight availability as it used to be just few hundred years ago, the body clock gets affected very badly because of erratic sleep wake cycle. Some long term health issues are considered (yet not proven) to be because of bad sleep hygiene.

One solution to fix easily would be to start work early and reach home before sunset. That therapy could be available free of cost as well and it helped me when I was following it. The traffic was light hence faster commute, within 2-3 hours of sunset I was sleeping which in my opinion was the soundest sleep I ever had. Early morning coffee and newspaper in the breezy balcony (Even in Chennai summer) was heavenly.  I have succumbed to the team’s requirements and now altered to my lifestyle of starting work almost near noon and ending late. Now it is dark when I go home.

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A hunter watches a mountain goat grazing on the pastures on the side of a highway. A speeding truck loses control and starts veering towards the grazing goat, in split seconds it jumps off to a safe place. The hunter’s kid who was watching all this asked his dad, “Did the goat escape because it is agile?”. The hunter replied “It is just common sense to avoid a speeding truck”.

There was a question posted in programmers forum in stack exchange site asking Is agile the new micro management? I am not sure why such an impression about agile has been formed in that person’s mind. It could be due to some recommendations being wrongly interpreted. First of all the recommendations like “a quiet place to work” is a necessity for development teams anywhere following any methodology. Interpreting that as a no talking zone requirement is against improving communication between the team members. My perception about why these kind of wrong interpretations arise is due to wrong sense of accomplishment provided by having something tangible. If someone has to show any progress in adopting a new process or a method then it is natural for him/her to incline for a support in some form which could be seen or measured. This has led someone to believe that following some guidelines verbatim and measuring the level of adherence to it is equal being successful in adopting a new process or method.

I have not been aware that I was part of agile teams for a few years until I met someone who joined my team because it was an agile team. We were a team of 12 people doing weekly releases to production, wearing different hats of Dev, QA, BA and had everyday interaction with the customers. That is how I started my career and I never felt the value of it until I worked in a conservative setup. There was one golden rule of thumb we followed in the teams I worked, treat the team (client team included) as your own organization and do what makes sense to deliver the right value.

I asked one of the directors of a company that how come he never used the word agile though he was part of agile teams for quite long, he replied  “talking to your customers often; keeping the code well tested, integrated  and delivering the right value on time is all about common sense. There is nothing agile about it!”. He sure left me to figure out what agile meant.

Is there a prescription? Check the answers given out in that forum for that question.

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Recently my faithful mobile handset dropped dead after five years of duty as a phone and a bluetooth DUN. I reached the shop trying to get myself a similar device and the salesman lured to Xperia arc and started explaining the features. The one feature (ok fact) that sounded too ridiculous was 2,50,000 applications available and the numbers are increasing way too fast. I ditched any advice to go for a hi end phone and settled for a candybar one. I think that there is an android bubble and need to understand how big it is. First look at the market place shows that it allows any application to be available for use without QA from them. This one window allows vendors to mutate, replicate, spam their products on the market. Examples – Ringtones classified as mp3 players, wallpaper changers with just one wallpaper but rendering too many ads, very simple applications which could rather be rendered as a web page. Finding a useful product out of the store is an uphill task.

Secondly; like how every company wanted their website during the dot com boom, similarly they seem to be in line for mobile applications for themselves. Most of the applications are concentrated on content rather than getting innovative by using the accelerometer, camera, GPS, cell site information, NFC and others. Layar is one such application which is a true blue mobile application. My gut feel is once the excitement levels plateaus and the awareness of the mobile applications increase, then we will see high quality products on the market. As a developer I restrain myself not to create a mobile app which can anyways be rendered in a web browser with a good UI.