by on

Patents were introduced to encourage inventors to come out in public and get the due credit for the invention. It also granted exclusive rights to the inventor for a certain period to enjoy the fruits of the invention. Though patents are a great way to protect inventor’s effort the laws and enforcements are generally tricky. Some countries have chosen to ignore the Pharma company patents to protect the health of the public as patents were monopolizing life saving drugs.

Paul Graham mentions in his book Hackers and Painters about the copyrights & patents in software and how the laws enforcing them are beginning to threaten intellectual freedom in the field of computers. Laws can be so tight that it can prevent an individual from dismantling something and looking at how it was built. Many people I have met are of the opinion that patents do not have a place in software.

Assume that we work hard and create something,  secure it with a patent and prevent a large corporation from copying it. They can still ignore the patent go ahead with money power to face the lawsuit. So patents for inventors might not guarantee immunity. Then how can we be sure that someone cannot copy our work?

Paul Graham’s answer is to run up the stairs. His analogy was interesting, assume in the computing world the giants are usually large, burly people and startups or individuals are slim and agile; if they are trying to chase us out of existence then it is fairly easy when running downstairs or on the corridors but it is extremely difficult for them to chase when we run upstairs.

The examples are in the profession of sports, arts and music. What a top musician does is so easy to imitate, but she/he can keep coming in with more performances that others find it hard to emulate the success. Innovation is the key skill, the skill cannot be copied. What we need is to find what is tough for others to do and do exactly that. To run up the stairs we need to be strong and healthy, similarly to be ahead at work we need to be strong at what we do.

If we run upstairs chances are high that the competition is always left behind. Here is Paul Graham’s essay which covers the topic of running up the stairs.

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

by on

Right from the school days I have enjoyed sharing knowledge with others in such a way that it stays with person who receives it. The good side effect it got me was that it made me stronger with the fundamentals. The easiest way for me to learn something was to commit to someone that I will teach the same. The fact that I will be questioned on many aspects made me dive deeper into the subject as well as look at the meta part of it.

I started learning music recently, my progress was really slow. I struggled to understand or visualize many of the concepts like why the chords have to progress in a certain way, how do you identify its minor or major etc. Until I volunteered to teach someone else the basics, I did not dive deep enough to find the physics behind the music. As I begun to teach, my ability to express something which I understood started increasing multifold. Slowly I was able to draw analogies from different subjects to explain music.

How did it help me at the workplace? Periodically signing up for sharing something with the peers helped me to learn a lot. The eustress provides the right push to dive deeper and come to a good understanding. Many of the organizations have a constant turnover of people which means that it is necessary to get new people on board with culture and technology.

Signing up as trainers at the workplace has a good effect. This has two benefits, one it eliminates full time position of trainers, the other is it provides the trainers the right platform to sharpen and strengthen their skills. It also helps to break the monotony of regular job and provides a different view of it. Some of the questions posed to me in the classroom also made me rethink on some of my beliefs and led me to relearn some things, so it is not just learning but also unlearning.

Joy of teaching is as much as joy of learning.

by on

A typical bad day at work for a programmer is to getting stuck. A stuck programmer is easy to spot, s/he is the one who has not moved away from the computer for a long time and if at all moves away is still visibly occupied with thoughts about how to find a solution.

Some of the solutions which I observed are

Discuss the problem with someone else

This is one of the best solutions which always worked for me. Even at times when someone listens to the problem does not help me fix it, just explaining it to someone helped me visualize and articulate better which in turn brought me closer to the solution. This is where pair programming wins hands down.

Read the Manual

While this may sound obvious, I have observed this to be one of the key issues to someone getting stuck. The entire IT population is trying riding on the keywords like convention over configurations, intuitive code, fluent interfaces; that combined with the hello world kind of exposure to tools gives programmers a more than enough confidence to carry on the everyday work. So when getting stuck the immediate response is to try what is obvious or what looks intuitive.

Take your eyes and mind of the problem

Any person’s action at work will first be governed by the conscience and instincts take over later. It is very similar to how we start driving or play instruments, we will be at ease once we are in a productive rhythm. The advantage of this mode where the instincts control our work is that it is very efficient but at the same time it moves us into a very narrow view of the work. When stuck we are stuck just in this narrow view and might not think out of this view (is it sounding like thinking out of the box?). This is similar to sleeping, it is so easy to get back to sleep when the alarm rings in the early morning no matter how difficult it was to fall asleep; if the concentration levels at work has been high and we got stuck then a way out is to come wide awake out of the concentration. Few times I have been stuck at programming from 6PM till bedtime just to wake in the morning and solve that in 15 minutes.

Almost every one of us at the work place have signed up for some sort of deadline, if we get stuck it adds to the stress. We have to use the phrase from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“. DONT PANIC

Image: Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net