Something different...

A few years back, when i was fresh in the industry, I used to read up a fair amount on "Personal Productivity" and "Effectiveness". Some of the articles that were useful to me were written by a person named "Steve Pavlina" who used to run a games site.

I did a search for those articles again a few weeks back and I found that he has quit games and moved on to have his own personal development website http://www.stevepavlina.com. and http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/

Spent sometime reading it up and what I find different about this person is his hands on approach to everything that he tries. If something is not dangerous and worth knowing about then he tries it out on himself for a few months and writes about his conclusions (polyphasic sleep, living without a microwave, manifesting money through intention! ... ) .

He is pretty comfortable writing his point of view and experience about things that are usually considered bizzare (paranormal).

Definitely worth a read. Be prepared for something unconventional and ask yourself why you feel uncomfortable if you do !

I always remind myself that whats "rational" today was not rational a few centuries back and what will be "rational" a few decades from now may not be considered rational today.

One laptop per child..

I was impressed by what these folks set out to do and wondered if they could pull it off. Creating such a cool laptop for less than $200 is something admirable. Looks like they are in mass production now.

This is a project worth reading about: http://laptop.org/en/laptop/

The ted video that talks about this:

Interviews...

I usually feel that technical interviewing is, for the most part, random (old post). It is cool that some teams are not only aware of this but do interviewing differently to take care of this.

See how the mono team hires :
http://tirania.org/blog (search for sample interviews)

A resume, plus an interview when you ask the candidate to "implement XX on the whiteboard" and some trick questions have too many problems which are probably worth discussing some other day. In my experience these kinds of interviews that have been popularized in the industry are bad. They evaluate developers on all the wrong dimensions that you need to produce software.

Coming up with what makes sense for each specific group/team takes effort, but who said keeping things real is easy :)

Demotivational posters...

Pretty hilarious ones. Some are pretty close to reality :) :

http://www.despair.com/viewall.html

Because, in our world of instant gratification, people desperately want to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems. And when desperation has disposable income, market opportunities abound.

AT DESPAIR, INC., we believe motivational products create unrealistic expectations, raising hopes only to dash them. That's why we created our soul-crushingly depressing Demotivators® designs, so you can skip the delusions that motivational products induce and head straight for the disappointments that follow!

Getting through JEE

Even though it is more than 10 years since I wrote JEE, even today i get questions like "how do you prepare for JEE", "give me some tips/guidance for effective study" etc. Since it is such a long time i no longer remember the main things that i did/strategies that i used to prepare etc. So I have to resort to generic bullshit like:

1. Work systematically to cover everything
2. Write a lot of state/country level tests
   
3. Do what you like, don't try to get through JEE and into engineering just bcos there is peer pressure.
4. Plan well, experiment and find out what works best for you etc etc

If someone had asked me the same question when i was studying, i would probably have had a million specific things that i used for preparing. Once you are through you usually forget what actually contributed to that and start resorting to obvious things like the above...

If I had a (b)log of what all i did back then, I am sure it would have been valuable now. If we had similar logs for say the top 100 ppl in their respective fields (say ppl who start startups, ppl who had significant social impact, ppl who invent things...) I wonder what we will learn from their logs rather than from listening to what they have to say about how they did it.