Immortality of Youth

Reading this blog post from Wesley CrusherWil Wheaton reminded me first of my visit to the beach a few hours before Cyclone Nilam hit landfall (at the Thiruvanmiyur Beach). The fact that I couldn’t stand in one place (wind) and was constantly being attacked by sand – it was exhilarating.

The blog post also reminded me of how much I mis-treat my body. I’m surprised I’m not bedridden, immovable and with a host of diseases. Trading health for a wealth of incredible stories.

Immortality of youth, or plain old luck. Hopefully I’ll wisen up before either of them run out.

Worse is Worse

Richard Gabriel’s Worse is Better (falsly attributed to jwz by many), is a piece on how LISP lost out to C, despite being ‘better’.

Jim Waldo’s Worse is Worse notes, quite accurately, that what us geeks consider ‘better’ might not what is, in the context of the universe at large, ‘better’. To quote,

[…] what we see is that better is a complicated notion, and can depend on a variety of different metrics. It may be disappointing to find out that what we geeks think of as better may not be what our customers think is better. But finding this out shouldn’t surprise us too much.

There is also explanations on how on many of the examples used to justify worse as being ‘better’, the wrong criteria was being used.

The original piece has been used to justify people producing shoddy, shitty work quite frequently. Waldo agrees:

My problem with the slogan is that it has become a catch phrase for those who either haven’t read the original article, or have read it and either have forgotten what it really talked about or never understood it in the first place. As a catch phrase, it is often used to justify shoddy design, or following the crowd rather than doing what is right, or as short-hand for the real claim that our customers are too stupid to either appreciate or deserve high quality products. Why spend the time doing things right, this line of reasoning goes, when we all know that worse is better. You are far better off giving the customer something that you know is less than what you could produce, because they (those simple customers) will think that it is better.

The end result of this thinking is sloppy products that don’t work, are hard to use, or are unreliable (or all of the above). We try to convince our customers that this is the way software has to be, and then turn around and convince ourselves that they won’t pay for anything better. But we short-change our customers, and we cheapen our craft, when we put up with this sort of thinking. When the original article was produced, I don’t think that this is what the author had in mind; even if it was, it is time for us to reject the simple-minded interpretation of the slogan, and start putting out software that really is better (on the dimension of goodness that our customers have, not necessarily our own).

I’ve sadly had to personally witness this at a few places. When ‘shit work’ becomes acceptable, it very soon becomes the norm. Eventually people consider that not just the norm, but something to aspire to – as if producing something that is actually shit is, somehow, better than producing something actually better. If you notice that happening to yourself / your project, please step back a bit, trout yourself, and do the right thing.

The Month of Awesome (2012 Edition)

I left Chennai on the 3rd of November. I (will be) leaving Delhi on the 4th of December. That’s a 31 day trip. It taught me to be optimistic. It taught me in very real terms that the world is a large place, and so is life.

A few highlights:

  • Building an app from nothing to workable state in a few days
  • An actual first class train ride in India
  • Running into a bunch of random french people who ended up becoming travel buddies
  • Feeling small, and very temporary being in the ruins of Hampi. Here was a civilization that used to be great, reduced to rubble visited by 2-3 tourists a year. Our Data centers and Washington Monuments will be similar in a few hundred / thousand years. “The one thing a man can not truly have, is perspective” – DA.
  • The best lassi money can buy
  • First train ticket that was confirmed after being waitlisted
  • RAVE!
  • The scenery at the Goa Beaches
  • Learning to float in the ocean. ZOMG THIS IS AWESOME!
  • Pulling a passed out guy out of the ocean, and seeing how other locals react to that.
  • Watching Rob Moen try to negotiate with the local hawkers
  • Stopping at a Pharmacy every time we get into an Auto with Rob Moen
  • Being annoyed at Jon Robson’s eternal optimism,  and then eventually coming to accept that it is a good thing
  • Feeling incredibly unsafe in Aurangabad 2 days after Bal Thackaray’s death, harassed by a bunch of auto men.
  • Being told flat out that I’m not Indian, and having to pull out ID to prove otherwise
  • Being stranded in Aurangabad, with a bus journey out costing about 50 hours
  • An airport (Aurangabad) smelling of pure unadultered human shit.
  • Good things happening
  • Horrible horrible experience in Agra – Taj Mahal surrounded by lots and lots of slums with open sewers. Entire place being pimped out for money. The ‘two India’s in sharp contrast again
  • A 9 year old girl selling pens at traffic signals, speaking to me in a language I could not understand about things that do not need a spoken language to be understood
  • Surprised to find myself a grown up in Delhi

I’m sure I’m missing out a few things (intentionally or unintentionally) – and each of those things would merit a blog post of their own too. Maybe I’ll write them sometime. Maybe I’ll write about my (amazing) last year out too.

Thanks to @rakugojon, @riddems and @flyingclimber for making this awesome.

 

Happiness #1

Happiness is fixing a bug with no obvious cause with a one liner and pushing it out to five million people with wonderful support from a team sitting halfway across the world :-)

Red Eye flight

I am not a fan of red eye flights. Nobody is

I have one tomorrow. Which brings up the question – do I stay up, or go to sleep and risk not waking up in time?

I am going to stay up. Let’s see how that goes :-)

Wretched City

There has been no power here since yesterday night.

I have a million other reasons to not like Chennai. And scarce few reasons to like it.

I need to get out of here. As soon as I can.

Neglect and Sorrow

SumaStorm was my desktop computer. She died a slow, silent and agonizing death over the past few months, which came to light only today. Due to my neglect, she is dead today.

I built SumStorm with my own hands, bought with my own money (thanks to several amazing people on the web) when I was 16 or so. It felt amazing when I first booted it up. It felt amazing when I maxed out all its cores running distcc with my netbook. It felt amazing that I could run Photoshop in a Win7 VM on Ubuntu and not feel a stutter.

It was an amazing machine.

I felt horrible when I realized the extent of the damage the rats had done. This must be how kid feel when the pet dog they grew up with dies. When run over by a tank. Which the kid was driving.

I did not know I could be this attached to a machine. It turned out to be a very emotional few hours.

RIP SumaStorm. I’m sorry.

Staying on the bleeding Edge

I’m blogging from (one of the many) browsers on this Raspberry Pi. Testing setting it up to do slideshows during JSFoo 2012.

THIS IS SO COOL!

I am now editing this blog post from my new Nexus 7.

THIS IS SO COOL!

I am a few years behind the curve on this. Last year was spent slogging my ass out at a wonderful startup and travelling to a lot of places meeting and working with some wonderful people. Left very little time for staying on the bleeding edge.

Changing that fast – trying to produce useful stuff while also staying close to the bleeding edge. Fun times ahead :-)

House painters of Programming

We’re the Michelangelos of the great age of machine intelligence which is yet to come. We’re sketching out how it’s all going to look. We’re at the forefront of solving incredible problems and creating magical devices. – DanielBMarkham

If there’s a great age of machine intelligence to come, then one in a million of us may be a Michelangelo. The rest of us are house-painters, and the houses we paint are slated for demolition within our own lifetimes. – Lagged2Death

I’ll try not to be a house painter.

A Vague Sense of Order, No Sense of Purpose

Earlier this month I spent a couple of days as a ‘guest’ at Infosys Mahindra City (district finals for Aspirations 2020 – a TopCoder style programming competition). Interesting experience.

No laptops allowed. No storage devices either. Cameras are okay, but “please don’t take pictures”. Phones are okay too. The usual complimentary grope as you enter. Random security guards ask “Where is your ID card?” at random times. Buses bringing in hordes of people. Couples being couply in food courts. Reasonably good food. Formal clothes, without regard to the weather.  Everyone smiles when talking (unless they’re security guards). Respectful deference to hierarchical authority (with a big smile & explicit announcements of gratefulness). Unlocked cycles to travel around the campus.

A vague sense of order, but no sense of purpose.

This is what people are trying to (and mostly succeeding) in making Engineering ‘education’ resemble. If you’ve made peace with how engineering colleges are, you’ll feel completely at home at Infosys. Accident?