Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Imagine a world where things just work the way they are supposed to. The application never crashes, the deployment is always successful, every team member follow the rules, and the FedEx guy is always on time. This is what we expect from our day to day work and fortunately it never happens. What we call ordinary is out of the ordinary.
One of the simple yet impactful struggles I have is to shut down an idea. As a developer, and I often try to tell people what I do, many people often try to validate their ideas with me. Some are friends, some are family, some are clients, the moment they hear programmer they think apps, VR, games, and what not. And then they tell me their ideas with the eagerness to impress.
In order to test a project locally I needed access to the production website database. Unfortunately copying billions of records to my small development VM was not an option. I needed only the latest records but doing a sqldump would get me data from as far back as 2004. The cool thing however is that mysql allows you to add a condition on your mysqldump command to extract whatever you see fit. Let's break it down.
Have you ever wanted to build a website and were not sure what skills you needed to get started? Most people know that in the process, a computer has to be involved, therefore a good knowledge of computers would be important. This is not entirely true, it is akin to saying that in order to learn to drive you need roads therefor you need a good knowledge of roads... No you don't need to know how roads are built to drive a car, and you sure don't need to know how computers are built to build a website.
At Baskin Robbins, they boast about their plethora of choices. 52 different flavors of ice cream. If you only mix two you have the possibility of wetting your taste buds with 104 different combinations. Add a third scoop and the possibilities are endless. Your tongue will swim in a different flavor everyday, as much as you try you will not get to taste all the combinations. At least not before you would have gotten an early death from diabetes. But I am of the boring kind. For the rare times I go to Baskin Robbins, or any of those ice cream parlors, I settle for two scoops of vanilla.
When it comes to programming, there is no such thing as an expert. Well, there is one. Only one expert though, but that's beside the point. The field of programming evolves and changes, every day you have a new battle and you cope with the fact that you will not stick with the same routine for long. OK fine, his name is Jon Skeet and you can find him on Stackoverflow. So annoying...
I recently joined a project that runs entirely on .Net MVC. The only problem is that for the past 6 years, I spent the majority of my time programming on PHP projects. Obviously, there has been a lot of issue to go through the switch and I would like to list the main problems I had so anyone jumping in the same wagon could find some guidance.
Death Valley, like its name implies, is hottest and driest place in North America, nothing grows. Rain is a rare as a funny Adam Sandler movie. The earth is so dry you can see the cracks while driving from 10 miles away.
Linkedin is one of the many social network I never got into. After I was recommended by a friend that it was the best way to get a job, I opened an account. Filled up my profile information and subscribed to a few interesting subjects. It didn't take long before a swarm of spammy messages invaded my inbox. Unsubscribing to a single one was an event on its own. By adding friends and strangers from my contact list, I learned of some new skills that I had. I didn't know I had them, but my peers were all ready to endorse me and validate my knowledge. It was exciting. Potential employers will look at all these feats and will fight over me like the last glass of water in the desert. Of course, that was only true in my mind.
Success. A word we repeat everyday. We all convinced ourselves that success is the opposite of failure. It has become synonymous to happiness. If we don't succeed, then we are certainly failures. We are not happy. But comes a day you ask yourself an important question: What is success? Most of us are too quick to answer and often do no more than associate it with money and popularity. But is that all there is to it?
