Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Working in a team

I am working in a building with twelve floors, each of them inhabited by few hundred employees.

Each morning, when I arrive in time, there are two ordered lines of people waiting for one of the elevators. Politely, we wait in line and get in the closest elevator.

Usually, this does not take longer than 1-2 minutes.

Few days ago, I got in front of the line and waited, and waited, and waited. Then I waited a bit more.

What's wrong with the elevators this morning, I thought.

Then the guy if front of me moved a bit and said: 'Oops, nobody pressed the button to call the elevator!'

And he did press the button and one elevator came right away.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

Kids are smarter. Even than developers ;)

If you are a developer or know one, you are aware we think we are the smartest of them all.

Today, I was visiting my 4.5 years old daughter schools. They had a session where the kids were showing the parents their "work".

One of the work was to sort ten tiles, numbered one to ten.

Quickly, I did a calculation in my head: I know a pretty smart sorting algorithm, that has complexity n * log n, n is 10 so I'll be done in around 30 moves.

Beat that, I thought, smelling already the victory.

My daughter smiled back, like guessing my thoughts, looked at all the tiles on the table and picked 1, 2, 3 .. 10. So, 10 moves in total.


Thursday, May 5, 2016

Why programming is a unique job

When working on a new software product, on a new function or simply a new piece of code, you are faced with an interesting challenge:

Nobody ever had the exact environment, the same code already written, the same requirements.

Nobody worked on exactly the same piece of software as you are.

You need to create something nobody ever did before.

Yes, there were similar situations. Similar projects. But none of them was exactly the same as the current one.

You are creating something for the first time.

And this situation is repeating with the next task, and the next one, and the next one.

Day after day, minute after minute, you get to do something nobody has ever done before. You feel like a real inventor, innovator, a pioneer.

How many jobs are like that?!?