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Wanted Hackers

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I gave a talk to MCA (Master of Computer Applications) students of GHRCE yesterday. Topic of my talk was ‘Wanted Hackers’ and objective was to inspire students to adopt hacker culture so that they can become better programmers and do great things in future.

At the outset I emphasised that Hacking is not actually what media and general public thinks it is and there is difference between hacking and cracking. Hacking is good, cracking is not. I showed a video of TED talk by Thomas Suarez: A 12-year-old app developer to inspire students.

Then I elaborated on various websites which organise programming contests and challenges. I also shared my views on which programming languages students should learn and from where.

I ended my talk with a brilliant video from code.org starring Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston etc.

I hope my talk inspired atleast a few students to become good programmers and not average unemployable college passouts which are so common in India.

2 Shopping Tips for LinkedIn

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I wrote a blog post some days back praising LinkedIn iPhone App’s use of smartphone capabilities, however there is one thing clearly missing in the App and that is, support for location sharing. I see immense use of using location in the App.

What if you can automatically come to know about one of your LinkedIn connections visit to your city or what if you are in some conference and you can see and connect with other LinkedIn users from the app itself? Sounds interesting right? I am not sure if its a conscious decision by LinkedIn to not use location in their app, but I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t support it. Obviously there may be some privacy and security concerns but users can be allowed to opt-out if they want to. As long as users can control their location sharing, there should not be any issue.

Thankfully if you want to use location with your LinkedIn account there is an App for that and the App is called Here on Biz and is available for free on AppStore. So my first tip for LinkedIn is that it should buy ‘Here on Biz’ and integrate all its features in the official LinkedIn App. Here on Biz on its own may not get as much traction, not everybody will install it or know about it, but if these facilities are available in the official app, everybody will be able to use it. ‘Here on Biz’ has just launched another great feature in their app and it’s called ‘Influencer of the Month’ where they highlight one high-profile business leader each month and users of the app can get a coffee date with that person. Read more about it here.

One specific need most of the founders have is need to find a suitable Co-Founder. What if they can search for a co-founder on LinkedIn? I know one can always browse through their connections to find a suitable co-founder or maybe even use LinkedIn’s Job section for it. But we all know finding a co-founder is not as straightforward as hiring somebody so Jobs section is not really much useful. There is clearly a need to fill this void and one company is making an attempt to do just that, the company is called Founder2Be and as par their own admission “Founder2be is like Match.com meets LinkedIn for entrepreneurs”. So my second tip for LinkedIn is that it should buy Founder2Be and make searching for a co-founder available as an independent section on their website.

It’s entirely LinkedIn’s decision to buy these companies or not, all I am saying is that I would love to have these 2 features in LinkedIn. Also I respect both ‘Here on Biz’ and ‘Founder2Be’ for their innovative offerings and wish them both all the luck in future. It’s not my intention to offend them by suggesting them as potential acquisition targets to LinkedIn.

Thanks for reading.

What can an App Developer learn from LinkedIn iOS App?

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LinkedIn’s iPhone App is great, but I will come straight to the feature which impressed me most and that is it’s integration with native Calendar app on iPhone. When you access the menu by tapping the icon on Top-Left (Pretty common UI element these days), you see an option to view Calendar and you can see your calendar events right inside the LinkedIn App, but what makes it really interesting is you can see Photos of all the attendees of an meetings and when you select an attendee, you are taken to his LinkedIn profile. I like this feature so much that instead of opening native Calendar app on my iPhone, I just open LinkedIn and check my calendar there.

Ok so what as an App Developer we can learn from this? We learn that while creating an iPhone app we should think how we can use smart-phone features like location, calendar, contacts, camera, sensors etc. in such little but innovative ways to add value to our app. What LinkedIn has done is that it has offered its users a new facility which is not even available on its website. Mobile app should not necessarily always have lesser features than a website, sometime it can have some extra features as well like in the case of LinkedIn app, so always think how can you use various features of an smart-phone.

Of Course there are many other things you can learn from LinkedIn app. They have slide-from-left menu screen and then slide-from-right for setting up some preferences, then we have pull-down-to-refresh gesture, all these have become pretty standard in any good app these days. App is fast and fluid and whole UI is generally very nice.

Basically what we need to ultimately remember is not see a mobile app as just a smaller screen version of website or desktop software, so we should not just try to fit everything for small screen of phones. We need to realise that mobiles are used differently than computers and mostly at different times and situations so we should strive to give our users optimum user-experience to suit all this.

Kiran Prasad who heads the mobile development team at LinkedIn puts this very beautifully:

We’re looking at the ‘entrenched’ use case [for desktop users], the coffee-and-couch use case [for tablet users], the two-minute use case [for mobile phone users].

You can read the complete article on VentureBeat.com for more of his insight.

Hope you found my little analysis of LinkedIn app useful and use some of it when you create that next great app of yours. I am also a big fan of LinkedIn as a Software Development Company (Not just their App Development) and you can read about their ‘Continuous Deployment’ model to know why.

Thanks for reading 🙂

Programmers and Small Things

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So often we are so fixated on big things that we don’t pay attention to supposedly small things. We realise it too late that those small things have hold us back all these years. I will talk about some of such small things in this post.

Typing

Nobody says it better than Jeff in his Coding Horror blog — “We Are Typists First, Programmers Second”. He quotes Steve Yegge in his post,

“I can’t understand why professional programmers allow themselves to have a career without learning to type. It’s like being, an actor without knowing how to put your clothes on. It’s showing up to the game unprepared. It’s coming to a meeting without your slides. Let’s face it: it’s lazy.”

Now my practical take on importance of typing is like this — If you can’t type fast enough, you would try to type less, you will avoid coding a long piece of code, you will skip writing comments or documenting you logic.

I always advise programmers to write comments with the code, but often hear excuse that code is still not finished and they will comment once its finished. My suggestion is comment and code simultaneously, if you change your code, change your comment as well, there is no harm is typing a few extra lines. Why risk waiting and forgetting to finally write comment?

Not only this often programmers have to exchange emails with clients or chat with them. Slow typists will take shortcuts here as well. They will skip answering some queries, will never give a detailed response on chat and I can go on and on.

There are many good websites out there where you can learn to type and even test your typing speed. http://typeonline.co.uk/ is one such site.

Reading

Now this is not just for programmers but almost everybody in today’s information age. We all need to read a lot these days and it takes a lot of time. The more you go up the ladder in any organisation, you realise that a considerable portion of your time is spent reading something or the other. You read emails, articles, news, books etc. Just imagine if you can somehow double your reading speed you will actually manage to save half of your reading time. That can make a huge difference.

In case of us programmers, we often read SDK Documentation, Technical Articles, blogs, and of course code. Now here too like typing if you are a slow reader, you avoid reading. You will skip reading complete definition of a class and thus forgo understanding it completely before beginning to use it. There are numerous little examples I can quote here. I often see a few guys hitting OK whenever an alert message or an error message pops up on the screen. Reason: They are too lazy to read all that text, but to a reader who can read faster, he will probably find it easy and would probably have read complete message before dismissing the dialog.

Speed Reading can help you learn more and do more in whatever you do in these times. There are many websites to help us in improving our reading speed and www.readfaster.com is one of them.

Communication & Logic

Programmers probably don’t realise this but programming is nothing but communication with computer. You communicate with computer in a language it understands. If you can’t communicate clearly with your peers, you probably won’t be able to communicate well with the computer.

You have to have ability to put your thoughts clearly and you have to have ability to understand what others say. A good understanding of requirements of client will often lead to a good Software. In most case a good communicator will be able to understand a bad communicator but vise-versa seldom works.

A good communicator would know to break down a complex problem into a set of simpler problems and solve them and thus finally solving the complete complex problem. A good communicator would know to ask right questions. Something which I find fascinating is that all programmers usually write Queries to get understandable data from Databases and when a query does not work, we say we don’t know the solution. However we don’t realise that ‘Query’ means a question in literal sense. So if our query is not returning the desired result then it means we are asking the wrong question. We can’t solve problems in most cases because we have never understood what the question is or what the problem really is.

This really holds true for life as well, we can’t solve a problem because we never know what the problem really is? Ability to understand the problem, ask the right questions and break the complex problems into smaller manageable problems is what communication and logic is all about.

You may also like to read — “communications 101 for programmers” to read an interesting post about importance of communications for programmers.

Email Etiquette

Now last but not the least a programmer writes a lot of emails. In most cases if you are not lucky enough to get selected right from the placement camp at your college, you will be soon shooting your resume in email to prospective employers. Now sample some of these real emails I got from some real candidates looking for a job.

  • I want to know whether there is vacancy for .net developer . just reply soon.
  • R/s, i m a passout student of batch 2011. i m fresher and want a job of software developer.If u have any vacancy then please inform me
  • applying in ur company for the vacancy in .net field, plz find my attached resume. Sir/Mam I am waiting for ur +ve response…

As you can see some are ordering me to just reply soon, some think they are having a casual chat with a buddy and that’s why their email is filled with all those chat slang and short forms. List is endless, I have misplaced a few very interesting emails which gave me a good laugh when they arrived. Unfortunately that’s the only purpose such emails serve, I have a good laugh and then just delete them.

If you can’t write a detailed email in a professional language it shows how serious you really are with your career.

Not only that I keep getting emails from candidates where they put email ids of all the Nagpur IT companies they can think of in the ‘To’ field. They may be thinking of themselves as smart people having achieved so much with a single email. Why write multiple emails when one is enough, right? NO COMPLETELY WRONG. You just proved that you are lazy and irresponsible and in most cases your email was deleted as soon as it arrived.

I would like to mention Apple here because it became the world’s biggest company by paying attention to details, details which other companies overlooked as being just small things. Small things do matter.

(Also Published in Hitavada Future Supplement dated 9th Oct. 2012)