Anand

We are Knowledge workers.

Software industry demands us to be creative in picking up good solutions all the time. We need to be committed at what we do continuously for years to come.

So our Mind is the most important asset. There is an absolute necessity to take good care of it.

Our to-do list is always full. We  always throw those extra hours at it coz we love doing it. We  say YES to everything. And we always take those weekends granted for something that can be done on the following monday.

But when the work we produce come out lousy, it starts to show up. Thats the result of a tired mind. The sooner we realise this point, the better it is.

Allocate good number of hours to whatever you work on. And focus on it completely when you are inside of it. But never work on it outside of those hours.

When we set our work patterns like this,

It makes it visible the line between what you can do and what you cannot do.

When we don’t know this line, we don’t know what to expect from ourselves. Thats when stress arrives in and in some worst cases - Burn out.

Prioritisation is an important step in any list we compose. That’s when our decisions start to become sharp and logical. Actions will become quick and confident. And thoughts will be so much more clear.

I believe that you always have to give up something to get something else. It is OK to accept that you can’t do/build everything. You would have to give up some of your secondary items in the list and choose the top most item for better results.

If you are in any way associated with building software, you must get sketch app and play around. Designing software components in it is super fast. 

Here is why I think it is better than Photoshop.

1. 100% vector. I can zoom 300% into a component and design it to the very detail i want. 

2. Exporting/Slicing is freaking fast and easy.

3. The whole software is less than 20MB. 

Get it here.

Kicker - The creators have put together a neat website to list all the templates for web and mobile design. Checkout sketchappsources.com

Be it a new product or a new feature or an enhancement or a bug fix, I follow this quite religiously.

1. Make it Work
2. Make it Right
3. Make it Fast

This is not new. Most programmers I follow do this. 

Make it work - first make the product do what you wanted it to do.

Make it right - Refactor it. Cut the duplication and make sure your code is easy to read and understand. It then becomes simple to maintain it.

Make it fast - if your product is slow, you suck. Big time. Measure the code and fix the bottlenecks. You can delight your users only when you finish this step.

Code review is almost always about the last two steps. If your team mate can’t do the first step, your shouldn’t have hired him in the first place. If he cannot do the last two steps - that’s ok. These skills can be acquired. Luckily, I work with good programmers. 

Don’t commit your code until you finish the third thing. You will have a better product if most of your team is convinced about all this.

I’ve been seeing many specs comparisons like this - http://www.cultofmac.com/238464/moto-xs-specs-compared-to-the-iphone-5-and-galaxy-s4/ and I think it’s absolutely irrelevant for users.

Apple devices by trend live without problems for 2 years. During the same period they receive first class support in software updates. There is usually one iOS release per year and so in two years, the device can run two OS releases.

Since the device can run all the software without any problem during its life time, I feel the specs comparisons are just confusing and misleading users.

If you want to purchase a Windows computer, specs comparison between a DELL computer and HP computer makes sense. If you compare two android devices, it makes sense. And if you compare two apple devices it makes sense. Software running on each of the devices is same in such comparisons and specs affect how fast you can run it.

What journalists do is they take an apple device and android device for comparison. Which is totally wrong way of doing it. Because the software is different in each of them.

Poor non-techie people use such articles to take decisions. As if that single GB RAM is gonna help them launch a space ship next day.

As long as my device can run that latest game on App Store, the specs doesn’t matter.

iOS 7 redesign is not yet done. 

What was revealed in WWDC is just the start. They set the tone of the entire system. And in every beta, Apple is refining the details one by one. 

So any blogger who writes review about iOS7 should know about this. Many think that what they see in beta is final. There is a reason why they call it iOS7 beta.

Apple can’t change the entire design overnight. First they have to come up with the feel of the whole system and they have to gather feedback before finalising the design. That’s what they are doing now.

Only developers are given a chance to use the beta. Thats purely for the purpose of getting their apps ready for the new system.

If a journalist gets hold of it and starts to write review now itself, its like eating a half-baked cake and judging the taste of it. 

Lets wait and see. The problem is, people from the other world are starting to go hoo-haa about the negative reviews. They don’t know what they are talking about.

I have not been following Rails for a long time. WWDC and few other things occupied my time. 

Its been a month since ✨Rails 4 got released✨. And the changes are pretty good. Committers are so bold and fast in adopting new stuff on the web. I think it is one of the things that separates Rails from other web frameworks.

Removal of Active Resource for example. Frankly speaking I’ve never used ActiveResource. I’m sure its the same case with many other developers. Anyways - i feel its a good move to remove it from the framework. 

And adding support for Postgres HStore in ActiveRecord is my favourite part. There is always a need for such a data type in my work.

I was camping on the other side (Python/Django) for a while and I realised many times that Rails is a perfect framework to build things.

Happy to be back on board. 🍻

From my college days, I always wanted to try native programming. For the sake of it. And for a solid platform.

Windows programming used to be THE THING in 90s. But when I graduated in 2010, web was filled with Ruby/Rails and Python/Django. And with frameworks like jQuery, Backbone.js, people have started to look at Modern Browser as the platform.

Windows still rules Desktop systems. True. Visual studio is so damn cool. But Programming for windows … err.. ok.. may be not my first choice. And its old-fashion.

I love Unix systems.

I could have written Software for Linux. But where is the market for it? No one is going to buy my software unless it is some enterprise security stuff like what RedHat sells. Otherwise, people expect it to be free and open source. I work for money. And this is definitely not my land.

With Mac and iOS, I get to work on native code and its all Unix inside. Apple developers have so much opportunity now. There is market for it and people are buying them. Take Clear and Tweetbot. 

This is a great time to be an Apple Developer. 

It’s so funny that Google keeps calling Chrome as Open browser.

Chrome forces users to sign into Google once you start using it. Firefox doesn’t. Safari doesn’t.

How can it then be called as “Open”. If they really want to keep it open, they must remove such features out of chrome.