Tag Archives: rant

Dim Dim is no longer free!

Quoting from their mail received today:


Dear Customer:

Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com. Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will not longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.

We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!


The Dimdim Team

Pursuant to the Dimdim Terms of Use (the “Agreement”) governing the use of Dimdim Inc.’s (“Dimdim”) Site and Services (as defined under the Agreement) by you (“You”), Dimdim is hereby exercising its right to terminate Your Dimdim Account and the Agreement in its entirety. Dimdim will continue to provide Services to you until March 15, 2011. Following March 15, 2011, neither You nor Dimdim shall have any further rights or obligations of any kind under the Agreement, including the right to access the Site, or receive or use any Services. Dimdim thanks you for your business, and wishes you success in the future.


Sad news.

Annotations are hardcoded string literals.

Well,
I do not have much to say apart from the what the title of this post says.

I do not like annotations as a way of weaving code for an application at all.
XML’s are bearable, but looking at an annotated code, is like looking at hardcoded values as if they are all string literals.

The reason I prefer XML over annotations is atleast they keep the configuration part staked away seperately or is it just me who does not like overloaded contexts?

Here’s the real motivation:
The OO paradigm was there to do the abstraction right, by punctuating them with annotations, we miss the broader general rule of why the object maping was done initally.

Let’s Keep the principle Simple!

The missing software oath!

We as software creators, affect lives of everyone.
Be it a lawyer/doctor/government/police/reporters and what not.
All of them have an oath they take acknowledging with their conscious the work they are supposed to do would be done with best spirits and with best intentions.
Although at the ground, it might not be true but atleast as a ceremony they have something to swear by!

Coming to the profession(an occupation requiring special knowledge) of software development and related works, we do have no such promises to make or oaths(commitment to tell the truth!) to take!

Maybe all related software professionals are assumed to lie or are assumed to be true.
If we all are liars, then we might not have his wonderful profession, as good things rest on good souls and get bad name from a few unfortunate few.

What place do you belong?

The agile India Scenario

The extreme programming wave initiated by Kent Beck et al in 1999 and since then the mature world programmers have embraced that change. A lot many clones started from that movement like agile itself, and the much widespread like scrum and lean.
Although these methodologies(or approaches?) had existed since long time, I remember reading somewhere that motorola had these practices in place since the 1960’s.

Flash-forward to India, I do not know who or when was the first project here was done with the wisdom of sound agile practices? But since I stepped into the professional way of writing software(means I was paid for what ever I did or did not), I was fortunate to see a genuine mix of these practices from the very start.Moving on to different software vendors, I notice that India per say is yet to embrace agile in spirit.

I do not travel at all, but looking around the small sample of professionals(incl self claimed agilist’s) I am dis-heartened to say the least, when I see my self surrounded by a lot of certified SCrUM(pun intended).
No doubt it has made its mark and helped realize XP too, ever since I got to know about XP, I had(still do) predicted the end of the software manager(with MBA) as a career.
The point that I want to make across is that these managers have misused the insights from agile practices to abuse the Indian developer. I have seen(and heard) *only* Indian managers who have been doing this to their Indian counterparts.
I dare say if they are given a mix of developers from different geographies, they would not do the mistake of exploiting more work in lesser time.
That is like a blind person blessed with more powers.

That being the problem around how do I( or we?) as the Indian developer in the clutches of the Manager (with MBA) cope with it?

Ahh! Its a complex mix out there.There are managers without MBA also.
Need to get back to the drawing board and start afresh!