geordee

In A Familiar Place

It was time to deal with the deep end of the pool as part of my swimming lessons. There was a fear inside, a sinking feeling!

My coach took me to the ladder at the deep end, and asked me to hold my breath and stand on the floor. I had to then bounce back to the surface and tread the water. It took a short while, before I could do it comfortably. Little by little, I was conquering my fears.

After it became easy, I started looking around, under water. I started building a sense of familiarity with the...

Give Time to Time

It took me a couple of weeks and four classes to follow the instructions on swimming techniques. I had to keep these techniques intact while learning something new after that. It was tough. I hadn’t converted the skills into muscle-memory. It was hard to manage two things at a time.

And we went back to the basics. This time the progress was slow. One by one, I acquired the skills into natural movements.

In French there is an expression, “Il faut donner du temps au temps”. It means “give time to time”. Certain things need time to perfect, to mature,...

Relaxed At Work

Further into my swimming lessons, there was another important lesson to learn. It is to relax in the midst of all the pulling, kicking, and treading water.

While we learn swimming, it is natural to panic in the water and stay tensed. This leads us into an endless cycle of sinking and panicking. I told my coach to remind me to relax every now and then. Once I achieve the relaxed state of mind and body, it becomes easy to swim. I get to pay attention to the technique and correct the mistakes made.

It is not easy. As I...

Technique vs. Goal

Recently I started taking swimming lessons. It was about learning something new, and achieving something extraordinary.

The first week in the pool, the struggle was to float in the water. Later it was all about swimming across the pool on the shallow end. The goal was to reach the other end of the pool. I did not know how to breathe while swimming and so it was a great task. I failed often. Because, I was so focussed on the goal, that I almost forgot the means to achieve it.

“Technique is important”. The coach shouts. I have stopped midway...

Identification, Discovery and Distribution of Apps

Sometime back I was building an online service to discover food. As we were on it, we also found many such services springing up all around us. We had a catchy URL using the generic top level domain “menu”. The product is Has.Menu, and in Dubai the URL would be dubai.has.menu.

Soon, it became apparent that everyone is moving to mobile apps, and the fight is on the top spots in mobile app stores. Featured app, recommended app, most downloaded app, top developer, and that competition is tough. I can almost say that I watched the whole thing moving from...

Bring Your Own Device, Too

Some years back I was in Australia. As we went around the city, I couldn’t help but notice BYO written in front of most of the restaurants. It’s the shortened version of Bring Your Own Bottle of wine or beer. These days, we hear a lot about BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device. In corporate world, it means the employees can bring their own phone, tablet or laptop to work, and get it integrated to the corporate IT infrastructure.

Some years back, I had written that an innovation moves from researchers to corporates and eventually to consumers. The adoption of...

Anything That Can Be Digitized Will Be Digitized

Electronic devices had first made computing easier. Hence the name computers. Increasingly, we are relying on electronic devices for managing information - to capture, store, analyze and retrieve. Not surprisingly, we have the term information technology.

The effect of information technology is ever-increasing in our lives. Computers fueled information technology, and in turn information technology fueled the adoption of computers. Over a period of time, both computers and information technology have become faster, cheaper and reliable. Today the smart phones are taking the place of computers, and we are probably witnessing a massive explosion in information technology. Smart phones makes...

The Perfect Solution

The perfect solution does not exist. A working solution does. Especially in the case of software systems.

We have been perfecting the software for while, and it always takes another week to improve that feature.

The complete solution does not exist. An acceptable solution does. The more it gets complete, the more it gets complex, and the lesser useful it becomes.

We have been trying to find the essential pieces in our software, to make it acceptable enough. Mobile access is essential, but do we need an app for that? User management is essential, but does it have to be...

The Internet Big Bang

Today Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President of technical infrastructure at Google wrote a post in Google+ about the corkboard rack/servers Google built in 1999. From the post and the comments we can make some interesting inferences.

• Google had 112 servers in 1999 and they added 1,680 servers packed in 21 or so racks. Let us round it off to 1,800 servers in 1999.
• Google today has more than an order of magnitude number of servers. Let us round it off to 18,000 servers.
• 3 to 4 of the current servers is equivalent to the entire computing power available in...
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Information Services

I have been thinking about writing a post with the title Information Services. That is when I got a notification on Code Halos, a new book by Malcolm Frank, Paul Roehrig, and Ben Pring - three Cognizant consultants studying the Future of Work and about Millennial Workforce. I quickly went through the book and the core idea of Code Halo is something related to what I imagined as Information Services.

Quickly put, we have technology and then information technology came about. The service industry, in general, used technology as a differentiator and built their capabilities. It could be transportation, hospitality,...